The photo that held my attention months ago is Eisenstaedt's, taken a year before he departs permanently from his native Germany to escape Nazi persecution. Dated 1934, it is titled: Examination of a German dancer in the Third Reich. We see a young ballet dancer performing on point to the left of the photo, and to the right is a table with four seated men, one of whom — at the far left — is one Karl Schönherr, President of the German Association of Choir Singers and Dancers. He wears a Swastika armband, and immediately one knows what has happened here. Art has been politicized, just as it had been by the Communists in Soviet Union, and would later be under Mao's Communist China. A simple black and white photo, yet so full of meaning.

Examination of a German Dancer in the Third Reich | At right, note enlarged detail of image of Herr Schönherr in SA Uniform with Swastika armband

Simplicity had been Eisenstaedt's motto, and one can see this in the current exhibit at the AGO where we have been given the opportunity to view 72 of his photographs. These show why he is seen as one of early photojournalism's most important figures. He seemed to know instinctively what made a great story-telling picture. The AGO has a remarkable collection of about 800 of his works, donated anonymously as part of about 20,000 works by various photographers collected by the Klinsky Press Agency.

Adams, too, knew how to capture our attention. He, however, seldom chose the human element, instead focusing his lens on nature and its majesty. His pictorial stories were intended to remind the viewer that nature — the wilderness — needs to be treasured or it will be lost. There are 125 of his photographs in this exhibit, selected from The Lane Collection owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

On the surface the two artists in this exhibition appear to have nothing in common. Yet the most obvious common elements of their work were that they worked with black and white film, and they wanted us to pay attention. Adams, from the very start, produced 'art' photos, while Eisenstaedt would never have admitted to being an artist. Yet he was, unquestionably. Light and shadow often were important elements in his work, as they were in Adams'. Both would sometimes concentrate not on the larger picture, but on the minutiae.

These two men had, perhaps, an easier time with capturing an audience when they worked in the early-to-mid-20th century than their colleagues do now. Today, with the proliferation of images produced for television, by digital cameras, with cell phone cameras, and posted by amateurs and professionals alike on the Internet, images still tell vast stories, but we are less likely to be captured — or enraptured — by them as people were in Adams' and Eisenstaedt's time.

Besides, color has come into the 'picture', giving it a whole new esthetic. In some ways, this element has added something, and yet, it has also taken away. Our minds are not as engaged. Think of a radio play of 50 years ago, before TV took over. It made us use our imagination. We had to paint our own mental scenes. The same applies to black and white (or sepia) photography. We have to add something to it, we have to become part of the process of the story these photographs tell. We have to really look at them, not just glance, as we more or less do now to photographs in color.

Eisenstaedt, who worked for many years for Life Magazine, is most famous for his photograph of a sailor kissing a young woman in Times Square, New York on V-J Day, August 15, 1945. This photo is not part of the AGO's collection as it belongs to the vast Time-Life archives. Like the photograph of the young dancer undergoing a state examination, however, it is a perfect example of knowing when to seize the moment and click the shutter. One of the reasons I seized on this ballet photograph is that some years ago I read an autobiography of the wife of Wieland Wagner, Richard Wagner's grandson. She describes how after a three-year dance course she underwent the state examine, which allowed her to be a choreographer with the blessing of Nazi officialdom. The irony here is that both Gertrud and Wieland Wagner were infused with Nazi iconography, yet when they were allowed to reopen the Bayreuth Festival in 1951, the world acclaimed their visions as new, and original. Nobody, it seems, noticed the influence of the former regime in the choreography, and the design.

There is both humor and foreboding in Eisenstaedt's 1933-34 series of photos taken at Dopolavoro del Urbe in Orlando, Italy. There is something ludicrous about the daughters of Fascist government officials learning to paint pottery while being dressed to the nines, including hats. There is both mockery and a sense of foretelling in another photo from the same establishment. It pictures a wall table with flowers in a silver vase above which hangs a large photo-reproduction of Il Duce (Mussolini) walking along the seashore in his famously exaggerated, cocky stride that today we might call the aggressive Putin-trot.

For many viewers the photographs Eisenstaedt took of Emperor Haile Selassie and his young heir (who never would be) in 1935 may not mean much, but they tell the story of a dying empire. Abyssinia, now known as Ethiopia, was at the time the oldest Christian monarchy in existence. Mussolini invaded it shortly after, and Selassie became a figure of ridicule in Italy and Germany. Italians produced cruel, racist cartoons about the emperor and his people, and equally mean, racist jokes about him became common in Germany. But the photos made Eisenstaedt's international reputation. Consequently, as the noose tightened ever more around the 'free press' in Germany, and as Germans of Jewish faith had fewer and fewer options, that reputation helped him to gain work when he arrived in New York later that year. He became a US citizen in 1942.

Even seemingly innocuous pictures from 1930, such as the little girl in a 'voting booth', intended to make children aware of their future duties in a democratic state, or the series of shots taken of Berlin's largest bakery, titled 'Baking for the Population' (at left), and the photo, 'Sunday Visit to Rococo's Alte Apotheke (Old Pharmacy)', offer up the peculiarities of a people. The 1933 picture of a group of elderly men in the National School for Coachmen in Berlin has a sense of humour about it that still echoes back to his series of shots at the Grand Hotel in St. Moritz (1932). But after that, the emotional tone changes. The 1934 series of shots 'The City of Puppets, Neustadt by Coburg, Germany', take on a political stance. One shows a whole family, from grandfather down to young boy, engaged in making puppet parts that will be clothed in regional costumes as part of Hitler's program to return Germans to the 'roots' of their past. A poster in one of the photos, which translates as 'Peoples and Folk costumes in the German Doll Museum', cannot just advertise its puppets but must be sanctified with the display of a Swastika.

