Big Island Wildlife Area, Marion County, Ohio

Date: 2011.

Materials: Digital photograph, Epson Ultrachrome Premium Luster print, 20” x 30”

Location at Summa Health:  Dr. Gary B. and Pamela S. Williams Tower on the Akron Campus (141 N. Forge St.), gold neighborhood, ground floor near "E" elevators.

This work was acquired for the Summa Health System — Akron Campus Wayfinding Project. 

About the art and artist:

The Big Island Wildlife Area is located about 5 miles west of Marion, Ohio, and is the largest wetland prairie area in the Buckeye State. In spring and fall, dozens of species of waterfowl and songbirds visit the area during their annual migrations, attracting birdwatchers from around the region. Early and late on sunny winter days, the sun turns the ordinarily brown marshland grasses into gold, as Adams has captured them here. 

This photo, taken just after sunrise when light contrasts are acute, presents us with an emphatically horizontal view, the stands of grasses penetrated by the deep blues of the marsh waters. The horizontals continue, stacked, up to the line of forest in the distance and then to the paler winter sky. The sun picks out the varied textures of the stands of marsh grasses and, in the foreground, at a micro level, creates chiaroscuro that dramatizes the varied heights and angles of stalks and leaves. Fine-tuning the digital file, Adams has saturated the colors of the grasses slightly to make them more golden and heightened their contrast with surroundings. The beholder can alternate between enjoying the restful, expanded distant vista or getting lost in the myriad details of the foreground growth.

Birch Allée, Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens, Akron, Ohio

Date: 1999.

Materials: Film photograph, Epson Ultrachrome Premium Luster Print, 20” x 30”

Location at Summa Health:  Dr. Gary B. and Pamela S. Williams Tower on the Akron Campus (141 N. Forge St.), gold neighborhood, ground floor near "E" elevators.

This work was acquired for the Summa Health System — Akron Campus Wayfinding Project.

This photograph shows the 550-foot-long path, or allée (French term used for such grand garden pathways), at the north end of the manor house on the historic Stan Hywet estate of rubber tire giant F.A. Seiberling.

More than 100 white birches line the allée and create a canopy overhead; they grow from the original root-stock supplied over a century ago by the garden’s architect, Warren Manning. At no time of the year is the light and color in the allée as spectacular as in the fall, when one walks in a tunnel of yellow-gold, punctuated by the white birch trunks on either side and made audible as one swishes through fallen leaves underfoot.

Adams has centered the pathway within the frame so that it is an almost-textbook example of how parallel lines (orthogonals) appear to converge as they recede into the distance, the basic compositional principal of single-point perspective. Here the birches offer not only color punctuation but, in leaning emphatically, as birches tend to, contrast with the strict orthogonals of the path and interrupt the more formal vertical that we tend to expect of trees. 

This photograph was first published in Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens (University of Akron Press, 2000), which was re-issued in a centenary edition in 2015 with photos by Adams and Barney Taxel, text by Steve Love, and forward by John F. Seiberling.

Chair Factory Falls, Lake County, OH,  1990

Materials: digital photograph printed on canvas, wrapped, 30" x 30"

Location at Summa: Barberton Joint Center of Excellence, Nursing Station

About the art:

Ian Adams has a gallery of selected images of waterfalls on his website, so we realize that they are a subject that he likes.  In every piece, the natural thrill of water falling through space onto hard surfaces is heightened by his choice of where he stood to take the photograph.

Adams' viewpoint is almost always located not head-on but at some angle to the falls, such that the water cascades at an angle (often more than one angle); we recognize that compositions with strong diagonals possess inherent dynamism.  Here the falls are shot on a line descending from left to right, but the stream from which they originate, marked on either side by the trees deep in the background, comes down from the opposite side, a zigzag repeated in the falling waters themselves as they drop down closer to us.

Other factors, such as the artist's height above the falls, the quality and source of light at the chosen time of day and features characteristic of the season (such as ice and/or snow), contribute to the energy we feel as a result of his taking that original viewpoint.  Whether Ian Adams took dozens of photos of these falls in an effort to seize the perfect angle and moment, or whether he carefully calculated the effects he wanted and then waited in a chosen spot until all the parts came together, it's worth it to keep in mind the choices that artists always make.  Most often, they edit out those views, those attempts, that don't meet their expectations; we don't see those.

