The story behind Ansel Adams' iconic moon photograph

Saturday 10 November 2018, 20:02 by Michelle Peeters | 5,878 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

The Ansel Adams Gallery made this four-minute video about Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez. A photograph the gallery calls "Adams' most famous and iconic image".

Sales director Brittany Moorefield shares the story behind the photograph while demonstrating an ultra-rare mural-sized print from the early 1970s.

Ansel Adams took the photograph while returning to Santa Fe from northern New Mexico on 1 November 1941.

I observed a fantastic scene as we approached the village of Hernandez, says Adams. The moon was about two days short of full, and the buildings and crosses were illuminated by a soft, diffused sunlight coming through the clouds of a clearing storm.

As he hurried to take the photograph before the light disappeared from the landscape, Adams could not find his light meter. Here is his account of what happened, as told in his 1983 book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs:

I could not find my Weston exposure meter! The situation was desperate: the low sun was following the edge of the clouds in the west, and the shadow would soon dim the white crosses ... I suddenly realised that I knew the brightness of the moon, 250 Candela / ft2 (square foot). Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this value on Zone VII ...

When I realised that when I released the shutter I had an unusual photograph that deserved a duplicate negative, I quickly turned the film holder over, but when I pulled the dark slide, the sunlight went off the white crosses. I was a few seconds too late! The single negative suddenly became precious.

Back in his studio, Adams worked to bring out the extreme contrasts in the image, which were particularly difficult to print, especially in larger sizes.

Over time, Adams reinterpreted the photograph by printing it with a darker and darker sky, bringing out both the moon in the background and the crosses in the foreground.

Adams made more than 1,300 prints of the photograph over the course of his career, and he made a splash in the art world when one sold for an unprecedented 71,500 dollars at the same auction in 1971.

The same print went under the hammer again in 2006 and eventually sold for 609,600 dollars.

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