Snow Hummocks at Valley View, Yosemite National Park, California

Print Notes

“Perhaps snow subjects offer the most exasperating problems to be found in all Landscape photography. The photographer is confronted with extremes of tonal value and a minimum of texture (in the snow itself). . . The main difficulty is in the suggestion of white substance. The blank white of the paper is very inadequate, and, no matter how intense the blacks of the image are, unless there is some tone in the whitest part of the snow image there is no life whatever in the picture.” -Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs, p. 416

The photographs in Lots 27 through 31 of this sale were acquired by Bill and Winnie Kinard directly from Ansel Adams in late 1959 or early 1960, and they have remained with the Kinard Family for more than six decades. These photographs are accompanied by a copy of the original typed correspondence with Adams on his early '131 24th Avenue · San Francisco 21, California / Telephone Skyline 1 1282' letterhead.

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Description

Ansel Adams
1902-1984
1949 | Printed 1959-60
Gelatin silver print
Image Size: 17 5/8 x 23 1/8 inches
Location: Sotheby’s ~ Unique ID 564

Provenance

Ansel Adams, 1960 by descent through the family acquired through to Sotheby's Photographs October 5, 2023, Lot 30.

Publications

Ansel Adams, Natural-Light Photography: Basic Photo 4 (New York, 1952), ill. 31, p. 59; Andrea Gray Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs (Boston, 2007), p. 295 (variant).