Greetings and Salutations.
I just visited the Booth Museum of Western art, located, in all places, Cartersville, Georgia. I will say that it is quite a large building, and, not at all what I would have expected to find in Cartersville! Frankly, it had been enough years since I had been through that area that I really still had a mental picture of the place as being a fairly small town. It has grown quite a bit, I have to say! While I do not usually think of Cartersville as being “the Wild West”, and, of course, now it is not, I am reminded that it was not that many years ago that it WAS considered just that! People would make that hard trek across the Smokies into East Tennessee, Georgia, etc, and face the same dangers and difficulties that the folks on the way to California faced!
I was actually not going there for the art about the West, but, because they have a fairly large, traveling exhibit of photographs taken and printed by Ansel Adams. He was one of the early influences in my own photography. His focus on black and white photography and the subtle use of light and darkness in those prints helped me understand the process, and, went a long way towards sharpening my own “Eye” and skills. Alas, we had limited time to work our way through the exhibit, so, it was kind of like standing in front of a firehose of information to walk through it. It is always a great thing to see photographs actually printed by the artist, as that can be the only way to really understand what their vision was. As an easy example, there is his (arguably) most famous photograph : “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” . Many reproductions of this kick up the light on the town itself, to pop it out of the print a bit more. In the print I saw, the important part was the intricate band of clouds across the sky…that was printed quite bright, so it really jumped out. The buildings of the town were much darker, so, while they were the secondary items the eye was drawn to, they WERE secondary.
I would recommend, if at all possible, that if you have any interest in photography as an art, and, the chance, that you do seek out an exhibition of Adam’s work, as it is VERY worth seeing and very educational! If you happen to be close to Cartersville, GA, then consider visiting this exhibit. It runs through 2011/02/10.