Eagle Peak and Middle Brother, Winter, Yosemite National Park, California c. 1968 - 1979

Curator: The chill practically radiates off this photograph. Ansel Adams' "Eagle Peak and Middle Brother, Winter, Yosemite National Park, California" from around 1968 to 1979. It's a gelatin-silver print. Editor: It feels like a confrontation with immensity, doesn't it? The dwarfed trees in the foreground against the looming, spectral mountains… There’s an austerity here that evokes ideas about the sublime, and also about humanity's relative insignificance within this vast, uncaring landscape. Curator: Absolutely. Adams, though, was also deeply involved in the burgeoning environmental movement at that time. Consider the Sierra Club, for instance, who benefited from his art to gain leverage in lobbying against industrial development. Editor: How does that activist element intersect, though, with the almost detached aesthetic? I'm not sure I see Adams overtly critiquing systems of power here. The pristine wilderness feels… idealised? Is that at the cost of acknowledging say, the forced displacement of indigenous populations to create these parks? Curator: A fair point. Though there's no explicit commentary on those issues, consider the politics of landscape itself. Photography of places like Yosemite shaped the public perception of the American West, contributing to ideas about national identity, even ideas around manifest destiny. Editor: That's a strong connection. The choice to render it in monochrome also abstracts the landscape, transforming raw nature into almost mythic space, a blank canvas on which national narratives were, and still are, being written. The play of light, and the way the clouds enshroud parts of the peaks – it makes the scene timeless, yet also untouchable, reinforcing, I think, that idea of imposed national space. Curator: Indeed, Adams sought to capture not just what he saw but also his emotional and spiritual experience. Perhaps this search to make Yosemite appear timeless elided more complicated stories around labor, power and access. Editor: This reminds us, as art, or visual culture can be, of these complex relationships to landscape and nature, both shaped by social contexts and ideologies. Curator: Precisely. This photo's icy beauty invites reverence, but also demands we examine whose voices get to shape these images of "natural" perfection.