Alpine Reflections: Ansel Adams's "Monolith" (Hardwear Sessions)

By Cynthia Houng

Over 80 years later, Ansel Adams's "Monolith, The Face of Half Dome" (1927) still has the power to shock.

There it is, that wine-dark sky, the impossibly pure snow, and that supernaturally sharp rock. Nothing in nature could look this way, and still the image feels right. I saw Adams's photograph before I ever saw the real thing. I have never been able to look at Half Dome without thinking of "Monolith."

In a strange way, Adams's photograph gives us a more precise visual experience of the sublime than the object itself ever could. The photograph gives us a concise summary of the alpine experience: the light, the air, the strange sharpness, the darkened sky. Half Dome is immense, possibly infinite (the bottom edge of "Monolith" slices across the cliff bottom, so we never see the rock's edge). We may or may not be able to reach the cliff -- it isn't distant, but the photograph gives us no clear method of crossing the void between the photographer's space (defined by the small snow-covered spit to the right, occupied by a lonely, gnarled tree) and Half Dome. There are no topographic features to facilitate human motion. We might fly, but flight lies in the province of birds -- or gods.

We know, from Adams's writings, that he labored to produce this effect. Reminiscing on "Monolith," Adams recalls that he "knew" he wanted to create an image that would carry "the majesty of the sculptural shape of the Dome in the solemn effect of half sunlight and half shadow." "I saw the photograph," Adams writes, "as a brooding form with deep shadows and a distant sharp white peak against a dark sky."

"Monolith" marks the zenith of the Modernist approach to photography. The image, though romantic, is never sentimental. It is formal, and precise in its attempt to convert the alpine landscape's key characteristics (steepness, mass, light, line) into the photograph medium. There is an edge, too, to "Monolith," an element of emotional darkness, a noir quality, that unsettles, preventing the image from resting too comfortably on its aesthetic appeal.

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In order to photograph Half Dome, Adams and his then-fiancee, Virginia, and two friends, scrambled some 2000 feet (from Happy Isles) to stand on top of the "Diving Board," the 2,000-ft cliff that on the West Shoulder of Half Dome.

It was April, and snow was still on the ground. That snow would provide the necessary contrast in "Monolith," the pure white complement to the rock's rich shadow.

"We started up Le Conte Gully," Adams writes, "under the north cliff of Grizzly Peak. It is quite steep and rough, with some rock faces requiring caution, and ends about 2500 feet above the valley floor. It is not a gully in the ordinary eroded-earth sense of the term, but a sharply pitched rocky cleft that possibly began as a fault or a fracture plan when the granite batholith of the Sierra was elevated."

Adams carried, with him, "a 6.5 x 8.5 in. Korona View camera, two lenses, two filters, a rather heavy wooden tripod, and 12 Wratten Panchromatic glass plates."

To darken the sky, Adams used a "deep red Wratten no. 29 filter." The photograph's incredible clarity derives from Adams's decision to use expose the negative for 5 seconds at f/22. A long exposure time, combined with a small aperture, gave "Monolith" a supernatural sense of clarity. "Monolith" truly is an inhuman vision. No human eye is capable of capturing the scene in the same manner.

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In its insistence upon Half Dome's unique formal qualities, "Monolith" departs from earlier attempts to recast mountain landscapes as alpine versions of familiar "lowland" landscapes. Consider the soothing tableau presented in Carleton Watkins's photograph of Half Dome (c. 1860).

In Watkins's image, Yosemite is less a sublime alpine valley than a comfortable English country park. A shimmering stream weaves between soft banks. Half Dome rises gently out of the vegetation -- a lovely, if excessively spectacular, garden folly. The landscape is beautiful, even striking, but it carries nothing of the edge or urgency present in "Monolith." Watkins gives us a human landscape. The photographer's distant vantage point reduces Half Dome, from a looming, massive sheer cliff, to something much more manageable. We see the cliff's soft shoulder, a possible way to reach the top without scaling that terrifying face.

Compare Watkins's humane perspective with Adams's highly foreshortened image. "Monolith" leads us to believe that Half Dome is an infinite, vertiginous cliff. Half Dome is, in reality, quite steep, but Adams would have us believe that it rises, sheer, without relief. To reach the top, we must invent another form of movement.