“The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score and the print is the performance.”
~ Ansel Adams
(1902-1984)
“Adams feels deeply about what he sees. He has a reverence for the earth in all its variety, delicacy and strength but he is the absolute reverse of effusive. He sees with such austerity, even severity, that some have mistakenly called him cold. He has an incomparable technical expertness in communicating what he sees and feels and for half a century and more he has gone on making photographs so plainly stamped with his personal artistry that they hardly need his steeple A signature on them. They have taught thousands how to see, they have become household images, they have steadily affirmed life.”
~ Wallace Stegner
(1909-1993)
This is one of Ansel’s greatest images taken towards the latter part of his long and productive life. For some reason he made very few prints of this image during his lifetime so I felt very happy to find this print in truly pristine condition. It has a totally modernist feel to it. He brilliantly captured the interplay of water, sand and sky with the lagoon's stream leading to the ocean and dramatic cloud formation above. The lagoon is located at the Marin Headland just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
