Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941

“We were sailing southward along the highway not far from Española when I glanced to the left and saw an extraordinary situation—an inevitable photograph.” Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Little, Brown and Co., New York, 1989, p. 40.

The present lot is an impressive, mural-size print of Moonrise, Hernandez, NM, arguably Adams’ most celebrated image and one of the most recognizable photographic images of the 20th century. A full moon hangs in the sky above a stucco-clad adobe church on the ancient roadway from Santa Fe to Taos, New Mexico. The fading late-afternoon sunlight gleams off the white wooden crosses in the cemetery to the right of the church and highlights the pockets of snow on the peaks of the Sangre de Christo mountains in the distant background. The picture is one of the great works of American art of the early post-war period, replete with history, grandeur and the promise-laden atmosphere of the American West.

The print on offer measures roughly 30x40 inches, and with a print date of circa 1955, it is also among the earlier prints of the image that the artist made. It is particularly rare in this size and displays a gorgeous and nuanced range of grey tones in the clouds of the sky and in the brush in the foreground. Known as a master printer, Adams combined artistic vision with a profound sense of the possibilities within his craft. While most mural-size prints are unsigned, this present example is rare in that it bears the artist’s signature on the reverse of the mount.

Decades after Moonrise, Hernandez was captured, Adams vividly recalled the circumstances surrounding the picture:

“Driving south along the highway, I observed a fantastic scene as we approached the village of Hernandez. In the east, the moon was rising over distant clouds and snowpeaks, and in the west, the late afternoon sun glanced over a south-flowing cloud bank and blazed a brilliant white upon the crosses in the church cemetery. I steered the station wagon into the deep shoulder along the road and jumped out, scrambling to get my equipment together...With the camera assembled and the image composed and focused, I could not find my Weston exposure meter! Behind me the sun was about to disappear behind the clouds and I was desperate...I had no accurate reading...After the first exposure, I quickly reversed the 8 x 10 film holder to make a duplicate negative...but as I pulled out the slide the sunlight left the crosses and the magical moment was gone forever.”

For Adams, the creative process of making a photograph was not just a matter of clicking the camera shutter in front of an appealing vista. It involved a keen act that he called 'pre-visualization', which allowed him to produce a technically flawless print from the resulting negative. The resulting prints from Adams' negatives were notoriously complex to print, and something he took great pride in.

According to a letter written by Adams’ secretary to the original owner of the work, only three prints in this size were made. The letter confirms the ‘vintage’ nature of this print, noting that the print date was ‘about 1955’. The letter goes on to note that Adams considered this print to be ‘one of the finest prints done in the size’, and that this 30 x 40 inch format is ‘an ideal size’.

Adams’ contributions to the practice of photography are unparalleled. In 1932, he was a founding member of the important f/64 group (participants and promoters of the new West Coast vision of ‘straight photography’) in San Francisco, California and in 1940, a year before he created the negative for Moonrise, Hernandez he helped establish the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, New York, with Beaumont Newhall and David McAlpin. During World War II, Adams acted as the photographic adviser to the United States Army and after the war he continued his personal practice, capturing the American landscape, while mentoring other photographers and conducting workshops around the world.

All the while, Adams was as committed to his activism for the preservation of wilderness as he was to his art. Throughout his career he regularly attended meetings and wrote letters in support of environmental conservation to newspapers, government agencies, politicians and to colleagues from the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society. Of course, his most powerful contribution to this mission are his sublime images of the wild American landscape. His grand presentations of these views were made in the tradition of painters such as Frederic Church and transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

This masterful print of Moonrise, Hernandez embodies Adams’s aesthetic as well as the power of photography to capture the majestic quality of fleeting moments.