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E-Newsletter Volume 1: Number 1: November 2007

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 Dear Clients and Friends,

 Welcome to the Alinder Gallery Newsletter.  This project started over a year ago, but one thing or another took me away from even publishing our first issue.  Moving the gallery to a larger location was one of the more major events.  If you haven't been here in the past few months here's what it looks like.

 The Alinder Gallery opened in April of 1990 and in the ensuing years has brought the best of creative photography to the Northern California Coast.  While specializing in the photography of Ansel Adams, the gallery exhibits the work of numerous other great image makers.  The gallery is located in the blue Victorian cottage at 39141 South Highway One, Gualala, California and is open during the winter from Thursday through Monday from Noon to Five.

 To prevent the Alinder Gallery Newsletter from being dumped into your junk mail by an overzealous filter, please add our "from" address (alinders@mcn.org) to your address book or internet service providers white list of accepted email.  This is becoming increasingly necessary. Earthlink, among others, has recently made delivery of the newsletter impossible to its users who do not specifically white list us.

 On the other hand, if you would prefer not to receive further issues, just hit the safeunsuscribe button at the end of the newsletter to be instantly removed.

 Our e-mail list is kept confidential; we do not sell it nor share it.  And, finally, a very Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Jim Alinder

Currently on View

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The fall 2007 exhibition currently on view at the Alinder Gallery is of works by "Group f.64" including the celebrated photographers Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Preston Holder, Alma Lavenson, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston.

            The history of art is punctuated by visual revolutions, pronounced in manifestos and organized into associations of young artists, bound together to break from tradition.  In 1932, Group f .64 was established by a group of San Francisco Bay Artists. Meeting informally at Willard Van Dyke's studio/residence at 683 Brockhurst in Oakland were Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham, Sonya Noskowiak, John Paul Edwards and Henry Swift.  Other compatriots who were invited to join in their first exhibition were Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson and Brett Weston.  With four women and seven men, the Group was perhaps the first art movement to comprise a substantial proportion of active women artists.

Their manifesto began, "The name of this Group is derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens.  It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image which is an important element in the work of members of this Group."

            The tradition from which they were seceding was Pictorialism.  Led in the west by William Mortensen and Anne Brigman, the Pictorialists actively achieved painterly effects in their hand-manipulated, soft-focus pictures, often printed on textured papers.  Their rationale was since photographs are machine made they must be altered to be considered a work of art.  Above all, the hand of man must be made apparent. Photography's greatest strength is its ability of producing images with pinpoint sharpness. Pictorialists denied photography's greatest strength.

Group f .64 rebelled; photographs are valid only when "straight" or "pure".  Photographs were to be unaltered, achieved by purely photographic methods, usually beginning with the use of a large view camera.  They used small apertures to give them the greatest sharpness in depth throughout the picture plane.  The f stop 64 is extreme as it is the smallest aperture available on view camera lenses.  Rather than enlargements, they typically made "contact prints", printed on a sheet of glossy printing paper that was directly touching the negative.  This technique gave the photographs an unrivaled clarity, subtle definition and maximum range of tone.

Their ideas were consonant with those of Lloyd Rollins, the director of the M. H. deYoung Memorial Museum in San Francisco, who offered Group f .64 its first exhibition that opened on November 15, 1932.  The Group held other exhibitions over the next several years as the rightness of its cause and its influence grew.

Over the past 75 years Group f .64 has become legendary.  Some of its members went on to other vocations, some continued in photography.  Adams, Weston and Cunningham are recognized as three of the greatest artists of the 20^th century.

  Ansel Adams, Frozen Lake and Cliffs, Sequoia National Park,

California, 1932..9-3/4" x 12-3/8" silver-gelatin print made later

by the artist, Excellent Condition, $27,500.00 Signed

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One of the great photographs that appeared in the 1932 exhibition and also is in our 2007 exhibition is Ansel Adams' Frozen Lake and Cliffs, Sequoia National Park, California, 1932.  Here's how it came to be.