Humor returns to the pictures when Eisenstaedt comes to the USA. There is the series of shots taken in 1936 of young people learning deportment at a school for just such purposes. Don't we wish they still existed? The youngsters' discomfort is palpable, at the same time one has to smile at their tentative steps as boy and girl come together to dance, wearing white gloves, one of his socks up, the other down. A more serious school picture from 1937 is of a group of youngsters at Beverly Hills High School, a co-educational institution. It is unusual in that it features black and white students sharing a classroom. It is really a picture of the future to come.

Eisenstaedt was born in 1898 and died in 1995 at Martha's Vineyard, his home for many decades. His career as a photo-journalist began in 1927. His last official assignment was a family portrait of President Clinton, his wife Hilary and their daughter not long before his death, which is, of course, not part of this exhibition.

Ansel Adams captures the imagination in a very different way from that of Eisenstaedt. Adams is not a photo-journalist, although he worked for years as a commercial photographer for Christmas catalogues to pay the rent, and also for such major clients as IBM and AT&T. He also collaborated with photographer Dorothea Lange on several projects for Time and Fortune magazines. In the 1950s Fortune carried their photo-story about the struggle between family farms and huge conglomerates over water rights in California's San Joaquin Valley. Time carried a study of the Utah Mormons. But the two had worked together before. In 1945 they produced the picture story of the wartime shipyards in Richmond, California for Fortune. Earlier, in 1943 he obtained permission to take pictures of the plight of Japanese Americans in the internment camp at Manzanar. He refused government funding for a resulting book, 'Born Free and Equal', with text by Adams, and published in 1944. It was badly received.

But these are not the pictures that made Adams almost a household word — or at least his photos, household images. His métier was nature, not people, even though there is a very striking photograph in the current exhibition of artists Georgia O'Keefe and Orville Cox (1937) in which the cloud formation is as important visually as the two figures. O'Keefe, of course, was the wife of Alfred Stieglitz, whom he had met in 1933 and who gave him his first one-man show in 1936 at his gallery, An American Place, in New York City. There is also a portrait of Stieglitz (1939) and a few other people, but they are an oddity in this exhibit. The emphasis is on nature, or on human neglect and its effect on nature.

In some ways it is easier to identify with Adams and his need to capture nature with his lens, at least for me. I am not very good in photographing people—for the most part—but have managed to get some favorable response to my nature images, some of which have been published alongside my poetry, and long-ago published newspaper stories.

It is also easy to connect to Adams because one has visited many of the places he has photographed. Who, when visiting Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, hasn't snapped a photograph of the Old Faithful geyser? But, viewed in black and white, the geyser takes on a very different meaning then when seen in color. In Adams' photographs the geyser is not just a natural phenomenon, but also a sculptured monument. And who, when in the Arizona desert hasn't taken a photograph of a Saguaro Cactus? Yet, as seen through Adams' lens in 1942, we must stand in awe of his personal vision of this giant.

Having grown up in Vancouver, Mount Robson, BC's highest mountain at 3,954m (12,972'), is a familiar BC icon and sight. Yet, the view of Robson as taken from Mount Resplendent, which is about 500 meters lower, takes an intimate view that few of us can accomplish. Adams, who took the photo in 1928, called Robson "one of the wild's finest mountains."

When Adams did not focus on the larger picture, he now and then concentrated on the more intimate images of a Rose on Driftwood (1932)(see below left), a Pine Cone and Eucalyptus Leaves (1932), Leaves Floating on a Pool in Sierra Nevada, California in 1935, a Moth resting on Ancient Wood in 1948 in the Interglacial Forest at Glacier Bay National Monument, Alaska, or the abstract pattern of Sodium Sulphite Crystals (1962). These images reveal Adams in a more intimate, lyrical mood.

They also show us why Adams wanted the public to accept photography not just as reproducing a moment seen through a lens, but as art. As such he helped to found in 1940 the first curatorial department devoted to photography as art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1946 he also helped to establish the first academic department at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco to teach photography as a profession. He also wrote several books about the theoretics of photography, which to this day are still valid.

Finally, he preserved for us a view of San Francisco before our perception of the city was forever altered. He focused his lens on the Golden Gate, the entrance to San Francisco, before the Golden Gate Bridge took our view away from nature. Instead of nature, the bridge now focuses us on man's ability to erect huge mechanical structures. In this vein, his 1967 image of the Freeway Interchange, Los Angeles raises a shudder with its resembles to a cluster of snakes intertwining in their nest. Yet, man's ability to build also is represented with some majesty in his shot of the RCA Building, New York City in 1941.

There was obviously a constant struggle in Adams' mind between presenting nature and showing the nature of man. In 1962 he wrote to Lange that he " . . . .resent(ed) being manipulated into a politico-social formula of thought and existence . . . . Is there no way photography can be used to suggest a better life—not just to stress the unfortunate aspects of existence . . . .?"

Born in San Francisco in 1902, he took his first photograph with a Kodak Brownie camera given to  him in 1916 during a family trip to Yosemite, California. The boy who wanted to become a pianist, finally turned his hobby into a life-long occupation in 1930, through the influence of photographic images by Paul Strand. He continued to work as a photographer, conservationist and writer almost to the end of his life in 1984. His work on behalf of nature was honored in 1985 with the naming of an 11,760-foot high peak in the Sierra Nevada as Mount Ansel Adams.