In Re Ansel Adams is a 2008 artwork by Terry Flaxton which is held in the permanent collections of the Harris Museum in Preston and the Royal West of England Academy of Art. The piece is a re-constitution of Ansel Adams’ famous photograph of Yosemite, using digital means and for the digital age.
Making the work was a process of interplay between old and new ways of experiencing landscape. Flaxton took a powerful digital camera to Yosemite; with it, he sought “to find a way to recreate the spirit of Ansel Adams' high level photography - but in the cinematographic moving-image realm.” He grappled with the problem of how to reproduce the qualities inherent to a photograph from a plate camera - whose textures and processing flaws add resonance to the communication of the land - using a camera which can make ‘flawless’ reproduction. “How could I reproduce the shock of the detail and resolution of a photograph from a plate camera which if it were imitated by a CMOS sensor today would be of hundreds of megapixels?” The final artwork, shown here as a digital edition, was produced by working with different resolutions and data levels in the studio.