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Adams exhibit stirs memories of great photography

My father, who had been in advertising for…

Photography has always been a great love of mine. From the days when I used to go out to Montauk in the summer with my family to the trips we took up and down the East Coast, there was always a camera on hand.

My father, who had been in advertising for years, developed a good eye for design and subsequently composition. Looking over some family photos recently, I was amazed by how, over the years, the quality of the photos improved.

When I went to sleepaway camp in the Berkshires, I spent a great deal of time in the darkroom, learning how to make a good picture a great one.

At SUNY New Paltz, one of my roommates, X (yes, that’s his name), was a photo major. By this time I had taken a few photojournalism classes and really thought I knew what I was doing. X quickly put any inkling of that to shame with his ability to capture moments and emotion in places I had been and events I had attended that I simply didn’t see with the same eye he has.

Well move over, X. There’s a new photographer in town. Well, actually, quite an old one.

The Museum of Modern Art in Long Island City just opened an exhibit by one of the best scenic photographers of all time — Ansel Adams.

For those not familiar with his work, Adams, who would have turned 101 this year, spent decades in the American West photographing the natural beauty of canyons and mountains that in prehistoric times had originally been underwater.

And what makes his work even more fascinating is that the beauty, tone and texture of American landscapes are conveyed so well in black and white prints.

“Ansel Adams at 100,” the exhibit, has been on tour since it first opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in August 2001. It has since traveled to Chicago, London, Berlin and Los Angeles before it landed in its current and final location — Queens.

Adams spent more than 20 years of his career photographing Yosemite National Park, the location of some of his most majestic prints. The exhibit at MoMA QNS focuses on his work of the 1920s and ’30s in Yosemite.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book bearing the name of the exhibit. It contains 114 tritone and 23 duotone reproductions and is available in the museum’s gift shop.

The exhibit will be up through Nov. 3. The museum, located at 33rd Street and Queens Boulevard, is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday through Monday and Thursday. It is also open Friday from 10 a.m. to 7:45 p.m.

For more information, call 212-708-9400 or go to www.moma.org.