Art: Images of America Before Its Fall

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Pickled in Nostalgia. In the mean time, of course, photography has gone in other, less romantic directions, of which Adams is intolerant. "Whenever I see a picture of a garbage dump," he huffed to a reporter during a New York visit in 1972, "I am not the least bit moved. I have a garbage dump; I could take a photograph of my ash can that would be just as revolting as anything you can get here in Harlem." No won der Adams' ideas about his art seem quite pickled in nostalgia to a generation of younger photographers whose sensibilities are roused by the urban mess, from trash to glitter. Adams' work is criticized for being indifferent to the flow of historical time and documentary "relevance," a recognized exception being the photos he took of Japanese Americans persecuted in the anti-Nisei hysteria during World War II.

But there is one area in which admiration for Adams' work is universal: his command of tonal range on his prints. "The negative is the score," he says, "the print is the performance." Ad ams can do things with a print that are the despair of professional developers: his ability to bring out every nuance of tone within a shadow, gray overlapping black, so that each detail of form is both implicit and simultaneously present, is astounding. The difference of quality be tween an Adams print and one made by a studio from an Adams negative is just as evident as the difference between a first and a tenth edition of an etching. It is the responsiveness of his printing, combined with his long wait at the view finder, that gives Adams' handmade landscapes their unique and poetic clarity. If he is an anachronism, as some crit ics claim, Adams remains the most commanding anachronism in modern camerawork.