Accidental Blogger

During our childhood, for many years and even more hours, my sister and I used to pore over a book of photography that our father had brought home when I was probably six or seven years old and my sister two or three. The collection consisted of black and white pictures from all over the world. We were entranced by The Family of Man whose content took us to remote corners of the world inhabited by landscapes and people we never expected to see in real life. What we did not know at the time because we  paid scant attention to the names of the photographers, that it was our first exposure to the famous Ansel Adams, many of whose photos were included in the collection. The fact that black and white images of deserts, stark mountains, rivers and canyons in far away America (none of Adams' photos in the book featured anything live other than trees) fascinated two very young children at an age when color pictures of people and animals usually appear more interesting, says something about the hypnotic quality of his photography. That copy of The Family of Man of our childhood became tattered due to our love for it.  About fifteen years ago, my sister and I each obtained a new edition of the book in order to preserve our fond nostalgia. (This exceptional book of photography has been continuously in print since 1955.)

Photographs like those that my sister and I admired, have made Black & White the signature colors of Adams' photographic legacy. But Adams also took color pictures, many in fact, mostly as remunerative commissions for commercial outfits. He had planned to put together a book of his color photos a few years before his death but never got around to finishing the project. In 1993 a book was published showcasing that other half of his work, Ansel Adams in Color, which has now been reprinted in 2009. A review of the book appears in this month's Smithsonian Magazine. (See photo gallery here) The color photos in the hands of the consummate shutterbug are terrific also. But many viewers (and the photographer himself) insist that Adams' artististic brilliance is far more spectacular in the works where he utilized his beloved palette of just two shades - black and white.

"I can get – for me – a far greater sense of 'color' through a well planned and executed black-and-white image than I have ever achieved with color photography," he [Adams] wrote in 1967. For Adams, who could translate sunlight's blinding spectrum into binary code perhaps more accurately than anyone before or since, there was "an infinite scale of values" in monochrome. Color was mere reality, the lumpy world given for everyone to look at, before artists began the difficult and honorable job of trying to perfect it in shades of gray. 

Two similar photos by Ansel Adams, one in color and the other black & white.