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Lot Essay
This Is The American Earth compels us to ask what is the value of solitude, the cost of freedom, the legacy of our ingenuity—and the peril of our unwavering march from nature.—Foreword
As one of the leading environmentalist organizations in America since its inception in 1892, the Sierra Club of California has continuously championed land conservation and wilderness protection. Among the organization’s milestones is an exhibition mounted in 1955 in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences at the Le Conte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite Valley entitled This Is The American Earth. The mission of the exhibition—and the book of the same title, published in 1960—was beyond an aesthetic celebration of the great West. Rather, as noted by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, the exhibition 'is one of the great statements in the history of conservation.' The exhibition (and the book) offered text by Nancy Newhall and eighty-five photographs—over half of which were by Ansel Adams—and subsequently launched the Exhibit Format Series, which brought environmental consciousness to the very foreground of American politics. For being as poignant and compelling, The New York Times reviewed the exhibition as 'terrifying and beautiful.'
The current lot was among the forty-four prints made by Ansel Adams for the exhibition (see fig. 1). According to Andrea Stillman, Sequoia National Park was one of the photographer’s favorite parts of the Sierra for being remote. The dome-shaped granite monolith that it captures can be hiked on a stairway designed and built by the National Park Service in the 1930s. Under Adams’s lens, however, the stairway is unseen, offering a timeless and romanticized vista of an untouched, uninhabited tract of land.
This is the first time a print of this image has come up for auction. Other prints of this image are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
As one of the leading environmentalist organizations in America since its inception in 1892, the Sierra Club of California has continuously championed land conservation and wilderness protection. Among the organization’s milestones is an exhibition mounted in 1955 in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences at the Le Conte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite Valley entitled This Is The American Earth. The mission of the exhibition—and the book of the same title, published in 1960—was beyond an aesthetic celebration of the great West. Rather, as noted by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, the exhibition 'is one of the great statements in the history of conservation.' The exhibition (and the book) offered text by Nancy Newhall and eighty-five photographs—over half of which were by Ansel Adams—and subsequently launched the Exhibit Format Series, which brought environmental consciousness to the very foreground of American politics. For being as poignant and compelling, The New York Times reviewed the exhibition as 'terrifying and beautiful.'
The current lot was among the forty-four prints made by Ansel Adams for the exhibition (see fig. 1). According to Andrea Stillman, Sequoia National Park was one of the photographer’s favorite parts of the Sierra for being remote. The dome-shaped granite monolith that it captures can be hiked on a stairway designed and built by the National Park Service in the 1930s. Under Adams’s lens, however, the stairway is unseen, offering a timeless and romanticized vista of an untouched, uninhabited tract of land.
This is the first time a print of this image has come up for auction. Other prints of this image are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.