Richard Misrach

My basic approach to photography depends on the visualization of the final print before exposure is made. I see this very often, and I don’t know whether people realize just exactly what is meant. When you visualize the photograph, it’s not only a matter of seeing it in the mind’s eye, but it’s also and primarily a matter of feeling it.

Richard Misrach

I’m Richard Misrach. I’m a photographer. My mind is on fire. Photography is the way I channel that. And I’m just so grateful after a half century, to be as thrilled and excited about making images as I was when I first started. I didn’t hang out with Ansel anything like that, you know I met him a half dozen times in my life and, you know, we had some nice, cordial conversations.

Richard Misrach

The other day I found these letters that I wrote and that he wrote to me, back and forth, and he was a little critical of my technique, but it was really important. And to me, it’s precious. It’s really, really precious. This was written in 1978: Dear Ansel, it seems to me a medium is in its most alive and vital condition when in the throes of heated dialogue, as photography is now. What is needed is not the affirmation of the concepts and issues of photography that you have so keenly articulated, but rather antithetical positions that can push and stretch the medium still further.

Richard Misrach

You don’t want people making more Ansel Adams pictures. You want people to take your legacy and then build on it. He gave me the tools to go off and just do something completely, radically different. I owe it to him. To be in a show with Ansel is just such an honor and thrill, and I just can’t wait to see it.

Lauren Palmor

What we have here in presenting Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum is an opportunity to celebrate Ansel Adams as a hometown hero and a San Francisco artist. And I think what’s so exciting about the way that we’ve paired Misrach and Ansel Adams in this show is this image that Ansel Adams took in his own backyard of Golden Gate before the bridge is going to be placed in conversation with Misrach’s Golden Gate Bridge series.

Lauren Palmor

Now, Golden Gate Bridge series was made on Misrach’s porch in the Berkeley Hills, and so he too, is intimately familiar with the Golden Gate Bridge.

Richard Misrach

The whole book is simply the same view over and over and over again, but just under different light conditions. And I believe this photograph here is one of the four that’s going to be in the show. I did this over a four-year period, and it really is about kind of scouting out, looking, searching for pictures, chasing clouds, trying to find the right light along the lines of Ansel.

Richard Misrach

The whole point is that I don’t move. I just point at that bridge and then see what happens. And the fact that there could be so many variations, so radical. And this is a good example, but every single picture is different. And then they dialogue with Ansel’s pictures. I think back in the sixties when I first started falling in love with photography, Ansel Adams was part of that.

Richard Misrach

Just the beauty of his prints. The landscapes are glorious. The technical component that he infused with the images. They’re just so exquisite, so beautiful. And that beauty just spoke to me. I tried to emulate that. I tried to learn by creating what he did. I learned technically how to make better pictures, better negatives, and how to print them better.

Lauren Palmor

Ansel Adams had a very attuned sense of what a photo should look like. The innovations he made in darkroom technique are beyond parallel. He was like a conductor in front of an orchestra when he was in the dark room. And that connection with music, I think, is really relevant, as Ansel Adams himself was a musician.

Ansel Adams

The negative could be compared to the composer’s score and the print is a performance. If you have succeeded, you have a negative, which has the basic information required and you can perform it. It doesn’t mean you always have to print it the same way.

Richard Misrach

He elevated the practice of making a beautiful print to part of the art. He was such a perfectionist. I think that quality of his, that striving for photographic perfection, you know in terms of the print, I have that to this day, you know, 50 years later. I print something over and over and over until I get it right. That’s Ansel’s legacy.

Ansel Adams

I first came to Yosemite Valley with my family in 1916, and I have not missed a single year since then. Every year has been an extraordinary experience. And as time goes on, this experience becomes more penetrating and more related to the world at large.

Richard Misrach

My play on in 1988 of photographing the parking lots in Half Dome and the picnic bench in Half Dome and the fire burnt out forest of Half Dome, it’s dialoguing with Ansel going back.

Lauren Palmor

Ansel Adams’s legacy is the fact that his work is so bound in environmentalism and conservation movements.

Richard Misrach

Ansel is kind of an articulate spokesman for environmental injustice way back in the day, and I know that that stuck with me. Ansel showing the beauty of nature, it reminds us whenever we see those pictures of what we have to lose. His pictures were esthetically magnificent, but they also had a message.

Lauren Palmor

His legacy is harnessing the power of photography to make real change in the world.

Ansel Adams

I go out into the world with my camera and I come across something that excites me emotionally, and I see the picture in my mind’s eye. And then I make the photograph and I give it to you as the equivalent of what I saw and felt.