Exhibition, November 10, 2023 – January 6, 2024
SHARING THE SUBLIME:
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANNE LARSEN AND JOHN SEXTON
The Ansel Adams Gallery | Yosemite National Park, CA
Photography is about connection and communication. It is about an experience that an artist is attempting to share with a greater audience, those of like-mind and at common odds, whether by absurdist irony or realist approach. As Ansel Adams would say, “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs.”
When looking at a photograph by Anne Larsen or John Sexton, I am immediately transported to an emphatic place of quiet light; there is a familiarity and fellowship with each subject regardless of its whereabouts or any notion of its prior existence. The darkest aspen forests glow, ice playfully masquerades as a sea of cumulus clouds, and the dazzling morning sun scattered through fog is shrouding. I feel connected, focused and welcome.
So then why all of this discussion of communication? Such a thing may be undefinable in the temporal sense, but as John Szarkowski has said of fine photographic work, it is akin to great “lines of poetry, [that] grasp us, grips us, and you think: ‘That’s right, that’s true. I don’t know quite what that [poem] means, but whatever it means it’s true.’ And a good picture does something like that.” Embedded in the nature of the medium, from making a negative, to developing it, to sharing and seeing it, to collecting it or revisiting it years later, there is a consistent theme of revelation about what has genuine meaning to oneself.
Emanating from the silver prints by both Anne and John is this tacit notion of truth; of genuine places communicating a sympathetic sublimity that is unique yet somehow universal to us all.
Sharing the Sublime: Photographs by Anne Larsen and John Sexton will open at The Ansel Adams Gallery on November 10th 2023 and run through January 6th 2024. A reception for the artists will be held on December 16th from 11:00am to 2:00pm.
Trees on Hillside, Winter, Yosemite, CA 2012
Original Photograph by Anne Larsen
Signed by the artist.
Gelatin Silver photograph.
Forest in Spring, Happy Isles, Yosemite Valley, CA 1989
Original Photograph by John Sexton.
Signed by the artist.
Gelatin Silver photograph.