Vicki Goldberg

BOSTON — Ah, wilderness! It’s our answer to Europe’s cathedrals, our proof of a unique national identity.

Most citizens were introduced to the wilderness by images. In the early 19th century, Thomas Cole placed the eastern wilderness — his beloved Catskill Mountains — on walls. Later in the century, Carleton Watkins’ 1861 photographs of Yosemite contributed heavily to Abraham Lincoln’s decision in 1864 to secure the valley forever “for public use, resort and recreation,” the first time any government anywhere set aside land to benefit the public.

William Henry Jackson’s 1871 photographs of Yellowstone helped persuade Congress to establish the first national park in 1872. Then, in the 1930s, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), a staunch conservationist who had grown up near the windswept dunes of Golden Gate Park, lobbied Congress and sent the government a book of his photographs of the southern Sierra Nevada range. They strongly influenced President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to make the Kings Canyon area a national park.

Late in the 19th century virtually every home had a viewer for 3D stereographs of a West that looked like a fable. Manifestly — in mindset as well as mission — the West was our destiny.

And now it is bracing — if perhaps cautionary — to see, close to the moment that the government shutdown has affected many of the national parks, so many noble and challenging images of our country’s heritage starring in “Ansel Adams in Our Time,”at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It is a far-ranging, smartly and instructively installed show of more than 100 of his photographs.

Not a mere retrospective, it also includes about 80 images by 23 contemporary photographers that the curator, Karen Haas, sees as a modern lens on Adams. Although the connections are occasionally a bit tenuous, their addition highlights how Adams, who carried the 19th century’s hymn to America into the 20th century, has remained an inescapable force.

The photographers on view who adapt Adams’ imagessimultaneously make radical changes and commentaries. Their inclusion points out major shifts in the way both landscape photography and landscape itself are now regarded.

Although Adams gave his heart to the 19th century, he trained his eye on modernism and the “straight photography” of the 1930s, with its sharp focus, vivid contrast and compositions that amounted to studies in form and light. His iconic and still breathtaking mountainscapes of Yosemite and elsewhere are on view, as well as such semiabstract landscapes as “Sand Dunes, Sunrise, Death Valley National Monument, California,”which could stand comfortably beside an Edward Weston.

Most come from the Lane Collection, a munificent gift of more than 450 Adams photographs to the MFA. There are surprises too, like the breadth of Adams’ interests (and the extent of his need to earn a living with commissions and magazine work), from Native Americans to ghost towns, from a World War II Japanese internment camp to cemeteries, churches, a cigar store Indian, a highway interchange.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Adams experienced a heightened spirituality in the wilderness that spoke to a longing for the beauties, peace and spectacle of untrammeled nature — a yearning that lingers strongly in our time, suggesting it might be innate.

He was 14 when he first visited Yosemite. He quickly took his Kodak into that stupendous valley and was so moved by the experience that it changed his life. Adams meant his images to convey the emotions he experienced while taking pictures and heightening their impact in the darkroom. (He was a superb printer.) How lucky it is for the arts that human vision, although it does not register the world in black and white, can respond to colorless representation on a level within reach of its response to color.

Landscape tourism grew exponentially from the post Civil War years to today, but untouched wilderness has dwindled as the population increased and migrated to cities and suburbs, while mining, drilling and industrialization encroached on open spaces. Adams, although well aware of how commercialized the national parks had become, could scarcely have anticipated that on summer weekends the grounds bordering the Grand Canyon would look like Woodstock.

He preferred the parks pristine, and Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century photograph of Yosemite Valley with a logging road cutting across it is paired at the MFA with Adams’ image of the same place, the road carefully retouched out.

Photographers took note of how “progress” had changed the land. In the 1960s and 1970s, the movement called New Topographics signaled a radical shift from traditional depictions of the land to the many ways we had altered it.

Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and others photographed what had once been purple mountains’ majesty — mountains now more likely to tower above rutted lanes and ticky-tacky houses. Adams took some note as well. His photograph of a housing development is at the MFA, as is his picture of a pensive cemetery statue that makes it clear the cemetery borders on a forest — of oil derricks.

The New Topographers were determined to acknowledge the slow decline of wilderness, which had been trampled in part by the lingering wish to be near nature, a wish that bit its own tail. Many of the houses destroyed by the recent Northern California fires were located in what’s called the wildland-urban interface, dangerously close to forests.

