More About the Image:
Ansel Adams made this photograph while traveling on the High Road to Taos, New Mexico. The white church in the distant middle ground catches our eye by its brilliance. Competing tonally for our attention are the brightest areas of cloud cover above drawing our attention to the impending weather. The rest of image relies on its variations of quartertones and midtones zigzagging their way across the frame to create a simple but dynamic composition. On close inspection, the foreground also reveals a cultivated landscape - a rarity in Adams imagery. We begin to draw connections between the church and the land, colonial roots, westward and agricultural expansion, and all of the complexity of issues that follows. The brewing storm overhead brings forth metaphors of both religious and environmental connotations, while also serving as a reminder of the general sacredness that rain was to the indigenous peoples who saw it as a sign of renewal. Like his contemporary Edward Weston, Ansel would have insisted that the scene is merely (and fantastically) an experience, one that he photographed for its pure beauty. In a letter to Edward Weston in a few years before this image was made, Adams wrote how they both wanted ‘to express with our cameras what cannot be expressed in other ways – to trust our intuition in respect to what is beautiful and significant – to believe that humanity needs the purely aesthetic just as much as it needs the purely material.’ (L pg76) ) At the end of his life, Ansel communicated the significance of this image by including it as one of the variants in his last major project, The Museum Set.
So wrote Ansel Adams, whose photographs of the varied and rugged landscapes of the region have imprinted upon the imaginations of millions around the world. Beyond Yosemite and the High Sierra, the Southwest was one of Ansel’s best-loved regions of the country.In fact, it was a trip to Taos, New Mexico in the 1930s that led Ansel to cross paths with photographer Paul Strand, who helped inspire him to make photography his life’s work. The rest, as they say, is history.
