Bay Area photographers bring fresh perspective to ‘Ansel Adams in Our Time’

Binh Danh, who immigrated to San Jose from Vietnam with his family in 1979 when he was just 2 years old, remembers having a boyhood fascination with Ansel Adams' photographs of the American West. The iconic images were taken in majestic places like Yosemite National Park, which Danh wouldn't visit and photograph himself for years to come.

 

Adams' finely detailed black-and-white shots of granite Sierra peaks and cascading waterfalls "came in the mail, on real estate advertisements and calendars," Binh recalls. "I knew Ansel Adams' photographs even before knowing that there was an Ansel Adams."

 

Because Adams' mass-produced, high-contrast images loomed so large in his imagination and felt so definitive of the locations they depict, Danh recalls that feeling of familiarity being tinged with intimidation once he started studying photography.

 

As an art student at San Jose State University in the early 2000s, and then at Stanford (where Danh, then 25, was one of the youngest people ever accepted into the university's competitive MFA program), he "felt hindered from even going to national parks."

 

"What else could I have to say about these places that Ansel Adams hadn't already? He'd covered it," Danh told The Chronicle on a recent morning at the de Young Museum.

 

Danh and fellow Bay Area landscape photographer Chris McCaw discussed the ways Adams' outsize legacy and mastery of his craft have inspired and informed their own creative processes.

 

"I felt the same way as Binh at first," McCaw said, "that you can't take a photograph in Yosemite - Ansel's taken care of that."

 

Danh, who now teaches at San Jose State, and McCaw, who lives in Pacifica, are two of the 23 contemporary artists who have work on display in the immense and absorbing group exhibition "Ansel Adams in Our Time".

 

McCaw is nationally recognized for his unique approach to contemporary landscape photography, work that can be seen, in relation to Adams, as both an homage and an invigorating departure from the famed San Francisco photographer who died in 1984 at 82 and whose ashes were scattered on Half Dome. McCaw creates one-of-a-kind images using old technologies in fresh ways that allows the artist to investigate his own relationship to nature's physical and temporal realities.

 

Having overcome his initial jitters, McCaw has created work in some of the same locations Adams captured beginning nearly a century ago, drawn, as Adams was, to views of the natural world that can cause us to question or recalibrate our human-scale concerns.  

 

In McCaw's "Sunburn" series, he has devised a way to use a handmade large-format camera to capture on film the sun's movement - or, more literally, the Earth's daily rotation - by burning pinholes that aggregate into streaks directly on negatives. ​​After hours, or even a full day, of exposure, the extremely intense light creates an effect called solarization, a natural reversal of the landscape's tonality.

 

These images and many others, by artists like Berkeley photographer Richard Misrach, give viewers a fresh new way to consider and connect with Adams' work. They highlight the interplay between more than 100 of Adams' pictures - including his greatest hits, like a moonlit Half Dome and Death Valley's sand dunes - alongside contemporary photographers. Many of them, like Danh and McCaw, are grappling with Adams' legacy by working in the same terrain he once frequented.

 

The effect is a compelling dialogue among 21st century artists on many of the same themes that drove Adams during his lifetime: awe at nature's beauty, balanced with an increasingly dire need for environmental advocacy and a near-spiritual connection to the land.        

 

"These artists are tackling some of the same very pressing human and environmental issues of our day, things like land and water rights, the impact of forest fires, mining, and the creation and consumption of energy, urban sprawl and global warming," said curator Karen Haas, who works at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, where the show originated.

 

"My goal was to delve into the legacy of this iconic figure who was both an artist and an environmental activist at a moment in time when we find ourselves undoing so many of the protections."

 

The de Young exhibition also presents Adams' work in the city where he was born, lived most of his life and launched his career. 

 

Growing up in San Francisco's Sea Cliff neighborhood, his first museum exhibition at the de Young was in 1932. It was the same year he and fellow photographers Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston formed the influential Group f/64, which embraced a style characterized by sharply focused natural forms.

 

"Ansel Adams in Our Time" includes Adams' shots of the Marin Headlands from the city before it was spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge, plus his more modernist experimentations like a shot of 1930s political posters affixed to a San Francisco wall. Also on display are his lesser-known wartime images of Japanese Americans farming potato fields while imprisoned at the Manzanar internment camp in Inyo County.

 

Wherever he roamed, Adams was most likely toting a heavy, 8-by-10-inch or even 7-by-17-inch panoramic-view camera, making capturing his most timeless shots an incredibly cumbersome endeavor. It required tenacity and physical strength, which both McCaw and Danh said they could relate to.

 

"My piece in the show was taken with a 30-by-40 (inch) camera I actually don't use anymore, because it destroyed my back," said McCaw.

 

Standing with McCaw in front of his "Sunburn," which he shot over two hours early one morning near Candlestick Point, the artist explained that the sun's burnished streak across the sky above San Francisco Bay in the image was caused by the "gelatin of the (photographic) paper cooking. You can actually smell it when it happens; it smells like roasted marshmallows."

 

As McCaw prepared to head out to photograph that day in the Presidio, he said that everywhere he goes, Adam's name and legacy are inescapable.

 

"Literally, just yesterday, I was shooting the bay right behind Genentech (in San Mateo) as the tide was coming in. People see me with this big 16-by-20 (inch) camera and everyone has to stop and ask what's going on, and they ask if what I'm doing is like what Ansel did," McCaw said. 

 

"I say, 'This camera is actually bigger than what Ansel used. But yeah, it's the same idea.'"