The Romance of Canada 2: Ansel Adams Pays Us a Compliment

Ansel Adams, In The Canadian Rockies (2013)

This is from a letter Adams wrote to Virginia Adams while he was photographing the Canadian Rockies in 1928, which is quoted at the very beginning of this book:

These mountains are breathtaking — utterly different than anything we have seen. The peaks and forests and “tone” fulfill almost every ideal I have had of what “my” mountains could be. The cold ice crashes down tremendous cliffs to the very edge of deep, somber forests. No dust is here — all is snow, ice, clean black rock and mossy earth covered with thick green vegetation — all cool and calm and very strong in the primal aspect. These are the great mountains we dream about.

There speaks the true Romantic voice! Just the choice of words shows how Adams had absorbed the Romantic idea of the natural sublime: the forests are deep and somber, the ice crashes down, the cliffs are tremendous, the rocks clean and black, the vegetation thick and green. Here, in essence, is the idea of Canada as an unspoiled wilderness of breathtaking natural beauty, so different from the mountains Adams has seen before, presumably in the U.S., and presumably rendered less impressive by the fact that they had become more travelled than the remote regions of Canada he visited. The word “primal,” at the culmination of that sentence, suggests that in travelling to Canada, Adams feels almost as if he has travelled back into an earlier period of time when nature was still untamed.

And note the use of the word “ideal”. I don’t like to harp on Plato too much — well, actually I kind of do — but this letter seems to lend itself particularly well to a Platonic interpretation. When Adams speaks of the “ideal” he has had of “what [his] mountains could be,” we enter the territory of the Platonic idea of forms: the “ideal” mountain is essentially the “form” of a mountain, the perfect, idealized concept of “mountain” of which all earthly, actual mountains are an imperfect reflection or imitation. And yet in Canada, Adams has found the ideal; it’s as if he has entered the world of Platonic forms and seen in reality the perfect mountains that until now he has only been able to visualize in his imagination.

Canada here is almost a mythic realm, a place so unspoiled and rich in natural beauty that its mountains cease to be earthly objects and become the perfect forms that fill the artist’s dreams.