Lost in the Wilderness Ansel Adams in the 1960s | UCR ARTS
Exhibitions
Ansel Adams lost his way. The great American photographer stood at the summit of his life, renowned, celebrated. Then came the 1960s: the civil rights movement, the counterculture, free love, psychedelics, assassinations, Vietnam War protests, marches, and chaos. Even more traumatically for the country’s preeminent photographer, photography itself changed beneath him. The new generation of 1960s photographers didn’t give a damn about rocks and trees. They rejected the pieties of tradition and the shackles of Adams’ “Zone System.” Photo historian Jonathan Green: “The obsessions of sixties photography were ruthless: alienation, deformity, sterility, insanity, sexuality, bestial and mechanical violence, and obscenity.”