In the late 1970s, a group called the Rephotographic Project figured out exactly where and in what season some important 19th-century landscape photographers had stood, then made photographs at the exact same times and places. The landscape, often enough, was quite recognizable but equally often overrun or partially obstructed by buildings.

Nonetheless, art and commercial photographers today still photograph beautiful landscapes beautifully. Landscape photographs are everywhere, thanks to Instagram, providing proof that wilderness still exists, although it may be outnumbered by its portraits.

SOME CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHERS ask a vital question of art history: What can be done with a scene that long ago became an icon and is tattooed upon our minds? The answer lies with what artists have done with icons for centuries: They have reinterpreted them.

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe incorporated pieces of earlier photographs into their own collaboration on exhibit here, stitching a time sequence into a single image. They photographed the view from Glacier Point overlook at exactly the spot where Carleton Watkins had stood, then replaced portions of their color photograph with a fragment of Adams’ and a fragment of Watkins’ photographs of the same view.

Catherine Opie takes highly colored, out-of-focus pictures of Adams’ territory in the national parks. In a video at the exhibition she said she wants people to know what they are looking at but to question it, an act of witnessing that one click on an iPhone, one glance at social media, does not create.

Abelardo Morell converted a dark, sealed tent into a camera obscura. An image of what an attached periscope saw was projected through its angled mirror onto the tent’s ground. He then photographed that underfoot image and printed it just as it was, showcasing America the beautiful through smatters and tatters of grass and dirt, as if the soles of our shoes had risen up to insist they were as essential to viewing as the view itself.

Binh Danh took daguerreotypes of Yosemite, a reversal of time and history. Daguerreotypes, made without a negative, are unique. They were introduced in 1839, never widely used for landscapes, and largely replaced by a negative process by the time Watkins photographed Yosemite in 1861. Their surface is reflective, so Binh Danh’s viewers see themselves looking at images of iconic places that they themselves are in.

Other contemporaries report on the many lasting changes human hands have made on the landscape. Mark Ruwedel photographs the tunnels and cuts that railroads long ago carved through the West at terrible cost and later abandoned — useless paths to nowhere slicing across the land.

Mitch Epstein’s “Altamont Pass Wind Farm” suggests that human interference has reached an implausible level. The wind farm sits in a barren desert, but where the windmills end a glistening green golf course begins, equipped with a concrete lane for golf carts. Where did, where does, the water come from? And the dirt? It may be ironic to plunk an entire course down beside a sand trap, but the 19th-century idea that God meant us to tame and reconfigure the land for our use did not have this in mind.

David Emitt Adams also photographs a deranged landscape, printing tintypes (another 19th-century process) of landscape details onto sculptures he made of old, beat-up, discarded metal cans he collected in the desert, where they pepper the ground. A new role for the desert: prime dump.

Although Adams remains extravagantly popular and landscape photographers across America and the world continue to provide us with luscious images, probably the largest number of landscape photographs people see, on television, the web, on mobile and in newspapers, are images of environmental destruction that is at least partially due to climate change: flooded beaches, rivers, towns, and islands, shrinking glaciers, forest fires feeding on drought, hurricane damage of cities and fields. All scientific predictions say this will grow worse unless strong action is taken soon.

Beautiful landscapes are good for the eye, the mind, the spirit.

One day images of them may be all that we have left.

Ansel Adams in Our Time

Through Feb. 24 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; 617-267-9300, mfa.org.

Related Exhibition

Through March 3, the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, has on view “Contemplating the View: American Landscape Photographs,” an exceptional photography exhibition with examples of Adams’ work.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/arts/design/national-parks-ansel-adams-photography.html" id="e1754bb1-dd69-3553-ad2e-533cf0798476">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

Ansel Adams in a New Light

<h1>(Critic’s Pick): NEW YORK — Century after century, the moon adamantly refused to give up its secrets. The ancient Greeks and Romans generally considered it pristine, smooth and white but did not have a good explanation for the dirty spots on its face that were visible to human eyes. Then, around A.D. 90 , Plutarch wrote that those blemishes were the shadows of mountains and valleys and that the moon must be habitable.</h1>

By no means did everyone agree, but ignorance is seldom bliss. Faced with an unanswerable question, our species generally comes up with theories, guesses, myths and fantasies. Telescopes made viewing more precise, and photography did even better, but although no living creatures showed up, the notion that they might would not die. After World War II, one of several rumors was that the Germans had established a secret facility on the moon, and some even speculated that Hitler had faked his own death and lived out his days beneath the lunar surface.

