Ansel Adams made only one exposure of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, his most famous photograph, and for decades he could not say when he took it. Astronomers eventually pinned it down from the position of the Moon: 4:49:20 p.m. on November 1, 1941, on a roadside in northern New Mexico.
Eighty-five years on, the picture is one of the most collected images in photography. Adams printed it more than 1,300 times himself.
A few seconds of light
In October 1941 Interior Secretary Harold Ickes hired Adams for six months to photograph federal lands for mural-sized prints in the department’s new museum. Adams set off across the West with his young son Michael and his close friend Cedric Wright.
Driving through the Chama River valley toward Española late that afternoon, they passed the village of Hernandez, where a church and a graveyard full of white crosses sat beneath a rising Moon and snow-covered peaks. Adams pulled over on the shoulder of what is now US 84/US 285.
His later accounts are frantic. He could not find his Weston light meter, so he worked out the exposure from memory, knowing the Moon’s brightness to be 250 candles per square foot. He wrote in his 1983 book Examples that he flipped the film holder for a backup shot, “but as I pulled the darkslide, the sunlight passed from the white crosses; I was a few seconds too late!”
His first published description, at the end of 1942, was much calmer. There he called it “a rather normal photograph of a typical New Mexican landscape.”
How the date was solved
Adams had given the year variously as 1940, 1941 and 1942. His friend Beaumont Newhall, a curator, asked David Elmore of the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, to work it out from the sky.
- First attempt: Elmore tested 36 possible autumn dates from 1941 to 1944 and settled on October 31, 1941, at 4:03 p.m. Adams adopted that date in print.
- The doubt: astronomy writer Dennis di Cicco plugged the same position into his own software and the Moon did not line up.
- The fix: after about ten years of on-and-off work, including a site visit, di Cicco found in 1991 that Adams had stood on the old roadbed, about 50 feet west of Elmore’s spot, and that Elmore’s coordinates for Hernandez were off.
- Result: 4:49:20 p.m. on November 1, 1941, which Elmore accepted.
The correction moved the moment by a day and by 46 minutes and 20 seconds of clock time, all from the angle between a rising Moon and a line of mountain peaks.
From $71,500 to $930,000
Early prints are rare because the original negative was hard to print, and Adams later reworked it with more contrast. A 1948 print sold at auction for $71,500 in 1971, then for $609,600 in 2006. A mural-sized print reached $930,000 in New York in October 2021.
For more on how the sky shapes what a camera sees, read why tiny crescents fill tree shadows during a solar eclipse, or explore another stretch of the American Southwest in our story on Palm Canyon, the largest fan palm oasis in the US. There is more in the Badiyaa history section.
Art historian H. W. Janson summed up the image as “a perfect marriage of straight and pure photography.”
Further reading
Image: Ansel Adams, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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