There is dark humor to that design that runs counter to the cover of Zone Eleven. Evidence has an ominous, black dust jacket with the title in white, like a heading on a dossier. The size and horizontal orientation of Zone Eleven echoes that of Evidence, as if they are siblings born forty-four years apart, with divergent personalities. Sweeney/Rubin Ansel Adams Fiat Lux Collection, California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside Benson Roe, Open Heart Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, 1965 Sweeney/Rubin Ansel Adams Fiat Lux Collection, California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside Ansel Adams, Dr. Ansel Adams, Freshmen Reception, University of California, Berkeley, 1966 Mandel had the idea for Zone Eleven, a new book that culls out-of-character Adams pictures, back then, while Adams was still alive (he died in 1984). That book (and exhibition), composed of found photographic oddities culled from governmental and corporate archives, forged an approach to looking at vernacular pictures that wryly reveal commentary when taken out of their official context. This was just a couple of years before Mandel collaborated with Larry Sultan on Evidence, which was published in 1977.

Mike Mandel met Adams in 1975 when the former photographed the latter for Untitled (Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards), Mandel’s witty commentary on the rising status of well-known photographers of the time. There are rarely any humans visible in Adams’s most famous photographs, and so, by extension, it’s easy to think of him simply as a quiet man who communed attentively with nature.

You picture him alone beneath majestic mountains, in the shadow of Half Dome at Yosemite, and looking up at billowy clouds through which light streams down to the rocky terrain of California’s Central Valley. It is difficult to associate Ansel Adams with anything other than sublime, silver-print vistas.

Ansel adams documentary