Photos

Sometimes a photograph offers the photographer a gift he didn't expect, a marvelous detail - what the eye longing for meaning sees unconsciously, and includes. How wonderful it is that the decision to take a photograph is mysterious - giving us, like love, more than we bargained for. - John Rosenthal -

If photography is about anything it is the deep surprise of living in the ordinary world. By virtue of walking through the fields and streets of this planet, focusing on the small and the unexpected, conferring attention on the helter-skelter juxtapositions of time and space, the photographer reminds us that the actual world is full of surprise, which is precisely that most people, imprisoned in habit and devoted to the familiar, tend to forget. - John Rosenthal -

As a photographer Ansel Adams saw the natural world simultaneously as itself and as an art object. The realized perfection of many of his images derives from an abstract tendency working itself out in the dimensions of a large, vibrant terrain. This is a very different matter from the mild geometry of brick and shadow or the interminable search for "texture." In his best photographs, landscape and season, earth and light, are revealed in a grand mutuality - a moment so precisely visualized in tone and composition as to be mathematical, and yet so revelatory of earthly beauty as to be something else entirely. - John Rosenthal -