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The public for fine photographic prints is growing, and prices are soaring (see box). But it can hardly be called a large audience. Most people are immersed in a daily stream of documentary photographs from newspapers, magazines and television. The purpose of these images is information; they are scanned, milked, passed over. From that documentary point of view there is something perverse and excessive in the very idea of paying thousands of dollars for a single photo, a sum which a decade ago would have brought home three or four moderately good Rembrandt etchings.
No living photographer has done more than Adams to establish the difference between the documentary uses of photography and the aesthetic, or, as he prefers to say, "emotional." The landscapes on which his reputation rests are scarcely concerned with documentation at all. There are no people in them. They say nothing about society or history. They contain no news. The world they tell us about is exceedingly remote from ordinary experience. "It is all very beautiful and magical here—a quality which cannot be described," Adams wrote to his friend the photographer Alfred Stieglitz from Painter Georgia O'Keeffe's ranch in New Mexico in 1937. "You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro-and the micro, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago."
This sense of a miraculous, beneficent clarity, of vision ecstatically distributed between the near and the far, has permeated American nature writing from Henry David Thoreau to Carlos Castaneda. It is as central to Adams' photography as it is to O'Keeffe's painting, or further back to the landscapes of Yosemite and Yellowstone painted by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran and their followers in the 19th century. An entire tradition of seeing is inherent in the word wilderness; it is essentially romantic. As Szarkowski has observed, "Adams' pictures are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition . . . It does not seem likely that a photographer of the future will be able to bring to the heroic wild landscape the passion, trust and belief that Adams has brought to it."
The wilderness, for most Americans, is more a fable than a perceived reality. Ecologists and preservationists have made it a moral fable, an emblematic subject drenched in quasi-religious conviction. But this does not make it any less fabulous. The family in the Winnebago, lurching toward Yosemite to be reborn, cannot experience what in the 19th century used to be called the "Great Church of Nature" as it is seen in Adams' photographs: the experience has become culturally impossible. That has also worked to Adams' advantage. By now, his photographs of lakes, boulders, aspens and beetling crags have come to look like icons, the cult images of America's vestigial pantheism.