The title of this book is the author's in-joke about Ansel Adams photographic ten-part zone system (Wikipedia explains it). Mike Mandel knew Adams and now several decades after his death, in 1984, he wanted to revisit the great photographer's legacy in the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
There is a twist in Manel's photo selection, he only looked at Adams's commercial assignments rather than his famous photos of the American West. The book's eighty-three mono pictures are mostly one to a page, with each spread having a slightly similar image facing each other. Page thirty-four shows a male dancer posing, taken in 1928, facing a female dancer, taken in 1966. Page seventy-eight has a collection of several amateurish road signs in California from 1950 facing a professionally produced Hawaiian shopping centre sign, listing all the retail units and taken in 1958.
Though the photos have interesting compositions and they were, after all, taken by Ansel Adams, their commercial assignment potential just doesn't compare to the visual staying power of his Western natural landscape work.
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