A new exhibition, “Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a journey through an uncommon history, the history of representations of the moon across four centuries. This outsize and beautifully installed revelation of persistent astronomical searches is a trailblazing marriage of science and art — 300 images and objects (a telescope, a photograph used as a fire screen, two moon globes, Hasselblad cameras used by astronauts), plus film excerpts. The images shine a bright light on astronomers’ unstoppable pursuit of knowledge as well as on technological advances, artistic responses and fantasy, and also a generous serving of unabashed cuteness. The show amounts to a testament to the human drive to know and explore, and it quietly affirms the growing influence of visual representations of the moon from the invention of the telescope through the first manned moon landing 50 years ago.

Mia Fineman, the curator in the department of photographs at the Met, organized “Apollo’s Muse” with Beth Saunders, curator and head of special collections at the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and they wrote essays for its informative catalog. (Apollo, god of the sun, never had a muse; he was leader of the nine muses. NASA, of course, wasn’t going to the sun.)

After 1608, when the telescope was invented, the moon seemed approachable. In 1609, Galileo drew its first closely observed portraits: maps of a portion of the surface. English mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot made telescopic observations a bit earlier than Galileo, but his were not published until later, and he could not explain the “strange spottedness” he saw. Galileo, expertly trained in perspective and art, realized that the “spottedness” was actually the shadows of mountains. His published drawings, two of which are included in the exhibition, represent the dawn of modern astronomy.

The 17th century brought to human vision both extremely distant and extremely tiny objects, as telescopes rapidly improved and the power of microscopes, invented at the end of the previous century, vastly increased. Accomplished artists collaborated to provide scientists and the public ever more detailed and delectable illustrations of information obtained au clair de la lune. Johannes Hevelius’ highly successful Selenography — a lunar atlas published in 1647 and named for Selene, the moon goddess in Greek mythology — is thought to be the first book entirely dedicated to the moon. Hevelius surrounded one lunar map with baroque flourishes: cherubs brandishing pronouncements, looking through telescopes or studiously drawing.

Astronomers drew what they saw; artists made the drawings better. But some images were of little use to astronomers without good scientific texts, and most were not widely seen by anyone but scientists. French artist Claude Mellan’s 1635 engravings were not simply beautiful but also so accurate that they were not surpassed until two centuries later. In 1805, British portraitist and amateur astronomer John Russell made a superb engraving of the moon titled “Lunar Planisphere, Flat Light,” showing the moon not as we see it but rather in flat, even light. It’s a choice that reflected Russell’s belief that an artist should “correct’’ nature in order to produce an ideal.

The idea that Earth’s mysterious companion might be inhabited kept being broached by imaginative people, mistaken people and hoaxers.

The name of Sir John Herschel, a noted British astronomer, was slyly stolen in 1835 by The (New York) Sun for the sensational “great moon hoax,” which reported that Herschel had observed houses, roads and sophisticated cities on the lunar surface. The story was reprinted across Europe, and a wide international audience ecstatically bought both paper and hoax.

The invention of photography four years later meant that more accurate and believable imagery was about to take center stage. “Apollo’s Muse” has several of the earliest photographs of the moon, including Sir John Draper’s remarkable 1840 daguerreotype — exposure time: a half-hour. (Daguerreotypes required more light than the moon produced, hence the long exposure, during which the Earth and moon both moved.) Draper’s photograph gives us a glimpse into a rare moment of double discovery, comparable to Galileo’s: a more precise understanding of the moon’s surface, and one obtained with an instrument able to see more accurately than the eye.

Until mid-19th century, photographs could be reproduced only with great difficulty, and photography by the light of the moon as the Earth rotated was no mean feat, so for years the public saw less than visitors to the Met will.

British astronomer James Nasmyth, despairing of photography’s power to capture the minutiae and three-dimensionality he saw through his scope, made detailed plaster casts. In 1874, his photographs of his artful stand-ins for the moon were published and lauded as the most “truthful” representations ever seen. So much for photography’s reputation for veracity.

