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Today Adams spends far more time on the performance than on the score. He virtually stopped taking pictures for public consumption in 1965, and rarely lifts a lens outside Carmel any more. He can occasionally be seen roaming that photogenic seaside town, a Hasselblad camera in hand, but the images he snaps are put aside for his private collection. Instead of turning out new works, Adams devotes most of his working days to making prints of his earlier ones. He spends about four mornings a week in his darkroom and devotes the afternoons to updating the series of books on photographic technique that he began in 1948.
Adams' entire career represents a sustained, meticulous effort to order the jumble of the natural world, its colors, its erratic tones and shifting values, into a precisely tuned structure of differing grays. Some of his color photographs are beautiful. But they do not have the sense of a convention transformed and upheld that animates his black-and-white prints. The "feel" of Adams' monochrome work is utterly distinctive. It conveys an intense reverence for material: the density and solidity of rocks, the cannonball moon floating in a dark-filtered sky over Half Dome or the New Mexico desert, the way a geyser's spume becomes solid, a thick blade of water. There is an extraordinary distinctness and variety of detail, held in coherence by Adams' sense of tone.
To isolate Adams' contribution to the language of photography, the show at MOMA concentrates on his landscapes. (The only human artifact in the exhibit is a low stone wall in front of an early view of Yosemite Valley.) The show enables one to see Adams' early and late prints from the same negative, and the difference is interesting. The early ones are of ravishing delicacy; they have a subtlety of discrimination, a continuity of surface tone that are essentially lyric. But by middle age, Adams' work began to shift. In the darkroom, he was conducting from the negative's score—pushing the image to its tonal limit, infusing it with a Wagnerian moodiness. The late prints are public declamations, cast in an epic mode. To Adams, change is simply a matter of knowing more. The later the print, in his eyes, the better. "I like my prints full of beans now," he says. "I guess I get more belligerent as I get older."
For MOMA's Szarkowski, the reasons run deeper: "Ansel likes to look simpler than he is. He prints differently because he's a different man. In some contexts he'll admit that printing isn't ultimately a technical problem. But when you say that the changes in his prints imply changes in him, he denies it. He's a more interesting artist than he knows."
To see the range of Adams' achievement as a printmaker is to realize that no photographer in the history of the medium has managed to combine the monumental with the fugitive, the simultaneous awareness of vulnerability and endurance, more concisely. Yet even as they are praising nature, Adams' late prints speak of anxiety. For what is this perfectionism about, if not the desire to refine and perpetuate a sense of paradise that continually slips away, recorded only in silver particles and the memory of old men?—Robert Hughes