More About the Image:
Ansel Adams saw the landscape as a series of events both scientific and aesthetic that inspired him, but he understood the importance of the ‘religious significance these great natural features acquired’ from the indigenous populations. (OH pg.582) In 1958, he had been on assignment for the Kodak Corporation to make Coloramas (transparencies that would be 18 feet high, and 60 feet long) for Grand Central Station in New York City. The trip had proved trying for photography, but the commercial opportunity allowed him to make a few creative works. He and his assistants had been on location for nearly a month and within that time, made several black-and-white negatives. In this photograph the most famous motifs of the Southwest, the Mittens and Merrick Butte, are situated in a late morning light that keep much of their sandstone details in shade. These venerated monoliths feel cloaked and ascetic, their equidistant separation within the frame an allusion of meditative discipline. Perhaps we are meant to keep our distance and look upon them with an awe. The more finally wind tailored details of the sculpted rock in the foreground offset the muted, stoic nature of the buttes, invites inspection and gives us an appreciation for the predominant forces and beauty of nature at work. 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.
