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Ansel Adams' Snapshots Exhibited

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By MARTHA WAGGONER, The Associated Press

Published: November 12, 2007

ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. - They are photos Ansel Adams never intended anyone to see: proofs taken with a handheld camera of a landscape that lacks the grandeur captured in his portraits of the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite National Park.

Thanks to some connections and a quirk of inheritance law, and over the objections of the trust that controls use of Adams' work, the few dozen 5-inch-square proofs are now on display, however, at a small museum not far from the inland waterway where Adams shot the pictures in 1940.

"Adams' prints are perfection," exhibit curator Stephen Jareckie said. "But these proofs have a certain vitality that you don't find in a finished print. It gives them an educational point of view and shows the public what Adams' work is like at that stage - a work in progress."

The proofs, taken with a Zeiss Super Ikonta BX handheld camera instead of a larger view camera mounted on a tripod that Adams typically used, were shot as Adams and a friend, David McAlpin Hunter, traveled the Intracoastal Waterway in November 1940 from Virginia to Georgia.

The exhibit of 50 photos, about 30 of which are credited to Adams, runs through Dec. 2 at the Museum of the Albemarle. "Ansel Adams in the East: Cruising the Inland Waterway in 1940" was also exhibited this year at the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts. This is its final stop.

Jareckie came across the proofs in the estate of McAlpin's second wife. McAlpin and Adams worked together on founding the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where McAlpin was a trustee.

The trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust in Mill Valley, Calif., can keep the images from being reproduced, but they are powerless to stop an exhibition.

Such exhibits show what are basically snapshots, "not works he ever would have shown in a museum," says William Turnage, one of three Adams trustees.

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