“Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, CA, 1944,” by Ansel Adams. Via Artnet.

Lange was hired by the War Relocation Authority to document the Japanese internment center in Manzanar, Calif.; her pictures emphasize the dislocation of the detainees. In 1945, while he was shooting at the camp, Adams took the magnificent “Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, From Manzanar, California,” a vast boulder-strewn plain with the backlit mountain in the distance….

In 1961, Lange said about Adams’s taking landscape pictures at the Manzanar Relocation Center: “It was shameful. That’s Ansel. He doesn’t have much sense about these things.” Adams wrote about himself: “I have trained with the dominating thought of art as something almost religious in quality. In fact, it has been the only faith I have known.”

— “A Friendship of Differences,” The Wall Street Journal. Via Susana Raab.

This aspect of Adams, along with his aggressive self-promotion and instances of what some might call “selling out,” like the infamous coffee can incident, are something that aren’t often touched upon by those who invoke his name as a kind of religious incantation or magic spell which somehow embodies all that is either right or ancient (or both) about photography.

Which is not to say that being somewhat amoral, fame-seeking, or capable of persuading people to pay him to do what he loved somehow makes Adams a terrible person or lessens his role in the history of photography. On the contrary, those qualities are integral to his achievement of that role in the first place.

It is useful, however, to remember that photographs occur in a context, and what’s outside the frame may be more than just extra scenery…