White Post and Spandrel, Columbia, California
© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
Adams was the consummate recorder of American vastness, the wideopen West with its canyons, peaks, and skies. This exterior view suggests a quieter domestic haunting and abandonment. The viewer’s eye centers on the spectral, Samson-like post serving as a support for the structure above. If not Samson holding the roof, Atlas holding the world. A moonlike orb, in fact a bare lightbulb, rests just under the plane of exposed roof in the right-hand corner—a kind of outdoor signature for Adams and a rhyme of his more famous landscape and sky photographs.
Exhibition Title: Asheville Art Museum: An Introduction to the Collection
Label Date: 2021
Type: Catalogue Entry
Written by: Jay Bonner
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