Moonrise kingdom: how Ansel Adams's most famous photograph became a money-spinner

Ansel Adams is widely considered the most popular and the most influential landscape photographer in history. “Few bodies of work transcend the museum and enter the wider public consciousness, but Adams’s has done,” the art book publisher, Phaidon, has observed.

“His black-and-white images of vast, sparse and distant landscapes adorn calendars, fridge magnets and countless other gift shop items. His prints sit in doctors’ surgeries and dentists’ waiting rooms not just in the US but throughout the world.” 

His most famous photograph is Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, taken in about 1941 when he was driving home after a long day’s work and caught sight of the moon hanging low above a desert church and village; the last light of the day reflecting off gravestones in the cemetery like stars.

Quickly, he stopped the car and, with one eye on the light meter he always had to hand, assembled his equipment. No sooner had he clicked the shutter than the light changed and the moment was gone. On such reactions, history is made.

Although the picture was reproduced in magazines at the time, few prints were made: the photography market was primitive and they had little value. It is said Adams sold early prints for as little as $10 each. But as his popularity grew, so did his market.

A turning point came in 1971, when the American art dealer Harry Lunn, who had a major role in kick-starting the fine-art photography market, saw Moonrise for the first time. “This was an extraordinarily graphic, marvellous image,” he said in a 1996 interview. 

In Adams’s first exhibition at Lunn’s Washington DC gallery that year, about 68 prints sold for $150 each. A mural-size version of Moonrise sold for $500, but within 10 years it had rocketed to $71,000 at auction. 

In the interim, Adams had been reprinting vintage landscapes and sharpening their contrast. It is believed that between 1941 and 1974, when he stopped reprinting, he made about 1,300 prints of Moonrise. Indeed, he spent so long in the darkroom on this and other images that he had little time left to keep taking pictures. 

In altering the contrast, the images became more defined. As Christopher Mahoney, the senior photography specialist at Phillips auctioneers who has sold countless Moonrises, says: “By the Seventies, what had been a twilight scene had become a dramatic moonlit nocturnal landscape.” 

Now, Moonrise is one of the most ubiquitous images in the market; a print appears in virtually every major photography auction, none exactly like another. Prices vary according to size, date, provenance and condition, but are led by a vintage print sold in 2006 for $609,600. 

In London this month, Atlas Gallery has recently opened an exhibition of 24 original landscape photographs by Adams. At under ￡10,000 each are several small, slightly yellowing vintage prints from the Twenties, which lack the precision of his more developed work.

Highest price is $95,000 (￡75,000) for a standard size, signed Moonrise print from the Seventies. In terms of original signed prints of this photograph, this is in the lowest range, says Atlas Gallery’s Ben Burdett.

In New York, long-term Adams dealer Robert Mann also has an early Moonrise dating from the Fifties and priced closer to the auction record. The tones are lighter, the image less stage-lit than the later print, but although both are signed, the earlier print will cost several times more.

It’s how you would expect the market to operate, but Adams did say that he thought his later adjustments improved the image.

Either way, it is a useful moment to look back on someone who has been credited with such influence, especially on artist photographers who use digital technology in their work, such as Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth.

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