We're looking at a picture by Ansel Adams that he called Moonrise Hernandez, New Mexico, and he very dramatically and specifically described coming upon this scene. He saw the moon emerging above the clouds, he set up his camera, he waited for it. And according to Adams, he couldn't find his light meter at the moment at which he needed to make the exposure. But knowing what he did about the light of the moon and knowing how he could compensate in the development process for any problems in the negative, he exposed it a certain way. Trying to make sure that not only do you see the moon as a little white dot, but that you can actually see the surface of the moon. And the large negative that he was printing really allowed him to hold this detail in his perfectly exposed negative. It is also a really nice banded composition in that you have the darkness of the sky sort of unfolding into the lightness of the clouds and then rolling toward the viewer with this kind of barren tundra in the foreground. Compositionally, it's very static, it's very serene. And your eye is drawn toward the greatest anomaly in the picture, which is the moon in the sky. And you see in perfect balance the moon, and the graveyard, and the buildings, and the mountains, and the clouds. And I think it's what gives this picture its magic, its chemistry, is that balance between all those elements. MoMA owns not one, but three prints made from this negative. And we can date them with certainty, which is a really valuable thing to be able to do as you trace an artist's engagement or interpretation from the negative they made. Ansel Adams made this picture in 1941, and the first print that the museum acquired came into the collection in 1943. You're struck by this incredibly delicate balance between sky and Earth. And the moon, while it's totally luminous, it's no more luminous than the crosses in the foreground and there aren't extreme blacks or bright whites. But within this middle area of the tonal range, you still get this electric feeling that I think probably captured the way Adams felt about this scene when he happened upon it. The museum also owns a print that came into the collection in 1953, so one decade later. And in that, you see that Adams begins to ramp up the contrast a little bit. So the sky becomes a little darker and the contrast between the moon and the sky becomes greater. And we own a third print that entered the collection in 1964, so again, one decade later. And as you look at this progression of images, you're reminded of how the negative for a photographer is really only the score. It's comparable to the score for an orchestra. So it's subject to different interpretations. And as Adams grew older and as the memory of this scene became perhaps more faint or more distant in time, he amped up the volume of his printing style to compensate, to sort of bring back that feeling of excitement, of electricity that he felt originally. Adams was a master craftsman, and that sort of virtuosic approach to photography, to being able to really pull exactly what detail and the perfect balance that you wanted to find in your print was something that he not only exemplified in his own work, but that he taught to scores of other photographers as well.
