Eclipsing Aestheticism: Western Landscape Photography After Ansel Adams

Abstract

Although Ansel Adams’s (1902-84) photographic legacy remains indisputable in mass culture and among museums and collectors, the nature of that legacy has been in contention among contemporary artists, scholars, and theorists of photography. For some by the end of the 20th century, Adams’s iconic mid-century landscapes of the American West colluded with Cold War-era US western expansion, even as his name was synonymous with aestheticized and depoliticized landscape photography. For their part, contemporary photographers remain beguiled by landscape aesthetics if additionally beset by political and environmental concerns. This essay analyzes some of the tensions in Adams’s ongoing legacy for Western landscape photography, and investigates the transformation of landscape photography by artists who negotiate contemporary political and environmental concerns of the global West.