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ANSEL ADAMS (1902-1984)
Moonrise,Hernandez,New Mexico.
Mural-sized silver print, 28
1
/
4
x37 inches (66.7x94 cm.),
flush mounted. 1941, reprocessed 1948; printed early- to mid-1950s
[200,000/300,000]
From Ansel Adams; to Edwin Land, Co-Founder of the Polaroid Corporation; to Edward Mills
Purcell (winner of the Nobel Prize, 1952); by descent to Dennis and Rosamond Purcell.
Ansel Adams’ position in the pantheon of master photographers is assured by his magisterial
landscape studies, of which
Moonrise, Hernandez
is his most famous and revered photograph.
This photographic print was apparently created during the 1950s, the decade in which it was
gifted by Adams to
Land.Todate, it is the only known print from the 1950s to be offered at a
public auction.
The subject matter of the picture is rich and symbolic, conveying the sense of awe Adams associated
with the natural landscape.And, this particular print also apparently demonstrates Adams’ earliest “re-
interpretation” of the negative, which he reprocessed in 1948 — the same year he began working for
Edwin Land (1909-1991), and a year after Land introduced an instant camera. Later on, Land
encouraged Adams to make mural-size enlargements from his Polaroid negatives, providing further
evidence of the quality of the film.
In 1948 Adams intensified the lower portion of the image area to increase contrast. (Adams had
remarked that it was difficult to craft photographs from the original negative, which is why
vintage prints are so scarce.) After he reprocessed the negative, increasing details in the
foreground, the composition of the image had greater aesthetic dimension and emotional
resonance. In this iteration of
Moonrise,
the dark sky sets off a luminous foreground, in which
the crosses seem to glow from within.The serene, waxing moon has resulted in a scene that was
said “. . . punctuates the meeting of heaven and earth.”
The picture was shot on October 31, 1941, Halloween day, at 4:05 PM, in the afternoon.
Interestingly, Adams could not recall when he actually made the photograph, claiming it was
sometime between 1941-44. (A scientist at the High Altitude Observatory, Boulder, Colorado,
determined the date and time based on the moon’s position in the sky.) However, Adams
proudly recalled the story associated with the picture, which is the stuff of legend. After a
discouraging day in the field with his son and an assistant, Adams was driving home when he
“saw an extraordinary situation—an inevitable photograph! I almost ditched the car and rushed
to set up my 8x10-inch view camera . . . but I could not find my exposure meter! The situation
was desperate: the low sun was trailing the edge of clouds in the west, and shadow would seem
to dim the white crosses.” Adams set his large-format view camera on a tripod on top of his
car. Having pre-visualized the image, he managed to take a single negative before the sun set
and light irrevocably shifted.
The scientist Edward Purcell (1912-1997) developed a close friendship with Edwin H. Land,
whom he met in 1950.They both served on the Science Advisory Committee that began under
President Eisenhower in response to the Soviet Sputnik revelations.There, Purcell chaired the
subcommittee on space; he and Land wrote, with the participation of Frank Bello, formerly of
Fortune magazine, a pamphlet sometimes called the “Space Primer” to educate people about
the possibilities of space exploration. Purcell and Adams met at about this same time and
enjoyed an active friendship as members of a Supper Club, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.