Art: Camera v. Brush

The snow-capped spine of the U.S. and the grandeurs of the West must be seen to be believed. This week FORTUNE readers got the next best thing: pictures of western national parks through the eyes of four artists and a photographer. The photographer won.

The artists had done their best. Surrealist Max Ernst contributed a waxy “translation” of Utah’s Bryce Canyon. Jane Berlandina’s abstractions of the Sierra peaks were appropriately lonely and cool, inappropriately pretty. David Fredenthal had taken a pack trip into the gouged, crumpled high country of Glacier National Park. Dong Kingman had made Grand Teton Mountain burst like a cloud-breathing dragon out of the plain, but the mile-deep solidity of its pine-covered ribs had escaped him.

The cold glass eye of Ansel Adams’ camera, however, recorded precisely what it saw. The results helped explain why, since the perfection of photography, artists have come to scorn “naturalism” in painting, and wandered off into the bypaths of impressionism, abstraction and surrealism. When it came to making unbelievable realities believable, the camera had it all over the brush.