From The Journal of Artists’ Books
Issue 21, March 2007

Ansel Adams | New Landscapes
Luke Strosnider
Visual Studies Workshop Press, 2006

Review by Clifton Meador

One of the frequent tropes in artists’ books is the one-liner. There doesn’t seem to be general agreement on what that really means, but it is incontestable that some books are the expression of a simple idea – an idea that is easy to explain and esay to make – and that many of these books are unrewarding to reread. But some of these books work like concrete Zen koans, posing questions that reverberate over and over.

Strosnider’s book seems to be a simple idea: Ansel Adams’ photographs reduced to histograms of scans of Adams’ pictures, printed as a big, landscape-format book that simulates a grand photographic album. And this treatment is very funny: one of the few artists’ books that made us laugh out loud when we first saw it, the perfection of the design details creating a seamless simulacra of the dull, grandiose, pointless photobook, which conceals histograms instead of photographs! Titled and presented just like photographs! This book presents a delightful critique of Adams’ work: his zone system, a careful system of controlling contrast and tonal reproduction, often seemed to be the actual point to many of his photographs. There was, of course Adams’ involvement with the majesty of nature, but his photographs tended to seem remarkably similar (at least the late ones), one long vista after another of beautiful natural landscapes, but always in a fantastically well-printed presentation. Strosnider points right at the heart of Adams’ work, at least as understood by the photographic community: his obsessive focus on technique in the form of his cult of the ten-step zone system. Strosnider has transformed these pictures into the graphic display of a census of pixel values of the 256 zones of an eight-bit bitmap image and eliminated all the other, unessential information, like the image.

Which leaves us meditating on the role of craft and obsession, the place for worship of one technology of expression over another, and how tenuously we appreciate art.

And people say there is no such thing as progress.

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