Oak Tree, Snow Storm

More About the Image:

Ansel Adams made this image in 1948 using an 8" x 10" view camera.  He encountered snow for the first time in Yosemite around 1920 and though considering himself ‘lucky’ to be a witness to such a scene, he would find that photographing the ‘snow-covered landscape is not easy.’  (LAA pg. 218)  The struggle in balancing extreme values of white and black was ‘exasperating’ as areas contained ‘a minimum of texture.’  (LAA pg. 218)  Up to the challenge, Andrea Stillman writes that the most successful of Ansel’s winter photographs ‘are trees laden with new-fallen snow.’  (LAA pg. 218)  The regal California Black Oak presented here, is one such subject.  The tree itself is naturally set apart from its neighbors.  In spite of this, Ansel’s camera position makes the oak blend into its surroundings, the lower branches melding with those of the background forest.  This visual chicanery develops further via the gossamer atmospheric screen of falling snow that compresses the lower half of the image by softening tonal separations, and decompressing the upper half by isolating the dark branches.  Depending on where you focus in the image, space gets pushed or pulled creating a very dynamic modernist composition.  Appropriately, Ansel would include this image in his Portfolio 1, dedicated to his mentor Alfred.  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, and would also be a part of the Special Edition of Yosemite series.