And let's credit Adams for some subtlety here, too, alerted by the few bright fallen leaves in the right foreground. These hint at a less obvious theme: Another week and the ground will be thick with bright, fallen maple leaves, thousands of them, and the trees themselves almost bare. In the image, the "now," we see those trees only in the depths of the composition, distant and small because of how Adams frames the composition.  This might seem paradoxical, since the image was probably taken in October, when northeastern Ohio maples have reached the apex of their golden glory.  But the artist has kept them at bay so that we have to work for the subtext, just intuiting at first: Those few fallen leaves tell us that season has already reached its climax and now has begun to march slowly but inexorably toward winter shutdown ...

The name of the falls (and title of the work) comes from the fact that this was once the site of a chair factory, now burnt down.  Technically, this work reflects a usual practice for Ian Adams: He takes the picture with a large format view camera, using (transparent) film, and then prints it digitally on another material, in this case canvas.

Work title, date:  Japanese Maples, Lake View Cemetery, Cleveland, OH 2015 

Materials and dimensions: Matte print on Epson Exhibition Canvas, 36” x 55”

Location at Summa: Juve Family Behavioral Health Pavilion

About the art and the artist:

Ian Adams has many fans and collectors throughout northeastern Ohio and beyond, and at Summa, anyone who has spent time in any of the patient rooms of the Williams Tower has seen his work.  His images of our distinctive natural world could stand as a catalogue of Ohio's landscapes and light. This large composition focusing on Japanese maples began as a digital photograph that has now been printed on canvas especially formulated to give photographs some of the luster of oil paintings (which are usually painted on canvas).

The image began in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery, a "garden cemetery" founded in 1869 and modeled on garden cemeteries of the XIXth and early XXth centuries in England and France.  Such cemeteries feature landscape vistas, original architecture and sculpture, and carefully designed plantings all meant to enhance the sense of beauty, solemnity, and contemplation that we experience when life -- and death --brings us to such places.  (If you have not yet visited this important Ohio historical site, where President James A. Garfield, among other notables, is interred, it is well worth your making the trip, in any season, for the cemetery offers regular tours, events, and programs throughout the year.)

Ian Adams captures an autumnal moment, his viewpoint high in the branches of a group of Japanese maples such that their nuanced and graded colors, and especially their sinuous interlaced trunks, limbs, and branches, draw us deep into the composition.  At the same time, the calligraphic nature of those tortuous forms floats them back up to the front of the picture plane, squiggles from some cosmic Etch-a-Sketch.  This almost out-of-body experience of abstracted form and subtle hues keeps this photo from becoming just another "Fall Color in Ohio" cliché.

Sacred Lotus, Cleveland Botanical Garden (September 1999) 1999

Materials: digital photograph printed on canvas, wrapped   30" x 30"

Location at Summa: Barberton Joint Center of Excellence, outside of Family Lounge

About the art:

The works of photographer Ian Adams can be found throughout the Summa Health system: In patient rooms in the Williams Tower on the Akron Campus, as part of the Wayfinding system there, and now on the Barberton Campus, in the Joint Center for Excellence.

This particular photograph -- a detailed look from only a few inches above, at a blooming Sacred lotus (Nelumba nucifera) on a lily pad, with surrounding seed head (pod) and leaves -- distinguishes itself from most of the others by this artist for its close-up view.  Nelumba nucifera is commonly called "sacred lotus" in reference to its status in both Hinduism and Buddhism.  Water lilies are rooted in the ground but spend their lives on top of the water in an interesting duality of the classical elements - earth, water, wind, and fire.

Ian Adams spotted this individual plant growing at the Cleveland Botanical Garden in 1999. The variety has North American cousins in the genus Nymphaea, the North American species, the American Lotus, Nelumbo lutea, of which grows in lakes throughout Ohio, where its large, yellow flowers on tall stems bloom in summer. This makes it relevant to Adams, who focuses on and carefully identifies views of Ohio natural locations by name in his photographs. 

Here the large-format camera that the photographer uses really enhances the intensity of our experience of the bright colors, areas of light and shadow, texture and contrast, and the three-dimensional curling of leaves and petals.  Adams then digitizes from the analogue film and prints from the very large files on the material he chooses for the ground (here, canvas).

One more technical note: Artists choose to wrap their canvas -- usually after painting or printing on it -- in order to enhance the sense of scale, the sense that the image continues even beyond the rectangular area occupied by the image (borne by the canvas across stretchers). There is no frame, no "window" that separates us from what we view: We are there, part of its field.

