He shot in color because advertisers and corporations liked to present themselves in color, and he liked the money they offered him by 1935, he had a wife and two children to support. Adams judged these (correctly) to be 'aesthetically inconsequential but technically remarkable.' His photographs were among those that sparkled in the station's Kodak Coloramas, gigantic transparencies 18 feet high and 60 feet wide that loomed above the commuting throngs in the main concourse. If you filled up your tank at a Standard Oil gas station in 1947 or 1948, you might have been given an Adams picture-Crater Lake, say, or White Sands-as part of a series the company called 'See Your West.'Īnyone who walked through Grand Central Terminal in New York City around that time may recall seeing Adams' color work in a more imposing form. The Standard Oil Company (or Esso, a precursor of Exxon) purchased reproduction rights to a number of them to promote driving in America. A generous selection of these Kodachromes, most created between 19, appears in a new book, Ansel Adams in Color, revised and expanded from the 1993 edition, with laser scans that might have met even his finicky standards.Īmerican motorists of a certain age may have seen some of the images without knowing they were his. As he traveled the country on commercial assignments or on Guggenheim Fellowships-a project to celebrate the national parks-he often took pictures in color as well as black and white. Still, Adams' misgivings did not prevent him from taking hundreds of color transparencies. Before the 1960s, black-and-white film often actually yielded subtler, less exaggerated pictures of reality. Reproductions in magazines and books could be garish or out of register. Color printing was a crapshoot in the 1940s and '50s.

Kodachrome-the first mass-market color film, introduced in 1935-was so complicated that even Adams, a darkroom wizard, had to rely on labs to develop it. America's regnant Western landscape photographer tried to control every step of picture-making, but for much of his lifetime too many stages of the color process were out of his hands. Yet he once likened working in color to playing an out-of-tune piano. In notes tentatively dated to 1949, he observed that 'color photography is rapidly becoming of major importance.'

Long before his death in 1984 at age 82, he foresaw that this 'beguiling medium' might one day replace his cherished black and white. Ansel Adams never made up his mind about color photography.

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