The Lessons of Ansel Adams in the Digital Age

For as long as he lived, Ansel Adams dedicated himself to both the practice and proliferation of quality photography. His enduring contributions to the education of the public are found within his works and across three textbooks on the practical elements of photography: The Camera, The Negative, and The Print. Though darkrooms and chemical washes may have faded into the niche of analog-leaning hobbyists and professionals, the prevalence of photography in culture has never been greater. With each of us able to use digital phone cameras to capture moments in our lives photographically, the learning curve for entry into the medium is low, resulting in a massive influx of digital images — artistic and documentary — into our world. For myself, a complete novice, Adams offers helpful advice in taking the language of photographic expression “beyond the conversation level” and into poetic fluency.

Physical photographic printing is a craft that requires a honed set of skills in order to develop and print an image resembling what one hopes to capture. Through digitization, facsimile versions of these skills have become widely available. Even the most amateur of photographers is now able to manipulate images to the creativity’s content through an array of photo-editing tools at the fingertips. Within nearly every phone’s operating system, there exists an ability to adjust substantial aspects of an image’s appearance. With that dramatic increase in control of a final image, we can consider the guidance of Adams as it applies to the camera (our phones with varying lenses and megapixel capabilities), the negative (the initial shot we take on our camera app), and the print (a final image rendered through careful and considered edits).

Some may consider the use of edits to be insincere because a photograph ought to use accuracy as the apex goal in representing what the lens faces. If we are to consider what made Adams a great photographer and apply some of his approaches to our own craft, we must dispel of this notion. Adams is quick to point out that a photograph can never be its subject. There is a fundamental separation between even the most accurately rendered image and the actual object of focus. Additionally, there is no inherent law demanding a photographer create images that are only replications of what the human eye sees. Rather, Adams purports that to make a photograph artistic, it must be born first in the mind.

In all of his teachings, Adams stresses the idea of visualization as the chief guide in executing an artistically viable photograph. A brief explanation of this process is that before the photographer even points the lens, he or she must consider what the final printed image will look like. A scene may inspire a certain feeling that only the mind’s eye sees. In matters of art, these considerations are to be valued with greater weight than the “facts” of an image.

For example, in Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (on view at The James Museum through July 31, 2022) — one of his most recognizable and successful works — Adams recalls the cemetery in the foreground filling him with a dark feeling. The sky in the print could not be as black as it is represented, because light was necessary to illuminate the landscape below. He repeatedly printed the image with greater and greater contrast so that the sky darkened and the moon brightened. This final print is a reflection of Adams’s emotional view of the scene, which filters the objective reality. More important to the process is the fact that Adams made the decision to blacken the sky before he took the picture. For our modern purposes, we need not repeatedly print on paper but rather simply scroll a dial on a touchscreen to adjust the contrast, or any number of fine details. Perhaps this is obvious to many, but to this amateur Adams’s words helped to liberate the guilt of adjusting major elements of images in post-production in the service of a more artistic end.

One helpful way to mimic digitally the traditional photographic process is to consider the initial pictures we take as negatives — means of capturing the proper composition with light and shadow that complement the goals of the photograph. Adams, a trained concert pianist, often compared the sequence of making the negative and finishing a print to playing music. By capturing all of the necessary photographic information in a negative the artist creates a “score,” which can then be “played” in the printing process. Each print is a performance, according to Adams, as well as an opportunity to explore the limits of what possibilities exist within a negative — to Adams, or a series of thousands of pixels — to us.

In this way, novices like me benefit from taking a closer look at the editing tools offered on the phone’s camera app. The categories available are the same adjustments that analog photographers attempt physically, but without the spontaneity of the printing process. Color aspects like saturation and red/green shift or value adjustments and contrast can be measured and changed with no consideration for time; the digital image is a mutable canvas that can be endlessly reinvented until the artist is satisfied their vision has been reached. This is not a deviation from the goal of fine art photographers like Adams, but rather an evolution that should be celebrated and learned. Amateur photographers who would wish their photographs attain the level of art bear the responsibility of fine-tuning the use of these tools and suiting them to a unique style, conceived first in the mind.

“An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with.”
—Ansel Adams, The Camera