Year in, year out, Ansel kept the four summer weeks of the Sierra Club Outing inviolate: hiking in the mountains with upwards of two hundred comrades. Appointed the official photographer in 1928, he made scores of negatives that provided black and white perspectives of each pass crossed, mountain climbed, meadow camped in and stream forded. After the Outing, members could order as many prints as they liked for three dollars apiece. The Sierra Club provided Ansel with great friendships, and also a ready-made audience to buy his photographs. He built a commercial studio in his home, equipped a darkroom in the basement and drummed up business with one-page ads in the Sierra Club Bulletin.

            Virginia Best, whom he married in 1928, shared his enthusiasm for the Sierra Club and was elected to its board in 1932. Ansel soon took her place, serving from 1934-1971. He proved a fierce warrior, central to many environmental battles for the rest of his life. For most of those years, they both returned to the Outing for vital, spiritual recharging.

On Saturday morning, July 9, 1932, Ansel and Virginia arrived at the Outing's base camp to join their joshing throng of good friends. Ansel had become a leader with responsibilities that included mapping the daily itinerary (very handy for the pictures he wanted to make), director of the evening's entertainment, and keeper of the lost and found - all in addition to his duties as official photographer. Ansel defined his lanky, six-foot frame in black from head to toe: cowboy hat, beard, shirt, jeans and his preferred climbing shoes - high top basketball - all black, all the time. His belt properly sported a handy, tin Sierra Club cup, ever ready for a cup of coffee. Blue-eyed, pink-cheeked Virginia, wrapped her blonde braids about her head, buttoned up a plaid flannel shirt and favored blue denims.

            About three weeks into the trip, Ansel pushed his heavy tripod's legs into the stony shore of Precipice Lake. He attached his 4 x 5-inch view camera securely to his tripod, and stood pondering how to best photograph the scene before him: an icy, partially melted pond backed by a chiseled cliff. Patient of her husband's camera time, Virginia pulled off her jeans and shirt to reveal a simple bathing suit and slipped into the water far enough away to not disturb the portion that intrigued Ansel. The lake was so cold we can probably still hear her gasp.

            Ansel made five exposures, intellectually and physically working his way to what his friend Edward Weston defined as "the strongest way of seeing." From the beginning, he framed the image horizontally and excluded the sky. He chose a moderately long-focus lens, similar in effect to today's telephoto, to flatten the image into an insistent two-dimensions. Each exposure he made grew more abstract, culminating in number 5. This proved to be his ultimate visualization of the subject: a composition of alternating horizontal bands of black, white and gray. Across the top two-thirds of the image lies the fractured cliff-face, described in sharp focus by a symphony of grays. A darker gray tumble of rocks intrudes upon a pale gray pile of age-hardened snow. The lake, half frozen white ice, the other half ice water, is a still, black mirror. No one that day at the lake saw what Ansel visualized.

            That fall Group f.64 was formed. In their landmark exhibition at the de Young in late 1932, Ansel proudly displayed, Frozen Lake and Cliffs, an early intentionally abstract photograph made from nature and an undeniable masterpiece.

Willard Van Dyke, Itinerant Workers, c. 1934, silver-gelatin

print made later by the artist, Excellent Condition Print #8

from the edition of 50.  $2,500.00 Signed

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Willard Van Dyke was central to the founding of Group f.64.  Born December 5, 1906 in Denver, Colorado, it was as a student at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1930's that Willard's photographic career began.  He and his classmate Preston Holder regularly visited Edward Weston in Carmel in an informal apprenticeship with the internationally known Weston.  Willard's place at 683 Brockhurst in Oakland became a gathering place for photographers, where Group f.64 was founded and a serious photography gallery.  In 1935 Willard moved to New York to begin a new career as a documentary filmmaker, believing that film could change the world.  In 1937 he was a cameraman for Pare Lorentz's The River.  With Ralph Steiner founded American Documentary Films, Inc and together they made the seminal film, The City in 1939.  From 1965 to 1974 Willard was the director of the Department of Film at MOMA.  Van Dyke died in 1986.  His wonderful photographs of the1930s, such as Itinerant Workers, are rare.