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Product Description
Product Description
Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was probably America's greatest landscape photographer. Well known for his wonderful photographs of the American West and primarily Yosemite, his black and white photography is perfect for reproduction in calendars and posters and can be seen widely. Less well-known is the Fiat Lux collection of his work. In March 1963, Adams and Nancy Newhall were commissioned by Clark Kerr, then President of the University of California, to produce a book to commemorate the centennial of the University. Four years later, Fiat Lux: The University of California was published. It captured in stark monochrome in the 1960s' university campuses, people, and properties statewide. The Unseen Ansel Adams reprises this collection, choosing images that even today look as fresh and convincing as they did when taken forty years ago.
About the Author
A publisher with more then twenty years' experience, Ian Westwell started a writing career more than ten years ago and has since written more than twenty non-fiction titles.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful
There's a reason these photos were unseen.
13 Nov 2010
Format:Hardcover
Ansel Adams was the widely revered grand old man of classical black and white landscape photography. He produced a huge body of wonderful imagery. But this book mostly serves to demonstrate that even Ansel Adams produced mediocre work. A handful of the photographs in the "Fiat Lux" collection are up to the high standards of his Yosemite, Sierra Nevada and National Parks work. Most however are painfully pedestrian commercial images produced for hire. His portraits are even weaker, almost without exception.
The reproduction quality also falls well short of the high standard set by Little, Brown in their series of Ansel Adams books. Many of the photographs suffer from lost shadow detail. All but a few lack the crisp, perfectly judged contrast that virtually defines Adams' work.
Unless you feel a compulsion to flesh out your Ansel Adams library with mediocre images that'll make you feel better about your own photographs...look elsewhere.
The reproduction quality also falls well short of the high standard set by Little, Brown in their series of Ansel Adams books. Many of the photographs suffer from lost shadow detail. All but a few lack the crisp, perfectly judged contrast that virtually defines Adams' work.
Unless you feel a compulsion to flesh out your Ansel Adams library with mediocre images that'll make you feel better about your own photographs...look elsewhere.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Excellent Unseen Adams Photography
11 Feb 2012
Format:Hardcover
I really have to disagree with the reviewers who think this collection of Adams work should go unseen. I find it a fantastic collection of photographs. Do I respond positively to them all? No. But I certainly respond well to a lot of them. There are some wonderful compositions here that I think deserve the light of day. I actually prefer the selection of images in this book to those found in 'Ansel Adams In The National Parks'. There are some really unique photos of locations and subjects you haven't seen from Ansel Adams. And I think that makes this book more than worth it. The quality of the images is also quite good for a book. Certainly the print quality is much better than the incredibly bad 'Ansel Adams: Landscapes of the American West'. For me, the book is definitely worth it. A wonderful collection of rare and unseen photos. Sure there are some photos that are worse than others. But I feel the same with all of his other books, and any photographer for that matter. Cannot expect to respond well to every image of a given photographer. Certainly doesn't make the book a waste.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Footnote
14 Dec 2010
Format:Hardcover
I can't forget the first time I saw an Ansel Adams photograph. It was the photograph of a boulder strewn field leading to Mt. Williamson in the Sierra Nevada and it stood, it seems to me, 10 feet tall, at the entrance to the Family of Man exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. It's easy to understand why, even though some downplay Adams' art now, in the eyes of many, he was and is America's greatest landscape artist.
In 1963 he was commissioned to prepare a book commemorating the University of California's centennial which was published as "Fiat Lux: The University of California". Although only a small portion of the images captured were published, 1,761 pictures were presented to the University. "Unseen Ansel Adams: Photographs from the Fiat Lux Collection" presents a selection of 190 photographs from the collection.
The compositional eye of Adams is immediately apparent in the photographs, even when turned to topics that were not the essence of Adams' work. The serpentine trails of roads, whether at a massive freeway intersection or meandering through rice fields, are quite impressive. More surprising though are the portraits of faculty, staff and students that show why the master was able to earn the income from his commercial work that his landscape art didn't provide, at least in the early days of his career. My favorite photo is that of the Lick Observatory, with three domes arrayed in distance, sitting on a ridge, high above the clouds, with distant peaks. The observatory in the foreground is crisp with a full range of black and white while the mountains, in a narrow range of tones of gray, show the effect of aerial perspective.
But be warned. Not all of these images are drop-dead gorgeous. Adams carefully controlled his work and I suspect that is why there were many fewer images in the "Fiat Lux" book than here. That's not unusual; most serious photographers shoot many more images than they present to the world.
A second problem of the images is their range of light. Adams worked hard and long on some of his pictures, when he took them, when he developed them, and when he printed them, to extend the range of light from what the camera captures to what the human eye sees (and some might suggest, even beyond that.) He wanted the blackest blacks and the whitest whites and a full range of tonalities between. In this book, many of the blacks are blocked up and many of the whites are featureless. That may be due to the process of printing (the book indicates the images were digitally reproduced from film negatives) or, I would like to think, because Adams only slaved to capture the full range of light in those pictures he deemed worthy of revealing to the world.
Lovers of Adams may want to look at the original "Fiat Lux" book which is still available. Students of the master will certainly want to consider these images, even if only to see the high quality of what he did not consider worthy.
In 1963 he was commissioned to prepare a book commemorating the University of California's centennial which was published as "Fiat Lux: The University of California". Although only a small portion of the images captured were published, 1,761 pictures were presented to the University. "Unseen Ansel Adams: Photographs from the Fiat Lux Collection" presents a selection of 190 photographs from the collection.
The compositional eye of Adams is immediately apparent in the photographs, even when turned to topics that were not the essence of Adams' work. The serpentine trails of roads, whether at a massive freeway intersection or meandering through rice fields, are quite impressive. More surprising though are the portraits of faculty, staff and students that show why the master was able to earn the income from his commercial work that his landscape art didn't provide, at least in the early days of his career. My favorite photo is that of the Lick Observatory, with three domes arrayed in distance, sitting on a ridge, high above the clouds, with distant peaks. The observatory in the foreground is crisp with a full range of black and white while the mountains, in a narrow range of tones of gray, show the effect of aerial perspective.
But be warned. Not all of these images are drop-dead gorgeous. Adams carefully controlled his work and I suspect that is why there were many fewer images in the "Fiat Lux" book than here. That's not unusual; most serious photographers shoot many more images than they present to the world.
A second problem of the images is their range of light. Adams worked hard and long on some of his pictures, when he took them, when he developed them, and when he printed them, to extend the range of light from what the camera captures to what the human eye sees (and some might suggest, even beyond that.) He wanted the blackest blacks and the whitest whites and a full range of tonalities between. In this book, many of the blacks are blocked up and many of the whites are featureless. That may be due to the process of printing (the book indicates the images were digitally reproduced from film negatives) or, I would like to think, because Adams only slaved to capture the full range of light in those pictures he deemed worthy of revealing to the world.
Lovers of Adams may want to look at the original "Fiat Lux" book which is still available. Students of the master will certainly want to consider these images, even if only to see the high quality of what he did not consider worthy.
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