Event Blog 3

Last week I visited the San Diego Museum of the Photographic Arts. I did my midterm project on the National Parks, and lucky for me, MOPA was doing an exhibit on just that. The exhibit included work from Ansel Adams, Carleton Watkins, and William Henry Jackson. Strewn throughout were old photographs of some of America's best natural landmarks. To emphasize the connection between America's nature and how landmark it is, the exhibit was called America's Cathedrals, except rather than man building a beautiful structure for God, God built beautiful structures for man.



These photographs are a great charaactrization of C.P. Snow's 'Two Cultures". Ansel Adams sometimes waited for weeks in the same location in the national parks to get the shot he wanted. He needed the art of the shot to be just right before he captured it with his technology. By combining his photographic gift with nature, Adams made quite the name for himself all over the country. He needed to balance light exposure, focus, and make sure his contrast was just right in developing. The same can be said for the waterfall, or tornado, or trees he was photographing.


The beauty of the national parks is that they are protected. I saw pictures of the same cliff faces and water falls that I have seen in person this year, and they look the same. We might be taking pictures differently, or painting paintings differently, but the landscapes (hopefully) will always exist.

Works Cited

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Cambridge UP, 1959. Print.

Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo 34.2 (2001): 121-25. Web.