All Over Albany

Ansel Adams: Early Works at The Hyde Collection

"Clearing Winter Storm," by Ansel Adams / The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Opening this weekend at The Hyde Collection: Ansel Adams: Early Works, which include 40 of the famous landscape photographer's works. From the exhibit blurbage:

For much of his early adulthood, Adams was torn between a career as a concert pianist versus one in photography; later, he famously likened the photographic negative to a musical score, and the print to the performance. Yet most museum goers are only familiar with the heroic, high- gloss, high-contrast prints that Adams manufactured to order in the 1970s-80s, coinciding with the emergence of the first retail galleries devoted to photography; as performances, these later prints were akin to "brass bands." Much less familiar are the intimate prints, rich in the middle tones - the "chamber music" - that Adams crafted earlier in his career. The present show focuses on the masterful small-scale prints made by Adams from the 1920s into the 1950s. Already in this time period there is quite an evolution of printing style, from the soft-focus, warm-toned, painterly "Parmelian prints" of the 1920s; through the f/64 school of sharp-focused photography that he co-founded with Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham in the 1930s; and, after the War, towards a cooler, higher-contrast printmaking approach.

The Adams exhibit opens Saturday (January 25) The Hyde Collection and runs through April 20.

A visit to the Hyde + a stop at the new Rare Earth Wine Bar in Glens Falls could be a nice day trip.

(Thanks, Paul.)