Bole Overlook, Holden Arboretum, Ohio

Date: 2017 and 2019.

Materials: Color digital photograph, printed on Willow Glass.

Location at Summa Health:  Dr. Gary B. and Pamela S. Williams Tower on the Akron Campus (141 N. Forge St.), blue neighborhood, NICU patient rooms on 2nd floor, patient rooms on the 4th and the 6th floors. 

The high viewpoint in this composition is balanced by its horizontal sweep.It is spring and we observe that range of early greens, the contrast of the deep green conifers, and the forest framework of trunks and limbs evident where trees have not yet leafed out.The horizon undulates gently – we are in glacial terrain, after all -- and we can trace the profiles of steeper features near at hand as their curves are mapped by treetops.And within the foreground tangle of branches and vines at left a single white stem – serviceberry? – thrusts itself upward.The photographer may have selected this specific site for that punctuation mark, another sign of the new season.

This digital photo is among those specially selected for new patient rooms in the blue neighborhood on the Summa Health System — Akron Campus, and not just for their meditative content. In this environment, where hygiene is critical, our curator chose digitally produced original works printed on Willow Glass, a super-thin, super-hard glass which can be thoroughly cleaned without degrading the quality of the image. These images list two dates of origin — the first when the original was taken and the second when Adams resized the images to fit proportions necessary for these patient rooms.

Fall Foliage at Triangle Lake State Nature Preserve, Portage County, Ohio

Date: 2003 and 2019.

Materials: Color digital photograph, printed on Willow Glass.

This digital photo is among those specially selected for new patient rooms in the blue neighborhood on the Summa Health System — Akron Campus, and not just for their meditative content. In this environment, where hygiene is critical, our curator chose digitally produced original works printed on Willow Glass, a super-thin, super-hard glass which can be thoroughly cleaned without degrading the quality of the image. These images list two dates of origin — the first when the original was taken and the second when Adams resized the images to fit proportions necessary for these patient rooms.

Salt Fork State Park, Guernsey County, Ohio

Date: 2009.

Materials: Digital photograph, Epson Ultrachrome Premium Luster print, 20” x 30”

Location at Summa Health:  Dr. Gary B. and Pamela S. Williams Tower on the Akron Campus (141 N. Forge St.), gold neighborhood, ground floor near "E" elevators.

This work was acquired for the Summa Health System — Akron Campus Wayfinding Project. 

The hillsides of oak and hickory glow with golden foliage in late fall at Ohio’s largest state park, Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County, Ohio. 

The photographer has created this almost textbook example of reflection of land on water, anchoring us to land with that rocky spit in the lower left foreground. The image becomes more interesting for the narrow band of haze on the water’s far edge, a line of no-reflection that complicates the formula and then invites us deeper into the picture as it recedes at left. The clear blue sky becomes a deeper blue in the lake waters closest to the viewer, aligned with the areas of the distant shoreline above, where the yellows are most intense. These color plays are so dramatic, caught even more subtly in the spit of rocks, that we might overlook the elegant profile of that evergreen, also doubled in aquatic reflection, at the edge of the composition on the left.

These effects are produced by the early hour, with the sun very low and so striking things almost horizontally, which creates drama and also affects the quality of the sunlight. This moment was chosen by the artist for his photo, siting his camera on its tripod in order to capture exactly the same image at different exposure settings that record the highlights of detail and shadow. The result will be, in some sense, hyper-real, more than the human eye can record at a single glance. Adams then combines the multiple images, using widely available software for “post-processing," and balances the whole to most faithfully present his vision. He tells us that much of this post-processing now occurs automatically in your mobile phone (he has also written a book providing instruction in landscape photography for mobile phones).It remains for us to appreciate the effects when an artist takes full control of all his tools, for we do not notice the behind-the-scenes efforts, only their results.

Salt Fork State Park is located east of Cambridge, Ohio, and covers 17,229 acres of land, with a 2,952-acre lake. A hidden gem in the northern section of the park is Hosak’s Cave, a sandstone overhang which is reputed to have sheltered Confederate general John Hunt Morgan and his troops during his famous “Great Raid” into Ohio in 1863, during the Civil War.

Sunflowers, Portage County, Ohio

Date: 1999.

Materials: Film photograph, printed digitally on vinyl wall covering.

Location at Summa Health:  Dr. Gary B. and Pamela S. Williams Tower on the Akron Campus (141 N. Forge St.), gold neighborhood, ground floor near "E" elevators.

