Without his light meter, Ansel Adams guesses the exposure for a moon rising over Hernandez
On November 1, 1941, Ansel Adams stopped beside a highway in Hernandez, New Mexico, and photographed the moon rising over a village, a church and a graveyard of white crosses. He was on a long Western road trip with his son Michael and his friend Cedric Wright, working on a commission from the Interior Department. Adams exposed a single negative at 4:49 p.m., a time pinned down decades later by astronomical analysis. By the time he reached for a duplicate, the light had moved off the crosses.
Adams made the picture on a federal commission: Interior Secretary Harold Ickes hired him to photograph public lands for mural-sized prints in the department's new museum. The frame that outlasted the assignment showed a New Mexico village, its church and its cemetery, and a mural-sized print later sold at Christie's for $930,000.
QWhy are Moonrise prints made before 1970 so scarce?
The negative itself was the problem. Pre-1970 prints are very rare because the original negative is hard to work with, and it resisted easy high-quality printing. Adams eventually remade the negative to heighten its contrast, which made good reprints far more practical. That later negative changed how the image could be reproduced. Early impressions from the original are the ones collectors now treat as scarce. The difficulty traces back to the conditions of the exposure: a single frame, taken in fading light, with the brightness of the moon and the lit crosses held on one sheet of film.
QWhere exactly did Adams set up his camera, and is the spot still there?
Adams worked from the shoulder of the highway at Hernandez, an unincorporated community in northern New Mexico, where US 84 and US 285 run together. The exact position was not on today's road, though. It was alongside the old roadbed, about 50 feet west of the corresponding spot on the modern highway. The village, church and graveyard in the frame sat below him, with snow-covered mountains behind. The road he pulled over on has since been realigned, so the vantage point sits slightly apart from the present pavement.
QHow much did a 1948 Moonrise print gain in value between 1971 and 2006?
One 1948 print sold for $71,500 in 1971, which equals about $568,400 in 2025 dollars. The same print returned to auction in 2006 and sold for $609,600, or about $973,600 in 2025 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, the price rose by roughly $405,000 over those 35 years. Prices have stayed high since. In April 2023, the print once owned by Peter Bunnell sold for $381,000 at a Phillips Photography auction. Bunnell's print brought less than the 2006 sale, a reminder that each impression is priced on its own date and condition.