In fact, photography did not simply run artistry out of town. As late as 1882, French astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, working at the Harvard College Observatory, believed that photography had limitations that art did not. He published “The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual,” illustrated with stunningly drawn prints of craters on the moon and an eclipse of the sun. His scientific drawings were published in a large portfolio and collected; public interest in science was growing.

New and more accurate information does not always move minds. (Consider the Flat Earth Society.) Technological and scientific advances never produced evidence of lunar inhabitants, but the moon was too fascinating to be held back by mere science.

Literary voyages to our constant companion existed long before Jules Verne’s influential “From the Earth to the Moon” (1865). Illustrations included humanoids and fanciful animals, but more charming was the first science fiction movie, Georges Méliès’ “Le Voyage Dans la Lune” (“A Trip to the Moon”), from 1902. A group of astronomers are shot off the Earth by a cannon, land smack in one of the man-in-the-moon’s eyes, and barely escape hostile natives. A colorized excerpt (as well as clips from Fritz Lang’s “Woman in the Moon,” from 1931, and Irving Pichel’s “Destination Moon,” from 1950) plays in the exhibition.

By the early 20th century, the moon had become cuddly. Portrait studios acquired sturdy, smiling crescent moons (and at least one that was implacably grumpy). Nudes, lovers, friends, families and pranksters sat on the crescent curve to be immortalized on postcards.

By the time NASA came along, the moon was a pretty serious matter again. Before the launch of Apollo 11, on July 16, 1969, cameras were surveying the moon from unmanned lunar orbiters, looking for a landing site. (Spy satellites had already taken photographs, and in 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 took a picture of earthrise two years before astronaut William Anders took the more famous image.) Some of the photographs taken from 239,000 miles away were converted into three-dimensional moonscapes and carefully studied for a landing site, but Neil Armstrong eventually, and breathtakingly, used his eyes to find a safer landing spot than the one to which he had been directed.

The exhibition usefully supplies some Soviet propaganda photographs — the first dogs in space, the first woman in space — that were stoking popular support for their outstanding space achievements when the United States was still feverishly working to surpass them.

These proved to be forerunners to the hugely successful American public relations campaign that followed the first moon landing. Images of the Apollo 11 astronauts — Buzz Aldrin walking near the lunar module, for example, or standing by the American flag — still resonate 50 years later.

Critics initially dismissed the Apollo program as a “moondoggle.” After Apollo 11 landed, a few declared it a fake. But Americans generally saw it as an affirmation of national greatness after a decade of tragedy, upheaval and Cold War, and the whole world thrilled to this intimate encounter with the moon, which had been aloof since something like forever.

Perhaps nothing can live up to the moon landing. Less exciting is the artistic response in the last gallery of the show. In 1962, NASA administrator James Webb and artist James Dean founded the NASA Art Program. A NASA website suggests one reason: “An artist also could bring something that engineers and managers loathe to admit to: emotion.”

The program commissioned well-known artists including Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, all of whom made tiny drawings in 1969 for a small ceramic wafer that was attached to the Apollo 12 spacecraft and left on the moon. (It has become known as the Moon Museum.) Also left behind, in 1971, was Paul Van Hoeydonck’s small sculpture “Fallen Astronaut,” a replica of which is at the Met.

The space program’s impact on popular culture is represented by Harry Gordon’s “Rocket” dress (1968), which depicts an alarmingly phallic rocket exploding upward through the mannequin’s middle. Made of paper, the dress could be cut apart and displayed on a wall. And it makes clear how just about everything, including history, is grist for the commercial mill.

The American flag was planted on the moon in 1969, not to proclaim our satellite an American colony but to memorialize our achievement. A 1971 photograph by Stephen Shames of a message spray-painted on a brick wall in a vacant lot in Brooklyn says it all: “THE MOON BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE!!!”

The images collected here read like a love letter from all its ardent suitors.

Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography

Through Sept. 22 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/arts/design/apollos-muse-moon-metropolitan-museum-review.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

By no means did everyone agree, but ignorance is seldom bliss. Faced with an unanswerable question, our species generally comes up with theories, guesses, myths and fantasies.

The moon sits for its portrait

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Vicki Goldberg

Articles written by the author

Ansel Adams in a New Light

The moon sits for its portrait