New York Times: The works on display at Paris Photo, which closes this Sunday, make a daring argument for photography as art. By Alan Riding. [NYT > Arts]
If photography began escaping the shadow of painting a century ago, decades passed before it was widely recognized as an art unto itself. Today proof of its star status can be found in a four-day international fair called Paris Photo, which closes on Sunday. Clearly, the market for art photography is booming.
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Olson and his collaborator, Russel Doescher, have used time as their jigsaw puzzle before, sifting through heavenly forensic evidence to pinpoint such events as when and where Vincent Van Gough painted his “Starry Skies,” and when Adams shot a photograph of the moon rising over Yosemite’s Half Dome ˜ a photo that has become an icon ˜ and figuring when the heavens would align the same way again.
But Thursday was different, because this time the celestial sleuths came to watch their prediction. Before, they always did the forecasting and stayed at school working while others ogled over their predicted sky scenes.
“It’s almost showtime,” Olson said while perched on a granite slope, his gaze moving between an 11-by-17-inch print of the Adams photograph and the vast horizon on which the replay moment was starting. The shadows took the same shapes as in the photograph. The moon rose.
Hundreds of people trained viewfinders toward the moon. It was a night of hiking boots and tripods and few faces, all the visages blocked by cameras. Some people brought star charts and astronomy books. Others brought their dogs and picnics.
Astronomers have pinned down the exact time and date that renowned photographer Ansel Adams snapped his ethereal picture, “Autumn Moon,” and have determined that the sun, moon and mountains will align in the same positions on Thursday.
Yosemite officials expect a crowd of photographers, astronomers and Adams aficionados will gather atop Glacier Point to relive the scene that Adams captured. The scene repeats every 19 years.
“Autumn Moon: the High Sierra From Glacier Point” depicts a gauzy moon hanging in the darkening sky above the jagged peaks of the Clark Range.
“Autumn Moon, the High Sierra from Glacier Point,” taken by Ansel Adams in Yosemite National Park, is a thrilling view of the American West, featuring a waxing Moon rising over dark, ice-tinged peaks.
But precisely when Adams took the iconic black-and-white picture has never been clear, and dates for it range from the mid to the late 1940s.
A team led by Donald Olson, a professor of physics and astronomy at Southwest Texas State University, claim that the mystery can be resolved.
The linked article includes the details and a copy of the photograph. One interesting fact is that the identification of time, date, and location resulted from the discovery of an original color exposure of the image.
