When is the last time your refreshed the art on your walls? Are you still displaying the artwork you bought at the college bookstore thirty years ago?
I’ve been come hyper sensitive to seeing Ansel Adams posters lately. I see an Adams at my wife’s college roommates guest room. I saw one in my son’s high school art teacher’s room and recently I saw one at my attorney’s office. We are closing on a house we are selling and were in the same room we were in about eight years ago. On the wall was the same framed poster of Ansel Adams Half Dome. I said “I bet that poster has been on the wall since 1986!” because that is when they were popular, in the mid-1980s.
I graduated high school in 1984 and college in 1988. During this time Ansel Adams started reaching into the realm of pop culture after a a major retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974 and later the release of his work in affordable book and poster form. According to a biography of his career, Adams didn’t make a lot of money on is photographic work until later in his career when one of his students persuaded him to release his work in book and poster format. In 1979, “Yosemite and the Range of Light”, book published which was to sell over two hundred thousand copies.
Ansel Adams died in 1984 which only increased the public’s interest in him and his work. Today, reproductions of his images can be found on address books, calendars, folios, screen savers, posters and in more than eighty publications. The Ansel Adams wall calendar is a favorite year after year, with over five million copies sold since it was first published in 1983.
Back in the 1980s if you wandered into the college bookstore, the COOP or your local poster shop – Adams work would be there, which brings us today and the dated work we see on people’s walls.
Seeing an Ansel Adams poster on someone’s wall is as reliable as carbon dating.