This work was acquired for the Summa Health System — Akron Campus Wayfinding Project. 

About the art and artist:

This field of sunflowers was photographed in late summer in Portage County, not too far from Salem, Ohio. Sunflowers are now cultivated for their seeds, which are harvested after the flowers have bloomed and the back of the flower head has turned brown. Adams has caught this packed field at what feels like the height of its growth: Pretty much all the flowers are in full, vibrant bloom (well, you can note a few stragglers here and there, not yet open). And he has selected a viewpoint slightly above the field but focusing downward, to dive in for this shot and so deprive us of horizon line or anything else that might minimize the feeling of being immersed in these tall, big-headed plants. This immersive effect is enhanced by the scale at which this image is printed on vinyl for this particular location, and by the height at which it is displayed, along a busy Summa walkway. At street level, so-to-speak, we can almost read those sunflowers as a crowd of fellow pedestrians or onlookers …

Who (pretty much) all face in the same direction … (do you get the feeling that you’re being observed?)

To explain: The Italian name for sunflower is girasole or “turn to the sun,” referring to heliotropism, the property of immature sunflowers to turn their faces toward the sun. This field bears witness to that trait, where the large, darkening centers of the flower are like faces surrounded by yellow crowns, all following the sun, and here on the Summa walkway, now accompanying you as you pass by. In translating the original film photograph into digital format, Adams tells us, he adjusted the brightness and color saturation to ensure that the highlights, mid-tones, and shadows would all correspond to the limited tonal range of the film original. This digital file was then sent to the design firm for final printing on vinyl, where additional fine-tuning may have been required to allow for the large-format printer on which this large-scale photo was finally printed.

Sunflowers are native to North America and were an important food to American Indians. Then the Spanish, in the 15th Century, took sunflowers back with them to Europe, where they were a great hit and widely grown as exotic specimens. Eventually, Russians discovered sunflowers’ commercial value for producing seeds and cultivated them on scale. Now farms like this one in nearby Portage County produce sunflowers solely for their seeds — which have a wide range of uses, from oil-making to human and animal consumption — while, as a side effect, we can enjoy them as they grow in joyous abundance, as celebrated in this delightful photo.

Sunrise, The Wilds, Muskingum County, Ohio

Date: 1999.

Materials: Color digital photograph, printed on Willow Glass.

Tinker’s Creek Scenic Overlook, Bedford Reservation, Cleveland Metroparks

Date: 2008.

Materials: Digital photograph, Epson Ultrachrome Premium Luster print, 20” x 30”

Location at Summa Health:  Dr. Gary B. and Pamela S. Williams Tower on the Akron Campus (141 N. Forge St.), gold neighborhood, ground floor near "E" elevators.

This work was acquired for the Summa Health System — Akron Campus Wayfinding Project.

About the art and artist:

Morning mist drapes the hillsides in late fall above the Tinker’s Creek Gorge at Bedford Reservation in the Cleveland Metroparks, about a dozen miles as the crow flies from Public Square in downtown Cleveland. Tinker’s Creek is the largest tributary of the Cuyahoga River and is named for Joseph Tinker, principal boatman for the survey crew of Moses Cleaveland. 

The overlook here affords a high viewpoint often favored by Adams, who also chose a high viewpoint for several other vistas featured in individual patient rooms on the Summa Health System — Akron Campus. He chose this early-morning moment when the sun’s angle makes for the greatest perceived variation in the layers of mist that fill the low-lying reaches of Tinker’s Creek Gorge. As the gorge follows the winding creek into the distance, it (or better, its image here) becomes an example of what painters learn about aerial perspective, by which more distant features grow less distinct and lose color definition. This is the physical and optical result of the growing amount of atmosphere intruding between them and the beholder: The heavier moisture content of the morning mist here heighten this effect.

The in-and-out course of Tinker’s Creek also yields contrasts between the western banks, which catch the morning sun and vibrate with fall color, and the darker, mist-filled eastern banks, deep in shadow because of the raking angle of the sun.Adams deliberately chose this moment for his photo and then has adjusted, digitally, the tonality and contrast in the image in order to emphasize the fog, which becomes the protagonist of the image. Sunlight and shadow create profiles that are almost like flat stage-sets receding in alternation into the distance, while allowing individual trees in the foreground and at left to stand out in their full autumnal glory (as well as that one tree thrusting its bare branches in profile, just above center). Ohio’s landscapes are understatedly dramatic and nonetheless breathtaking, as Adams reminds us here.