FRAGILE WATERS

FRAGILE WATERS, features three iconic photographers and environmentalists: Ansel Adams, Ernest H. Brooks II, and Dorothy Kerper Monnelly,. The exhibition is curated by Jeanne Falk Adams, former CEO of the Ansel Adams Gallery.

FRAGILE WATERS has components that are interesting to an audience of all ages. This exhibition is available for travel starting spring 2013, and has potential participants available for symposiums as well as lectures include Dr. Michael Adams (son of Ansel), Jean Michel Cousteau, Ernest H. Brooks II, and Dorothy Kerper Monnelly.

All three photographers have had a life-long involvement with classic black-and-white photography as well as a strong commitment to supporting environmental issues. FRAGILE WATERS is a powerful aesthetic and environmental statement, blending inspiring black and white photographs by three renowned American artists who feel an obvious reverence for nature in general and the marine environment in particular, and know the integrity of place.

Ansel Adams
Photographer, advocate, conservationist, mountaineer, writer, teacher, musician, scientist, innovator, curator - Adams was all of these.  He is renowned and best known for his iconic black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park. Adams "attuned himself more precisely than any photographer before him to a visual understanding of the specific quality of the light that fell on a specific place at a specific moment. For Adams the natural landscape is not a fixed and solid sculpture but an insubstantial image, as transient as the light that continually redefines it.”, wrote John Szarkowski. He shared with delight and persisted in what was important to him, such as preservation of wilderness areas, having photography accepted as a fine art, teaching creative photography, and encouraging others.

Ernest H. Brooks II
Ambassador of the marine environment, photographer, adventurer, diver and educator.  As the son the founder of the internationally renowned Brooks Institute of Photography, Ernie Brooks followed in his father’s footsteps as head of the institute before forging his own path. As a noted professional photographer, Brooks has won international acclaim for underwater photography. In his pursuit of dramatic marine images, he has descended into the treacherous waters beneath the polar icecaps and into the depths of almost every ocean on Earth. His photographic legacy is the evidence that has illustrated the dramatic changes in our oceans, and he himself remains a tremendous voice for oceanic exploration, and through that, the preservation of our marine environment.

Dorothy Kerper Monnelly
No landscape photographer at work today has done more to focus attention on the spectacular beauty of New England’s threatened coastal marshes than Dorothy Kerper Monnelly. Her body of work has helped inspire a growing movement to protect this fine-tuned, biologically rich ecosystem—long maligned as a wasteland—from human encroachment and irreversible damage. For more than 35 years, her life and work has been inextricably tied to the rise and fall of tidal creeks, the seasonal shifts in the marsh’s flora and fauna, and the ever-changing skies illuminating the shifting dunes and prairie-like sweep of spartina alterniflora. For Monnelly, the salt marsh is both artistic muse and spiritual anchor, a place that inspires her work as an artist and grounds her life as a community member, activist, and woman.