OKCMOA members are invited to preview Discovering Ansel Adams before it opens to the public!
5 pm | Reception in the Museum Lobby
6 pm | A Journey of Discovery: My Life with Ansel Adams in the Noble Theater
8 pm | Galleries close
Register today!
FREE for Members, $39.95 for Non-Members
Not a member? Join now at okcmoa.com/membership
ABOUT THE LECTURE | A Journey of Discovery: My Life with Ansel Adams
Curator of Discovering Ansel Adams, Dr. Rebecca Senf will share her decades of experience working with the Ansel Adams Archive at the Center for Creative Photography and how that intimate knowledge of the photographer has led to this distinctive exhibition. She will provide insights about his childhood and career, offer context, and reveal stories about Adams to enrich visitors’ exhibition experience.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr. Rebecca Senf is Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her BA in Art History is from the University of Arizona; her MA and PhD were awarded by Boston University. In 2012, her book Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe was released by the University of California Press; in 2017, her book To Be Thirteen, showcasing the work of Betsy Schneider, was published by Radius Press and Phoenix Art Museum. She has curated fifty exhibitions, including her recent Richard Avedon: Relationships, which was shown in Milan and Palermo, Italy and Rotterdam, in The Netherlands, and has contributed chapters, interviews, and essays to over a dozen publications. Senf is an Ansel Adams scholar, and in 2020 released a book on Adams’s early years called Making a Photographer, co-published by the CCP and Yale University Press, now in a second printing.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Discovering Ansel Adams features over 100 photographs that share Adams’s most celebrated works while revealing aspects of his development that are frequently overlooked. Together with original archival materials from the Center of Creative Photography’s Ansel Adams Archive, these photographs demonstrate how Adams transformed from a fourteen-year-old tourist with a camera into a renowned photographer between 1916 and the 1940s. Along the way, photographic prints from his early visits to the American Southwest, his mountaineering experiences as a young man, and his quest to photograph America’s national parks will enchant visitors.
Photographs in the exhibition span Adams’s entire career, from small, one-of-a-kind prints from his teenage years to a set of mural-sized prints showcasing some of his most famous views. Rare, original archival documents only available from the Center of Creative Photography, including correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, snapshots, personal possessions, book drafts, and photographic working materials, illuminate Adams’s rich life and fascinating experiences. Examples of publications he created explore the ways he made his photographs available to broad audiences throughout his lifetime. Portraits of Adams by other noted photographers, paired with letters and manuscripts in his own words, provide an intimate look at the person behind the camera. Focused sections on his skills as a mountaineer, his experience with the Sierra Club in its formative years, his investment in the art of bookmaking, and commercial endeavors in his beloved Yosemite National Park allow visitors to see Adams as they have never seen him before.
Discovering Ansel Adams is organized by the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, with the support of The Museum Box, and is curated by Ansel Adams scholar and Center for Creative Photography Chief Curator Dr. Rebecca Senf.
