Scott Nichols, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate in architecture, once quit a job to make more money to pursue his passion: Buying fine art photographs, especially those in the Group f/64, founded in 1932 by Ansel Adams and six other Bay Area photographers who shared a common Western style of sharply focused and carefully framed images. Besides Adams, the group included Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.
Nichols, a San Anselmo resident who owns a namesake fine art photo gallery in Sonoma, said his expertise centers on those artists and the era in which they lived.
“I love Ansel Adams’ work,” Nichols said during a telephone interview Monday, adding that he shows “a lot of” Adams photos at his gallery but also, from time to time, in Europe and Asia.
Having amassed a significant number of Adams photos over the years, he decided to open a new show of the San Francisco native’s works, “Ansel Adams: An Exhibition in Wine Country,” some 70 prints in all, at Nichols’ gallery just off the plaza in the historic Sonoma County town.
The show, which continues to Oct. 14, comes just as the De Young Museum’s major exhibition of Adams photos, “Ansel Adams in Our Time,” is scheduled to close Sunday at the San Francisco venue.
“I have a lot of Ansel Adams,” said Nichols. “That’s what inspired the show.’
He said the “famous” Ansel Adams photos, among them the epic landscapes of Half Dome and El Capitan in winter in Yosemite National Park and a moonrise in New Mexico — and so many more — “have become difficult to come by.”
But those who wander into his First Street East gallery, perhaps fans of Adams, “want detailed information” about the man who was born in 1902, was educated as a pianist before discovering his passion for photography in 1927, and composed his images in painterly ways that, at the same time, expressed musicality.
Adams, noted Nichols, died in 1984 and was, by that time, the best-known photographer of the modern era. And throughout his life, Adams called the Bay Area, Yosemite and Carmel-by-the-Sea his home.
Some half-dozen Adams photos scheduled for his gallery show sold before the show even opened, said Nichols, underscoring the famed photographer’s cachet. Images spanning his long career as a photographer, including early vintage photographs, images of Yosemite National Park, the desert Southwest, and the Bay Area will be available for viewing or purchase, said Nichols, adding that photos, in small and large formats, range in price from $1,000 to nearly $300,000 but most are priced from $2,500 to $35,000.
What Nichols offers to the casual viewer or buyer “are a lot of uncommon images you wouldn’t see elsewhere,” he said. “That’s what I like — the off-the-beaten path stuff.” The oldest photo in the show includes a 1927 image, “On the Heights,” a photo of Virginia Best, who later married Adams,” and the most recent one stems from 1964, “his really productive period,” noted Nichols, who is a member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers.
In 1927, Adams published “Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras,” photos that imitated Impressionist painting by deemphasizing detail in favor of soft, somewhat mystical effects achieved the darkroom, where Adams excelled as a printmaker.
Nichols said Adams “didn’t get really famous” until he published “Images” in 1974, “a really big coffee table book. There are a lot of things that are in there, places that you just don’t see in the real world.”
Myriad critics have mused on Adams’ legacy, a career that includes not only his photos and writings but also his leadership in the Sierra Club, during which he served as a visionary and voice in the fight to preserve and protect America’s wilderness areas.
To Nichols, Adams also achieved something else, too, by bringing photography “into the realm of fine art. His business manager and the people around him, the publishers elevated photography into a fine art.”
Adams’ overarching message, he added, “is the beauty of the landscape, the monumental presentation of Yosemite and other places like that.”
Of the seven members of the Group f/64, Adams is set apart by “redefining Yosemite photographically,” said Nichols. “Everyone had a different take. I think he was exposing Yosemite to the world — much more than Carleton Watkins,” who photographed Yosemite in the 19th century and died nine years after Adams was born.
As for Adams’ gift for composition, Nichols said, “He was able to present the image without cropping.”
IF YOU GO
What: “Ansel Adams: An Exhibition in Wine Country”
Where: Scott Nichols Gallery,
450 First St. East, suite G, Sonoma
When: Through Oct. 14
Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday to Monday
Phone: (707) 343-1928
Online: www.scottnicholsgallery.com
