L.A. Way, Ansel-ized

Try as we might, separating art from the real-worldly state of things is a difficult prospect. Art is not an escape route from the outside world, or not entirely. On a visit to the gratifyingly enjoyable exhibition Beyond the Wilderness: Ansel Adams in 1940s Los Angeles, at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, we expect to be bathed in the legendary photographer’s idyllic black-and-white vantage on nature, and, in this case, the urban landscape of Los Angeles. 

But, near the entrance, we are stung by the present-tense relevance of an Adams quote: “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.” The local topicality of that idea hits home where we live, with the Sable-rattling threat of the current White House regime’s “drill, baby, drill” mandate. 

More direct comfort arrives through another Adams quote on the wall: “Sometimes, I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.” 

Westmont’s enticing Adams show is not a primer in the essence of what made the photographer so iconic, although we get a selection of his greatest-hits images in the museum entryway. The larger emphasis of this show veers into a surprising nook in the periphery of his output. Call it “Ansel goes to LA., circa 1940.”

The first photo we see is not by but of Adams, an Al Satterwhite portrait from 1979 showing the legend with wrinkles of wisdom, a warm gaze, and a slightly angled half-grin. In the entry gallery, beloved Adams classics, including definitive images of Yosemite — Half Dome, the valley’s sweep, Mirror Lake, and more — which almost make the flood of Yosemite photography, professional and amateur, seem superfluous.

Also, the show includes his iconic “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941),” with horizontal sweeps of village, gentle mountain contours, and a black, moon-dotted sky consuming more than half the picture plane.

But the real distinguishing point of this show is the lesser-seen urban side of Adams’s work. On assignment from Fortune magazine in 1940, he traveled from his San Francisco home to Los Angeles on the brink of WWII to shoot the burgeoning aviation industry there. While in town, he toured the city’s landmarks and byways, creating a quick impression travelogue — despite uncharacteristically drizzly skies raining on his photographic parade as intended.

The Fortune article, “City of the Angels,” appeared in March 1941, and the bulk of Adams’s 217 L.A. images went into storage for two decades, before he decided they were of great enough interest to revisit and reprint. Many of them now reside in the collection of the Los Angeles Public Library.

In effect, the images are keepers and outtakes taken from a freelance gig he did, outside of the image bank he is most famous for. What emerges is a wandering outsider’s view of pre-war L.A., through a master’s eye, and moving from the designated aviation centers of Lockheed and Douglas factories to other sites and sights around the city.

He brings an artistic flair to even documentary work, as seen in “Lockheed plant in Burbank from Afar, view 3,” a crisply composed study with oncoming train, a strolling man in a fedora, and Lockheed structures in the left flank of the frame. 

Accidental art-making may be behind his image “Bowling tournament at Burbank Bowl, view 9,” in which a bowler, having just launched his ball, looks like a lumpy freeze-framed ballet dancer, in a weirdly dark-lit space. It’s a poetic image amid the sometimes more prosaic documentary shots.

Signage and vernacular architecture obviously caught Adams’s curious eye while in town. The shot “Douglas Company Employees at Lunch” shows lounging workers flanked by an almost-haiku-like sign: “THE BIG FIVE, Everything GOOD, Everything BIG, Everything.” A kitschy landmark gets the Adams touch in “Brown Derby on Wilshire Boulevard, View 1,” with its domed structure mimicking the very name of the joint, The Brown Derby. Another architectural quirk, with the structure imitating the name, is found in his “Pup Café in Venice.” In other signage of note, we find the image truthfully titled “Advertisement for Pat Murphy’s Chicken House.” 

A certain cognitive dissonance, by contemporary standards of what goes where in the urban landscape, is part of the charm in his images of oil derricks in the cityscape, and close to a place of eternal rest, in “Sunnyside Cemetery in Long Beach.” 

Once away from the place of aeronautics business and the workers therein, Adams did occasionally take his eyes off the architectural fabric of the city and train his camera on humanity in action. One image of humble comforts of home, with the deceptively simple picture “Life at Olympic Trailer Court.” An aproned woman knits in the yardlet outside the trailer while a man feeds, teaches and perhaps taunts a small dog on the other side of a small fence. It adds up to a “decisive moment” image we’d expect more from Henri Cartier-Bresson than Adams.

Then again, this exhibition is partly about rerouted expectations and widening the lens of understanding of a photographer’s life and work. Ansel, we thought we knew ye, and now we know more than we thought we knew.
Beyond the Wilderness: Ansel Adams in 1940s Los Angeles is on view at Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art (955 La Paz Rd.) through March 28. See westmont.edu/museum/exhibitions/ansel-adams.