THE GREATNESS OF ANSEL ADAMS LACMA EXHIBIT TRACES PHOTOGRAPHER'S EVOLUTION FROM THE SUBTLE TO THE GRANDIOSE.

Byline: Phillip Zonkel Staff Writer

For many, Ansel Adams' work is seen on a large scale - black-and-white posters of such majestic scenes as ``Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico'' (1941), which shows a small glowing orb hanging above a ribbon of clouds over a darkening desert landscape.

Such panoramas have long been images of choice for those in the environmental movement. But as you walk through the exhibit ``Ansel Adams at 100'' at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, you may be startled to see that many of the photos are hardly bigger than a postcard - as small as 5 by 6 inches. Yet the size doesn't diminish the power and artistic and spiritual vision of the work.

``The general public has received a general one-liner for Adams,'' says Robert Sobieszek, curator of photography at LACMA. ``A very good one to be sure, but it's one that has to do with posters, with conservation, with dramatic nature shots and operatic grandeur.

``But there's another side to him that had more to do with the more subtle, more refined, more lyrical artist. He began small, lyrically intimate and refined, but he grew, and his style changed over the years,'' Sobieszek says.

Now, a new exhibit at LACMA shows the whole picture.

Opening Sunday and running through May 11, ``Ansel Adams at 100,'' timed to coincide with the centennial of his birth, places his iconic images within the context of an unexpected and unfamiliar body of landscape and nature photographs. Featured works include many rarely seen prints from Adams' early career, several of which are displayed alongside prints made from the same negative much later in the artist's life. These contrasts reveal Adams' evolution as an artist, illustrating how his aesthetic choices changed over time and how his work was affected by his emerging celebrity.

Developing style

``Ansel's view of his own work changed very significantly over a 50-year period, which is not unusual for artists,'' says Bill Turnage, managing trustee with the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. ``But Ansel, who did all of his own printing in the darkroom, changed the way he printed to a pretty significant degree. As he got older, his prints were more baroque and more dramatic, deeper blacks, and less subtle and gentle than his earlier prints. They were the same photographs, but they looked dramatically different.

``Ansel wanted his work to be liked. He was a shy person, and his way of communicating with people and expressing his feelings was through his photographs,'' Turnage says. ``My view is that these later prints got a more immediately positive reaction from a broad segment of people. They weren't as well-liked by photography curators and art historians, but the general public liked them better. That's what Ansel reacted to. I think that's why he continued to print more and more in that style that was made into a symbol of the environmental movement and was a heroic projection of America.''

During his four years of research, John Szarkowski, curator of ``Ansel Adams at 100'' and director emeritus at New York's Museum of Modern Art's photography department, looked through more than 5,000 prints from more than 50 different sources, including every book ever written about Adams, private collections, museums and galleries.

In the end, he selected 115 prints for the exhibit.

``In a work of art, you want the same thing you want in a person or in a friend,'' Szarkowski says. ``You don't find people interesting because they confirm everything you already believe. You're interested in them because they teach you something new or propose something new.''

Says Turnage, ``Ansel, like almost all artists, they always like the last thing they did. But I think and John thinks, and many other curators think his earlier prints were the best. They tended to be smaller, more subtle and more modernist. That was the heart of the show, showing Ansel at his very best, not at his very latest. That couldn't be done until after Ansel's death.''

A life in focus

One of California's most famous citizens, Adams was born in 1902 in San Francisco, where he lived for most of his life. As a youth, he first photographed Yosemite Valley with a Kodak Brownie box camera, and Yosemite became the lifelong subject for which he is best-known.

In 1932, Adams helped establish Group f/64, an affiliation of Bay Area artists, including Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston, committed to promoting photographic expression in a pure, modernist vein. In his later life, Adams became an important educator and proselytizer of photography, America's best-known environmentalist, advocate of the Sierra Club and author of numerous publications on photographic technique.

From a centenary vantage point, it is clear that one of Adams' primary accomplishments was to revise the public's thinking about landscape, and Szarkowski acknowledges that achievement.

``This exhibition is my notion of why we should be grateful to Adams as a 20th-century artist,'' Szarkowski says. ``We're grateful because his work has certainly attuned us to greater or deeper emotional understanding of the experience of the wild world. Adams' pictures demonstrate that even in the great theatrical diorama of Yosemite, the mountains are no more miraculous than a few blades of grass floating on good water. His pictures have enlarged our visceral knowledge of things that we do not understand.

ANSEL ADAMS AT 100

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles.

When: Hours are noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Through May 11.

Tickets: $10 to $15; free for children age 17 and younger. Call [phone] or go to www.lacma.org

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1) ``Aspens, Northern New Mexico,'' 1958

(2) ``Thundercloud, Ellery Lake, High Sierra, California,'' 1934

(3) ``El Capitan, Merced River, Against Sun, Yosemite, California,'' circa 1950

(4) ``Mount Robson, Jasper National Park, Canada,'' 1928