More About the Image:
Stripped of much artifice, this photograph was likely made during Ansel’s visit to Ghost Ranch before his 10-day long journey with Georgia O’Keeffe, David McAlpin and the Rockefellers in 1937. Ansel had arrived early in New Mexico and before his fellow travelers. In the intervening days, O’Keeffe continued to paint her much beloved surroundings during the day, driving around in her ‘woodie’ station wagon, and Ansel joined on her at least some of these jaunts to photograph the surrounding landscape. While both would approach modernism differently – O’Keeffe through merging of color and form and Ansel through straight photography – similarities can be seen between their work in this image. A mutual purity of form is clearly present. In a letter to O’Keeffe’s husband, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel would write of the southwest: ‘It is all very beautiful and magical here – a quality which can not be described. You have to live and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you.’ (L pg. 100) 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.
