I’m so accustomed to thinking of Ansel Adams as a black-and-white photographer that when I first saw this book, “Ansel Adams in Color,” I thought someone had gone into Photoshop and given his pictures a color rinse. Silly me. Adams shot in color for almost as long as he did in black and white. And he experimented with it for the rest of his life, snapping over thirty-five hundred shots. While he felt comfortable using the medium for his commercial work—a Kodak Colorama of an orange poppy field here or a luscious red begonia for Life magazine there—he found the technical control in color too imprecise and frustrating for his own artistic work. He wrote, “I have done no color of consequence for thirty years! I have a problem with color—I cannot adjust to the limited controls of values and colors. With black-and-white I feel free and confident of results.”
“Ansel Adams in Color” is a new book out this month that establishes Adams as a master of both color and black and white. With the invaluable aide of the photographer Harry Callahan, a contemporary of Adams’s, twenty previously unpublished photographs by Adams have been printed in their full-spectrum splendor. The photographs are beautiful and arresting, and one aches for what Adams would have been able to do with the technology of today. Below, a short selection from the book.
