Monchrome Master

The black-and-white photos of Ansel Adams sparked my interest in photography in my undergrad years. They were so stark yet beautiful. They seemed to convey the feel of color while using only grayscale.

I was reading recently about his view toward color. His comments were especially interesting because we've spent so much time this fall studying the subject. This quote from 1967 caught my eye:


"I can get—for me—a far greater sense of ‘color' through a well-planned and executed black-and-white image than I have ever achieved with color photography."

Arts critic Richard Woodward says this about this photographer, who died in 1984:

The Infinite Scale in Monochrome
"For Adams, who could translate sunlight's blinding spectrum into binary code perhaps more acutely than anyone before or since, there was an "infinite scale of values" in monochrome. Color was mere reality, the lumpy world given for everyone to look at, before artists began the difficult and honorable job of trying to perfect it in shades of gray."

Back in Adams' day it was often hard to get realistic results with color. I wonder what he'd think about digital photography today. Would he have been more willing to use color with the amazing advances in quality and reproduction?

Woodward writes about Adams' rare use of color in the 1940s in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine.





in this article in Smithsonian Magazine.