'By keeping to a simple and rather austere style, his prints assume a dignity and beauty which is not generally conveyed by photography' (Joseph N. Le Conte, Sierra Club, Bulletin, 1927)
During the 1920s, as a member of the Sierra Club, Ansel Adams, an accomplished pianist, mountaineer and fledgling photographer, joined the Club's annual midsummer outings to the Sierra - month-long camping trips - as well as making several trips on his own. The intensity of light, vitality and grandeur of the landscape all helped shape Adams' mature photographic style and technique, characterized by the incomparable clarity and vigor of his prints.
Adams took photographs of many regions of the High Sierra - in King's River Canyon; Pate Valley, with its Indian pictographs; Muir Gorge, the pinnacles at the headwaters of King's River, Mount Brewer, The Black Kaweah, Mount Ritter, the Minarets, the area around South Fork of the San Joaquin and Evolution Valley. The best known of the portfolio group is Adams' first masterpiece, Monolith, the Face of Half-Dome, Yosemite.
The portfolio was championed by Albert Bender (to whom Adams later dedicated Portfolio Two, see lot 1050), an insurance broker and philanthropist with a deep commitment to San Francisco's world of arts and letters. Bender admired Adams' work and proposed that he produce one hundred portfolios of eighteen prints, each to sell for fifty dollars. On the morning that the project was born, Bender bought ten portfolios in advance and handed Adams a check for five hundred dollars. While Adams sat 'electrified', Bender sold by phone more than half the edition, even before all of the negatives had been made.
The portfolio was called - at the insistence of the publisher, Grabhorn Press, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. The term 'Parmelian' was a synthetic and meaningless word, made up of bits and pieces of other, 'grander' words, such as 'Parthenon' 'Parnassus' 'amelioration' and 'Pelias and Melisand'. The pretentious title was intended to emphasize the fact that these were not mere photographic prints - a mild embarrassment to Adams for the rest of his life, but perhaps not so embarrassing as the unwonted 's' on the end of 'Sierra'. An entire set is rarely offered at auction.
ANSEL ADAMS (1902-1984)
Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras
成交價 美元 97,000
估價
美元 80,000 – 美元 120,000
估價不包括買家酬金。成交總額為下鎚價加以買家酬金及扣除可適用之費用。
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ANSEL ADAMS (1902-1984)
Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras
成交價 美元 97,000
成交價 美元 97,000