Ansel Adams’ photo in Silverton

Silverton, Colorado, is what a person interested in light dreams about. Ansel Adams knew this, as evidenced in the photo above he took in the summer of 1951. I don’t know how to describe this, but a watercolorist or photographer knows what I mean by this. If you were to have stopped by Andy Darr’s Silver San Juan gallery several years ago and asked him why he is here, listen to what he says about light and how he paints skies, especially capturing what one feels in Silverton. Better yet, look at Ansel Adams’s photos of Silverton and the mountain west from 1948 to 1954. The most often discussed photo locally is one he made in 1951 while in an alley behind Reese street. Reportedly Adams was watching the phenomena of alpenglow swirl around Kendal one evening. Still, the timeline of an absence of snow on Kendall points to a late August / first week of September moment in the few short weeks that no snow is on Kendall. That photo is not about “alpenglow” but about Silverton. Also, if you notice the shadow lines on the two buildings that frame the photo, you can estimate that the photo was taken in the morning, probably around 10 am, while the sun is to the left of Kendall’s peak.

Adams had just come off winning a Guggenheim fellowship which he used to travel around the mountain west taking photographs; the work was so phenomenal the foundation renewed it for another year in 1949. Adams exhibited the Silverton photo in 1955 when Adams and Nancy Newhall organized an exhibit at the Le Conte Lodge called “This Is the American Earth.” Ansel described it as the first endeavor of its kind to relate to conservation at “both the sociological and esthetic level.” The exhibit was circulated in the United States by the Smithsonian Institution Below is a duo of photos from the Adams foundation of the image made in Silverton compared to one Evan Russell took 60 years later.