Ansel Adams: At the Water’s Edge

Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

Through Oct. 8

Photographer Ansel Adams “was more protean and various in his moods than is often acknowledged,” said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. His dramatic Western landscapes are “so sturdily composed, so enduringly right” that he can seem as immovable as the mountains he often glorified. It was thus clever of the Peabody Essex to create a show featuring more than 100 of Adams’s images of water—a subject that inevitably connotes “movement, flux, metamorphosis, and transience.” Clearly, he appreciated water’s many moods. In the “beautiful, mind-stilling” Reflections at Mono Lake, California (1950), he was able to celebrate water’s calming properties and make “inventive use” of its mirroring capacities. He perhaps loved waterfalls most of all. In El Capitan Fall, Yosemite Valley (1952), water spills over a cliff “like incautiously poured champagne, conjuring a triumph of the insubstantial and evanescent over gravity and weight.”

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“Adams certainly photographed water,” but what of it? said Greg Cook in The Boston Phoenix. His strength was capturing the majesty of varied wilderness landscapes, not the lakes or rivers sometimes included among those features. If anything, the narrow theme of the Peabody Essex show yields a “disappointing selection of outtakes from one of the greatest artists of the past century.” Not that breathtaking images have gone missing entirely. With Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park (1937), “we gaze over snowy evergreens to awesome storm clouds roiling between mountain peaks” as the sun breaks through, spotlighting a waterfall. Accompanying text asks you to focus on all the forms of water depicted, but to do so would be to miss the point. “The photo is like the climax of a symphony about the American West—vast and sublime and shot through with nostalgia.”