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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 |
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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 20th century.
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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.
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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.
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Subject: News from Alinder Gallery
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Volume 1: Number 2 Almost December 2007
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Dear Clients & Friends,
The addition of four Ansel Adams images to
the gallery inventory this past week called
for another edition of the Newsletter. I
just had to share them with you. Give me a
call or an email if you would like to add
one or more to your collection.
All best, Jim
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Ansel Adams photograph of the Northern
California Coast
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The following three photographs by Ansel Adams
were made at one of his favorite places,
Timber Cove, on the Northern California Coast
about 100 miles north of San Francisco. In
the early 1960s, Ansel was invited by Richard
Clements, the developer of Timber Cove, to
photograph the site. The offer of the Timber
Cove job was an especially attractive one, for
he could photograph his beloved California
landscape. Ansel had enjoyed exploring and
photographing the North Coast
for many years, but to do it and get
paid for it satisfied his Puritan genes. The
pay amounted to his expenses plus a building
lot in the new development. There is also a
street there named "Ansel.".
It is important to note that Ansel had to be
comfortable in a landscape before he could
make effective images. He had to know the
place well. His best pictures were made where
he chose to spend most of his time: Yosemite
and its surrounding Sierra Nevada, Death
Valley, and the Southwestern states of New
Mexico and Arizona. Though he often traveled
back east, spending weeks at a time in the
1940s in New York, it just was not his subject
matter. He visited Europe twice during the
1970s and made many lovely images, but not one
that had the force of his California work.
.Ansel was attracted to tough landscapes, like
the High Sierra. He also felt sympathetic to
the California north coast with its rocky
shoreline and wind-bent trees. While Ansel is
not well-known for his seascapes, these
photographs are a true mirror of this coast on
a sunny day.
Untitled, (Rocks, Lichen and the Pacific)
is a bold composition of worn, flat boulders
delicately embroidered with lichen. We are on
a hillside, looking down and over rocks and
grasses to a grand expanse of gentle ocean,
traced with succeeding points of land on the
right. The light is bright and revealing.
Large 16x20 inch image $6,500.00
The second print, a variant of the image
Storm, Surf, Timber Cove, has a different
vision. The power of the ocean is the subject
matter. The frame is consumed with water and
rocks, no room for even sky. Rather than a
soft day of ease, waves crash before our
eyes. The rocky shoreline has been shattered
by the ocean's force, offering its broken form
to waves spraying with gusto, glinting with
sunlight. Large 16x20 inch image SOLD
Sunset, Timber Cove
again a rare evocative moment for Ansel. The
active surf fills two-thirds of the frame,
then the last rays of sun and above a dramatic
cloud bank. The uneven horizon means no
"green flash" tonight. Time for a glass of
Chardonnay. Large 16x20 inch image $8,500.00
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Ansel Adams photograph on a Hills Bros.
coffee can 1969, excellent condition $1,800.
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Ansel Adams, Winter Morning, Yosemite
Valley, California |
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