“‘DESERT – DESERT, DESERT. And a cold wind is blowing and the sky is grey with furious clouds. I feel like an atom off in space between the moon and Spica!!’” Vivienne Toronto said to Andy San Diego, quoting Ansel Adams who wrote that in a letter in 1936 while he was travelling in New Mexico, a man in his thirties, long in t****l to the look of the Southwest, its radiance. And Ansel Adams made the trees and the rocklands emblematic in his photographs, and gave us a gift even he, Ansel Adams, did not know he was giving – how could he? He showed us what the sky of the Southwest looked like, what the rocks and shields and forests and badlands and tablelands and sierras and, yes, Death Valley looked like and how light loved it, before that light was radioactive. He had been born at just the ri
