“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” ~ Max Planck
girl gang
The delayed birthday was worth the wait. Stacy and I met Kelly, Regina, and Kelly’s BFF Corinne Connor, who is visiting from Chicago, at the Cincinnati Art Museum to see the Ansel Adams exhibit. It did not disappoint. The place was packed. It took us nearly 30 minutes to get into the exhibit, and the somewhat retrospective display began with surprisingly small images. These were also very pictorial, a style I either forgot he’d started with or never knew. The work was beautiful, though so small that I’m surprised somebody didn’t yell at me for getting so close to them (but my glasses didn’t allow a good look otherwise). It’s his later work after he’d developed the Zone System that most people are familiar with, the large images of Half Dome in Yosemite, for instance. But it is this image from the Taos Pueblo that grabbed my attention today. For me, this is a brilliant example of the Zone System with subtle detail in the deep shadows and crisp detail in the highlights. It’s warm and inviting, allowing the viewer to gaze into and appreciate a world likely different from their own. The other image of the exhibit that grabbed me was the colossal Grand Canyon from 1941. The digital reproduction pales compared to the print, and like the Grand Canyon, the scale of the photograph, easily four feet by four feet, was breathtaking. It felt like you could step into the image and plunge over the edge into the canyon. The worst thing about today was that there were just too many people to spend significant time with each image. However long or short, seeing the photos up close was worth it. They reminded me why I love photography in the first place. Each image is a piece of magic, and I am so glad I got to take it all in with my rental tribe. It was just what the doctor ordered.
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