Here’s to happy accidents.
Sarah Greenough, senior curator of the photographs at the National Gallery of Art, had anticipated opening an exhibit this fall to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Robert Frank’s seminal photography book “The Americans.” That show had to be delayed until mid-January, leaving the NGA with a hole in its schedule.
Meanwhile, Greenough knew she wanted to show “Southwest from the South Jetty, Clatsop County, Oregon, 1990,” a sequence of six Robert Adams photos the gallery had acquired. But rather than simply organizing an Adams show, “one of those middle-of-the-night epiphanies” prompted her to group the Adams series with two other nature sequences in the gallery’s collection by photographers who had strongly influenced him. “Oceans, Rivers, and Skies,” on view until next spring, is the welcome result of Greenough’s flash of nocturnal inspiration.
Like the Robert Adams series, its two companions here — a 10-image sequence by Alfred Stieglitz from 1922, and a five-photo sequence by Ansel Adams (no relation) from 1940 — explore the narrative form using nature, and time itself, as their subjects. “I just knew instinctively that these three series, when seen together, could make for a really beautiful exhibition,” Greenough remarked at the show’s opening earlier this month.
Any excuse to display the 10 Stieglitz photos is probably a good one. The sequence has not been exhibited in its entirety since 1923.
Steigtlitz shot these photos of clouds after the novelist and critic Waldo Frank had written of Steiglitz’s ability to conjure animated expressions from his portrait subjects. A photographer like Richard Avedon might accept that as a compliment, but Stieglitz was appalled — he thought Frank was effectively accusing him of hypnotizing the people he photographed, including his future wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe.
Stieglitz’s response was to spend the next few years taking pictures of clouds, a subject to which — unlike the celebrities whose portraits he made — no one could accuse him of having extraordinary access. His “Music — A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs” is probably not chronological (no one knows but their maker, who died in 1946) but is instead sequenced like the movements of a symphony. It’s an idea O’Keeffe would carry on in her paintings thereafter.
The NGA holds the most comprehensive collection of Steiglitz photos in the world. In 1949, O’Keeffe and her late husband’s estate donated to the gallery a “key set” of every mounted photo he owned. It includes 331 Steiglitz portraits of O’Keeffe (no word on when that show might be forthcoming) and more than 300 of his cloud studies, known as “Equivalents.”
The third series in “Oceans, Rivers and Skies” is Ansel Adams’s “Surf Series, San Mateo Coast, California.” It dates from a 1940 visit Adams paid to one his mentors, the photographer Brett Weston, at the latter’s home in Carmel, California. As Adams was driving home to San Francisco, he stopped and shot these five striking images looking straight down a sheer cliff face at the Pacific Ocean.
This small show is a fascinating companion piece to “Natural Affinities,” the exhibit of O’Keeffe paintings and Ansel Adams photos currently on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. That show addresses the conversation played out in the two artists’ work even after relations eroded between them for a time following Stieglitz’s death.
The three series that comprise “Oceans, Rivers, and Skies,” meanwhile, remind us that conversations among great artists never end, but only expand to admit new voices down through the decades.
If you go
“Oceans, Rivers, and Skies: Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, and Alfred Stieglitz”
Where: National Gallery of Art, 4th Street and Constitution Avenue NW
When: Through March 15, 2009
Info: Free; 202-737-4215; www.nga.gov
