Half Dome, Oak Tree, Autumn

More About the Info:
 

While Ansel Adams was well known for images showing Half Dome as an august monolith, he would also frequently frame the granite mountain in such a way as to purport its (and nature’s) symbolic fragility.  This is one such image.  Made on the northern flanks of Cook’s Meadow, the oak trees in the foreground look like decorated stewards of the valley punctuated by their foliage in full regalia, anthropomorphic branches reaching across to embrace Half Dome.  Ansel was careful to conceal a thoroughfare bisecting the grove of trees in the lower foreground that took guests to the New Government Center, but leaves enough of it visible to acknowledge the inevitable inroads of growing park visitation.  But like his contemporary Edward Weston, Ansel would have insisted, that the scene is merely (and fantastically) an experience, one that he photographed for its pure beauty.  In a letter to Edward Weston in a few years before this image was made, Adams wrote how they both wanted ‘to express with our cameras what cannot be expressed in other ways – to trust our intuition in respect to what is beautiful and significant – to believe that humanity needs the purely aesthetic just as much as it needs the purely material.’  (L pg76)