The Camera Coast, Adams and Weston
Near Carmel, California
This coast did not just draw painters and poets. It drew the two photographers who arguably shaped how the whole nation learned to see the American West. Edward Weston moved to Carmel in nineteen twenty nine and became obsessed with the rocks, kelp, and cypress of nearby Point Lobos, making some of the most celebrated landscape photographs ever taken.
In nineteen thirty eight he settled at Wildcat Hill in the Carmel Highlands. In nineteen thirty two Weston helped found a movement called Group f sixty four, named for the tiny lens opening that keeps everything, foreground to horizon, in perfect crystalline focus. Its members, including a young Ansel Adams, rejected soft, dreamy pictures in favor of sharp, honest, straight photography.
Adams, born in San Francisco in nineteen oh two, would become the most famous nature photographer in America, and in nineteen sixty five he too made his home in the Carmel Highlands, on the same wild shoulder of coast. I believe in beauty, Adams once said, I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate. Between the two of them, Carmel's cypress and granite entered the imagination of the world.
