Lost in the Wilderness Ansel Adams in the 1960s

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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.”

Ansel Adams’ Fiat Lux project traverses the dark heart of 60s—1963 to 1968. It’s a sprawling six-year commission from the University of California, the largest project the photographer ever tackled (his personal Yosemite obsession aside). Fiat Lux’s over 7,500 images reveal an artist whose photographic coordinates have become unfixed. We see a great photographer off-balance. We witness an artist swimming hard against the tide of relentless change.