Ansel Adams and Chip Thomas: Western Photographers

One West, exalted.

The West of canyons and rushing waterfalls and mountain peaks.

The other West… what would be the best word to describe it?

Erased?

No, it remains, not that erasure wasn’t tried.

Forgotten?

Not to the people who continue calling it home and have for centuries.

Overlooked?

Too kind.

How about abused?

The abused West. The West of Indian reservations and mining.

Both can be seen in Cincinnati of all places as part of the FotoFocus Biennial 2024, a statewide celebration of photography. The exalted West comes by way of Ansel Adams at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Everyone knows him. His sublime, reverential, black-and-white western landscape photos continue defining the genre. The abused West comes through the lens of Chip Thomas at the Contemporary Arts Center. His name and work will be a discovery to most.

The Painted Desert Project

Chip Thomas (b. 1957) first ventured to the Navajo Nation/Dinétah in 1987. He was sent there from back East to fulfill the requirements of a National Health Service Corps scholarship requiring volunteerism in an underserved community. He worked as a physician in Shonto, AZ. Surprisingly, the North Carolina native stayed.

He immediately noticed the poverty. How could anyone not? The lack of running water. About 30% of homes on the Navajo Nation still don’t have indoor plumbing as of 2024. The marginalization of a people; their systemic abuse. Thomas, an African American, grew up in the South during Jim Crow segregation and its immediate aftermath. He’d seen and experienced something like this before.

As a doctor, he noticed diabetes. A plague across America, especially acute in Indigenous communities. Communities known as “food deserts” where access to fresh, high-quality nutrition is scarce. Communities preyed upon by soda companies and fast-food chains pushing their cheap, sweet, high-sugar products. People who have become reliant upon highly processed foods. Garbage.

Over the years, Thomas gained the trust of his patients and the community. He began photographing. He took pictures of the residents, their sheep, and the breathtaking landscape of northeastern Arizona between Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon. Gradually, his photos turned into activism, first taking on the sugar pushers in images like Welcome to Diabetes Country (1989). He photographed amputees, those from whom the disease took limbs.

Chip Thomas, ‘Rayshaun at Cow Springs 1,’ 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

Decades later, he began noticing the cancer, especially among patients of a certain age. That age coincided with working the uranium mines in the Cold War years. The Navajo Nation was the epicenter of uranium mining in America from 1944 through 1986. It continues to be.

Exposure to the radioactive mineral during extraction, exposure from spills and groundwater and airborne contamination, exposure during testing, all contributed to a rash of cancers across the reservation. Native people doing the dirty, dangerous work of mining the material that allowed America to build a nuclear arsenal, bombs tested on Native people in the Southwest and elsewhere.

Same as with diabetes, Thomas had found another monster unleashed upon the Diné from outside to focus his art practice on. Through photos, video, posters, and ephemera, Thomas’ presentation at the Contemporary Arts Center highlights the harm done to the Diné as a result of uranium extraction.

Wanting to do something more than call attention to the abuse of the people and the land, in 2009, working under the street art pseudonym jetsonorama, he began placing billboards of his photographs on abandoned buildings across the region. This was a celebration of Diné people and culture. Beautification.

The idea expanded in 2012 when he initiated the “Painted Desert Project,” inviting street artists from around the world to explore and paint in the desert. The project carries on. “Chip Thomas and the Painted Desert Project” remains on view through January 5, 2025. 

‘Discovering Ansel Adams’

Nothing more can be said about Ansel Adams (1902–1984) than the countless books, articles, exhibitions, and documentaries centered on him already have. The Cincinnati Art Museum’s presentation focuses on the artist’s early career, demonstrating how, between 1916 and the 1940s, Adams developed from a teenage tourist with a camera into the country’s most celebrated photographer. “Discovering Ansel Adams” traces the artist’s professional evolution—sharing his journey from teenage musician to young mountaineer—as he experiences the American Southwest, imagines and learns how to communicate with a new national audience, and undertakes an epic quest to photograph America’s national parks.

Installation view of “Discovering Ansel Adams” at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Provided by the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Visitors will gain insight into Adams’s experiences in Yosemite and with the Sierra Club during his formative years, his early forays in the art of bookmaking, and his commercial endeavors in his beloved Yosemite National Park and elsewhere in the West. These seldom-explored backstories lend new dimensions to the Adams we know, and to his guiding mission to communicate the power and importance of America’s wild places to broad audiences.

The exhibition brings together approximately 80 photographs – familiar, endlessly reproduced images of the Grand Tetons, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite – with unique ephemera including handwritten correspondence, snapshots, personal possessions, and photographic working materials. Featured photographs range from small, one-of-a-kind prints from Adams’s teenage years to jaw-dropping, mural-sized prints of his most iconic views.

All pictures are drawn from the definitive Adams archive at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, including a delightful image of a young Georgia O’Keeffe with a mischievous smile on her face.

“Discovering Ansel Adams” can be seen through January 19, 2025.