Three important series of black and white landscape photographs will be showcased in “Oceans, Rivers, and Skies: Ansel Adams, Robert Adams and Alfred Stieglitz,” on view through March 15 at the National Gallery of Art’s West Building, ground floor, Gallery 34. This focus exhibition features 21 works in chronological order: ten by Alfred Stieglitz (1864‱946), five by Ansel Adams (1902‱984) and six by Robert Adams (born 1937).
The three series have never before been exhibited together, and Stieglitz’s series “Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs” was last seen in its entirety in 1923.
In 1922, Stieglitz made a series of photographs of the sky at his summer home in Lake George, N.Y. Exhibited the following year to great acclaim at the Andersen Galleries in New York, this series †which Stieglitz titled “Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs or Clouds in Ten Movements” †explores the possibilities of abstraction in photographs of the natural world.
In 1940, Ansel Adams paid homage to Stieglitz in his five-part series “Surf Sequence, San Mateo Coast, California.” Like his renowned mentor, Adams photographed a landscape he knew well †the coastline south of his home in San Francisco. Looking down from a high elevation, he made a sequence of photographs that recorded the rhythmic pattern of waves breaking on the shore. With each image taken from the same spot, the series reveals the temporal dynamism of nature.
More than 50 years later, Robert Adams explored the same subject in a series of six photographs, “Southwest from the South Jetty, Clatsop County, Oregon, 1990 A⁆,” taken at the estuary where the Columbia River empties into the Pacific Ocean.
Best known for his photographs of the collision between contemporary society and the landscape of the American West, Adams, in this series, approaches an abstract and ethereal sensibility that conveys the quiet sublimity of nature.
The exhibition was organized by Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art.
In 2004 the National Gallery of Art inaugurated a suite of five galleries in the West Building devoted to the exhibition of photographs and adjacent to state-of-the-art storage rooms for photographs. Photographs not on view may be seen by appointment only by calling the department of photographs at 202-842-6144.
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are always free to the public. They are on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW. For information, www.nga.gov , 202-737-4215 or TDD, 202-842-6176.
