Lot 16
Ansel Adams(1902-1984)Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, California
4 October 2021, 14:00 EDT
New YorkSold for US$50,312.50 inc. premium
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Ansel Adams (1902-1984)
Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, California , 1944
Gelatin silver print, printed 1980, signed and dated '3-83' in pencil on the mount; titled, dated in ink and 'Carmel' credit stamp on the mount verso.
15 x 19 1/2in. (38 x 49.5cm)
mount 22 x 28in (55.9 x 71.1cm
Gelatin silver print, printed 1980, signed and dated '3-83' in pencil on the mount; titled, dated in ink and 'Carmel' credit stamp on the mount verso.
15 x 19 1/2in. (38 x 49.5cm)
mount 22 x 28in (55.9 x 71.1cm
Footnotes
Provenance
From the artist;
to Peter Wensberg, Executive Vice-President and Director of Technical and Industrial Photography, 1971-1980, Polaroid Corporation, Cambridge, MA; and Chairman of the Board of Fellows, The Center for Creative Photography, Arizona,
acquired 1983;
by bequest to the present owner
Literature
Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Little, Brown & Co., 1989, p. 163
Ansel Adams, Yosemite and the Range of Light, Little, Brown & Co., 1992, pl. 99.
Szarkowski, Ansel Adams: Classic Images, Little, Brown & Co., 1999, pl. 38
Szarkowski, Ansel Adams at 100, Little, Brown & Co./ MoMA, New York, 2001, pl. 85
Stillman (ed.), Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs, Little, Brown & Co., 2007, p. 245
Peter C. Wensberg worked at Polaroid Corporation for over 25 years, serving as Senior Vice President of Marketing from 1971-1980, the company's most financially successful years. He worked with a talented group at DDB New York and insisted on developing TV commercials that were "both emotionally appealing, and technically instructive." The results were a memorable series of award winning commercials that both redefined the medium and changed the industry, featuring stars like James Garner, Mariette Hartley, Alan Alda, Laurence Olivier, a young Aly McGraw and many others. He retired from the company two months after Edwin Land's own retirement in 1982.
Peter Wensberg began working with Ansel Adams while at Polaroid, spawning a close personal friendship of some two decades. Perhaps more importantly, it started a serious conversation about how to best safeguard and honor Adams' legacy, archive, and body of work for future generations.
Wensberg subsequently helped establish the new institution formed for this purpose, The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, serving as Chairman of its Board of Fellows for nearly a decade and guiding its growth into a major repository for other giants of the photographic world including Richard Avedon, W. Eugene Smith, Edward Weston, Lola Alvarez Bravo, and Louis Dahl-Wolfe.
The Center's Adams Archive also contains a series of audio tapes of Adams interviewed by Peter Wensberg about his life, his career, and work, done in 1979. Wensberg's love for photography was matched by his love for books, and writing. Early in his career he worked in publishing for Harcourt Brace, and Little Brown. Wensberg's biographical memoir of Edwin H. Land Land's Polaroid, was published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1987.
Peter Wensberg had lifelong ties to organizations that matched his interests in photography, education and writing. In addition to The Center for Creative Photography and the Calderwood Writing Initiative at the Boston Athenaeum, where he was a proprietor, he was a trustee of the MacDowell Colony, Holderness school, and Franklin Pierce College.
