Ice on Ellery Lake

More About the Image:

Ice on Ellery Lake is a spectacle of the artist’s modernist traditions. The image was made circa 1959 just before the top of Tioga Pass - the eastern entrance to Yosemite National Park - and a subject that Ansel would have been intimately familiar with as he had passed it numerous times throughout his career. Made in spring or late autumn around mid-morning, this image would have been composed during a quiet moment for the artist, as the normally busy summer thoroughfare, would likely have been void of tourists or commuters, allowing for a great moment of contemplation. A very geometric image of an otherwise organic subject, the rigid lines of the shoreline, and foreground shadow crosshatched by a subalpine willow, all give way to the swooping, dynamic ice form that fills the center of the frame. The brilliantly lit ice highlights its disparateness to the corresponding dark water, which also draws attention to their interconnected but contrasting states in a classic yin and yang symbolic cycle.  The image was one of the five selected for the deluxe version of the artist’s magnum opus of the Sierra, Yosemite and The Range of Light, of which only fifty (per image) were made.