The Impact of Ansel Adams

Abelardo Morell and Catherine Opie

This fall, Ansel Adams in Our Time, developed by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, opened at Crystal Bridges. The exhibition featured more than 100 of the famous nature photographer’s images of the American landscape side-by-side with contemporary artists exploring similar themes. We acquired examples of two works in the exhibition by Cuban-born artist Abelardo Morell, who immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. We also connected with Los Angeles-based photographer Catherine Opie, whose work was also included in the show. Read about them here.

Crystal Bridges Acquires Artworks Seen in Ansel Adams in Our Time

Abelardo Morell, Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Mount Moran and the Snake River from Oxbow Bend Grand Teton National Park , 2011 (ABOVE)

Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Rio Grande and Mexico near Boquillas Canyon, Big Bend National Park, 2011 (not pictured)

Alejo Benedetti Associate Curator, Contemporary Art

The two waterways featured in the new acquisitions from Abelardo Morell might be familiar to some of our members: Snake River near Mount Moran and the Rio Grande. But look closer and you’ll realize there’s something slightly different about these photos. Borrowing the basic principles of a camera obscura, Morell sets up a tent outfitted with a periscope in view of his desired vista. The landscape is then projected directly on the ground inside the tent and he snaps a digital photograph of this projection (see rendering above). The resulting photograph does something truly astounding: it unites the mundane with the grand in one seamless image. It’s a radical approach to photographing and commenting on the landscape that brims with intrigue.

ABOVE: Catherine Opie, Untitled #1 (Yosemite Valley), 2015.

Ansel Adams in Our Time is on view at Crystal Bridges through January 3, 2021.

“Everything is worthy of your attention, and I’m going to put it in front of you and give it space,” said Opie.

A Virtual Talk with Catherine Opie

Crystal Bridges hosted a virtual talk with renowned photographer Catherine Opie, whose work from her Yosemite series was featured in Ansel Adams in Our Time. Broadcasting in October from her RV parked in Oregon, Opie and Alejo Benedetti, associate curator, contemporary art, discussed her decades-long career, the art of contemporary portraiture in photography, documenting the queer experience through photography in the ‘90s, and using the simplicity and architecture of things such as freeways, icehouses, and surfers to explore questions of human sensibility, observation, and our relationship with time.

In her 2015 Yosemite series, Opie traveled to Yosemite National Park to take images of well-known landscapes. Her photographs, however, appear blurred. While this might seem disorienting, it is intentional.

“You could never be Ansel Adams, so my approach to Yosemite was in relationship to ideas of memory with place,” said Opie. “By throwing the focus off, you have to work on a different cognitive level to fill in the blanks.” In other words, viewers are given the shapes and colors of a famous place, then asked to remember the rest.

In a place like Yosemite, Opie explained, beauty is found in abundance with majestic views and nature, but beauty can also be found in the non-majestic views as well. “Everything is worthy of your attention, and I’m going to put it in front of you and give it space,” said Opie.

When asked how she’d liked to be remembered as an artist, Opie said as “somebody who was incredibly curious to spend their life in relationship to making images and creating dialogues around the things I have questions about in my own mind.”

Special thanks to the exhibition’s sponsors: The Coca-Cola Company, Stout Executive Search, ConAgra Brands, Reed and Mary Ann Greenwood, Harriet and Warren Stephens, Stephens Inc., Harrison and Rhonda French Family, Marybeth and Micky Mayfield, Donna and Mack McLarty, Mark McLarty, Catherine and Stephan Roche, Lamar and Shari Steiger, Mark and Diane Simmons, Rebecca Hurst and Jim Smith | Smith Hurst, PLC, Jim and Susan von Gremp, Galen, Debi, and Alice Havner, Jeremy L. Goldstein, Dewitt and Cindy Smith, and Anonymous.