More About the Image:
Nancy Newhall, one of Ansel’s first biographers, wrote of Mono Lake how it was a ‘tragic and enchanted’ landscape. (EL pg needed) In tune with this sentiment, Ansel’s picture of a sun and alkali bleached branch, reaching spare and angular in the parched high desert soil, casts an abject character perhaps more at home in a German Expressionist diegesis than the American West. Conversely, the lake beyond contrasts this feeling with ‘meditative reflections’ that dominate the frame but linger in a mysterious, captivating way. (EL pg needed) While Ansel was adamant that he never took a photograph for an environmental purpose, it is hard not to see the powers at work in this image: the majesty of such a landscape and the importance in protecting it, combined with the environmental strain the lake underwent upon its inflow waters getting diverted south throughout the mid to late twentieth century that jeopardized the delicate ecosystem. 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.
