![]() But I still needed to figure out exactly when. Now I knew roughly where the picture was made. Adams’s black sky was bright blue, set off by chalk-white cliffs. It was thoroughly disorienting to see the location in color. Nearby was Horn Col, a dip in the ridgeline that serves as the boundary between Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks. Jeffcoach pointed me to the nearest named feature on Google maps: Elizabeth Pass. I sent him a link to the photograph, and he replied with pictures of a friend climbing the rocky outcropping. Soon I found Daniel Jeffcoach, a biology instructor at Fresno City College, in Fresno, Calif., and a dedicated hiker, climber and backcountry skier. I posted inquiries on online message boards for Sierra adventurers, asking for help in identifying the location. These later pictures brought him fame in his lifetime, and they remain the ones that are best known today. Eventually he became more concerned with representing the landscape in a way that did not rely on firsthand experience. Rebecca Senf, the chief curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, and the author of a book on Adams’s early career, suggests that he eventually developed a style that was “both widely comprehensible and spectacular.” Initially, she says, Adams was making pictures for fellow climbers and hikers: people who would recognize the strange terrain. Although “High Country Crags and Moon” features a fine gradation of gray in the rock face, the impenetrable shadow in the foreground seems to break Adams’s own rules. The practice, which he formalized around 1939, allows a photographer to balance the tonal values in black-and-white images ranging from the deepest shadows to the brightest highlights. In workshops, instruction books and articles, he emphasized his technique for making perfect exposures, called the Zone System. “It sticks with you,” she said, “for being such an enigma.”Īlthough Adams is perhaps the most famous of all American landscape photographers and is revered for his work in the national parks, he was also well known as a teacher. She’d chosen the image for its otherworldly qualities. Johnson, a curatorial fellow at the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University, in Stanford, Calif., where I teach, planned to include it in an exhibition. When I first saw the photograph, I didn’t recognize it as an Adams. Would dating the negative more precisely explain this long delay? Or was there something at the site in Kings Canyon that would help me understand the photographer’s motivations? Hurrying toward Elizabeth Pass at sunset in the middle of a four-day, 50-mile backpacking trip, I was trying to find out. The negative bore only the vague date of “circa 1935,” but Adams didn’t print the image I saw until 1979. But it was another mystery entirely that compelled me to find the scene in the wild. These visual puzzles had drawn me to the photograph. Only with conscious effort can I see the foreground shadow as an effect of the rising sun. I mistake the dark sky and the silver moon for night every time I look at the picture. But it’s the “sunrise” of the title that’s hardest to reconcile. The landscape itself seems lunar: no trees, no clouds, just emptiness. The moon, just days past full, floats in the darkness above the cliff. I had originally seen Horn Peak in a lesser-known Ansel Adams photograph called “High Country Crags and Moon, Sunrise, Kings Canyon National Park.” In the black-and-white image, a band of toothy gray rock is drawn through the middle of a wide black expanse. But with barely two miles until I reached the top of the trail, it was nowhere to be found. It should have been just north of Elizabeth Pass in California’s Sierra Nevada. I was looking for a rock feature that goes unnamed on most maps, but is known by climbers as Horn Peak. On my left, the white crags of Glacier Ridge were colored by the setting sun. ![]() Ahead of me, an arc of 12,000-foot peaks corralled the top of a canyon.
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