Sunday, April 30, 2006 | 7:21 a.m.
What: "Ansel Adams: America"
Where: Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art
When: Wednesday through May 6, 2007
Admission: $15; $12 for students, seniors over 65 and Nevada residents
Information: 693-7871
When the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art opens its Ansel Adams exhibit Wednesday, it will marry two unlikely bedfellows: an environmentalist in love with natural beauty and a neon city that thrives on faux reality.
Adams, a longtime member of the Sierra Club, lobbied on behalf of the environment, hiked and photographed Yosemite National Park and spent considerable time in the Southwest, photographing Death Valley and New Mexico.
But rather than play out the collision of glitter and nature, environmentalists and Adams experts see the union at the Bellagio as a peaceful, symbiotic relationship with an educational bent.
"His photos are really an ambassador for our mission," said Sierra Club spokeswoman Orli Cotel. "I hope that people would come to the Bellagio and be inspired to protect those places."
The exhibit was organized and loaned to the gallery by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, which owns more than 2,500 Adams prints, along with a thick collection of archival material.
The gallery paid no loan fee, but a "financial arrangement" was provided to the Center for Creative Photography, said its director, Douglas Nickel.
He said portions of the exhibit come from a show that Adams curated in the 1970s and considered as the best works from across his career. It combines his early and late works.
"In the late 1920s when he started off, he made relatively modest photographs that were modernist in approach, and tender nature studies," Nickel said. "After World War II, his work became more operatic and that's the work he was best known for."
Other pieces in the exhibit include "Boulder Dam" from 1941, photographs of New Mexico and a 1937 picture of artist Georgia O'Keefe and wrangler Orville Cox.
The nearly 50-photograph show will be accompanied by an archival collection that places Adams' work in context with his life.
It includes a pictorial timeline that begins at Adams' childhood home where he grew up on the dunes in San Francisco (overlooking where the Golden Gate Bridge would be built) to his later years.
There will be darkroom instructions, personal notes, the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President Jimmy Carter, an 8-by-10 camera the artist used and letters, including those to Alfred Stieglitz, with whom Adams had an intense relationship.
"He's probably one of the best documented 20th century artists. He wrote 10 to 15 letters a day," Nickel said. "We have tens of thousands of letters that track his everyday life."
The materials were ideal for Andrea Glimcher, president of the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, which often includes an annex of archival information with single-artist shows.
"It's a very personal exhibition," Glimcher said. "We found that the shows that are the most appealing, in general, are single-artist shows."
The exhibit also discusses some of the techniques the late photographer (and former pianist) used to create his dramatic works, including the techniques he used to capture "what a cloud feels like, what weather would look like."
As far as Las Vegas is concerned, Nickel said, "Adams had a deep love for the Southwest. He was quite attracted, always connected to the region."
Also, Nickel said, "Adams of all photographers was one of the most democratic in his point of view throughout his career. He wanted to share his love of photography with everyone.
"In many ways, Las Vegas is the most democratic city in the world."
archive
