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• Born: 20 February 1902
• Birthplace: San Francisco, California
• Died: 22 April 1984
• Best Known As: Nature photographer of the American west

Ansel Adams was a piano player who turned his attention to photography in the 1920s, inspired by the wilderness of central California, especially the area of Yosemite. By the late 1920s he began to earn a living by photography, thanks largely to his association with the Sierra Club. In the 1930s and '40s his reputation grew and he spent a good deal of time in New York, advancing his career as an artist -- and working as a commercial photographer to pay the bills. He wrote many technical works and encouraged museums and colleges to add photography departments, but didn't achieve financial success for his art until late in life. Now Adams' photographs, mostly stark, detailed images of the American southwest, are among the most recognizable in the world.

(b San Francisco, CA, 20 Feb 1902; d Carmel, CA, 22 April 1984). American photographer. He trained as a musician and supported himself by teaching the piano until 1930. He became involved with photography in 1916 when his parents presented him with a Kodak Box Brownie camera during a summer vacation in Yosemite National Park. In 1917-18 he worked part-time in a photo-finishing business. From 1920 to 1927 he served as custodian of the LeConte Memorial in Yosemite, the Sierra Club's headquarters. His duties included leading weekly expeditions through the valley and rims, during which he continued to photograph the landscape. He considered his snapshots of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, taken during the early 1920s, to be a visual diary, the work of an ardent hobbyist. By 1923 he used a 61/2*81/2-inch Korona view camera on his pack trips, and in 1927 he spent an afternoon making one of his most famous images, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park (Chicago, IL, A. Inst.; see fig.). Adams planned his photograph, waited for the exact sunlight he desired and used a red filter to darken the sky against the monumental cliff. He later referred to this image as his 'first true visualization' of the subject, not as it appeared 'in reality but how it felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print' (Ansel Adams: An Autobiography, p. 76).

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was not only a masterful photographic technician but a lifelong conservationist who pleaded for understanding of, and respect for, the natural environment. Although he spent a large part of his career in commercial photography, he is best known for his majestic landscape photographs.

Ansel Easton Adams was born on February 20, 1902, in San Francisco, California, near the Golden Gate Bridge. His father, a successful businessman, sent his son to private, as well as public, schools; beyond such formal education, however, Adams was largely self-taught.

His earliest aspiration was to become a concert pianist, but he turned to photography in the late teens of the century; a trip to Yosemite National Park in 1916, where he made his first amateurish photos, is said to have determined his direction in life. Subsequently, he worked as photo technician for a commercial firm.

He joined the Sierra Club in 1919 and worked as a caretaker in their headquarters in Yosemite Valley. Later in life, from 1936 to 1970, Adams was president of the Sierra Club, one of the many distinguished positions that he held.

Ansel Adams decided to become a full time professional photographer at about the time that some of his work was published in limited edition portfolios, one entitled Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras (1927) and the other, Taos Pueblo (1930), with a text written by Mary Austin.

His first important one-man show was held in San Francisco in 1932 at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Subsequently, he opened the Ansel Adams Gallery for the Arts, taught, lectured, and worked on advertising assignments in the San Francisco area; during the 1930s he also began his extensive publications on the craft of photography, insisting throughout his life on the importance of meticulous craftsmanship. In 1936 Alfred Stieglitz gave Adams a one-man show in his New York gallery, only the second of the work of a young photographer (in 1917 Paul Strand was the first) to be exhibited by Stieglitz.

In 1937 Adams moved to Yosemite Valley close to his major subject and began publishing a stream of superbly produced volumes including Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (1938); Illustrated Guide to Yosemite Valley (1940); Yosemite and the High Sierra (1948); and My Camera in Yosemite Valley (1949).

In 1930 Adams met the venerable Paul Strand while they were working in Taos, New Mexico, and the man and his work had a lasting effect on Adams' approach to photography by shifting his approach from a soft formulation of subjects to a much clearer, harder treatment, so-called "straight photography." This orientation was further reinforced by his association with the shortlived, but influential, group which included Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham and called itself f/64, referring to the lens opening which virtually guarantees distinctness of image.

Throughout much of his early career Adams worked both on commercial assignments and in pursuit of his own vision. He saw no inherent conflict between the two approaches since, as he affirmed, "I don't have any idea that commercialism or professionalism is on one side of the fence and the creative side is on the other. They're both interlocked."

In one sense Ansel Adams' work is an extensive documentation of what is still left of the wilderness, the dwindling untouched segment of the natural environment. Yet to see his work only as documentary is to miss the main point that he tried to make: without a guiding vision, photography is a trivial activity. The finished product, as Adams saw it, must be visualized before it is executed; and he shared with 19th century artists and philosophers the belief that this vision must be embedded within the context of life on earth. Photographs, he believed, are not taken from the environment but are made into something greater than themselves.

During his life, Ansel Adams was criticized for photographing rocks while the world was falling apart; he responded to the criticism by suggesting that "the understanding of the inanimate and animate world of nature will aid in holding the world of man together."

Further Reading

A great deal has been written by and about Ansel Adams; of particular value are two books that are superbly illustrated with his work. Nancy Hewhall's Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light (1963) provides a good analysis of his work and place in the history of photography; and Ansel Adams' book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (1983) is a firsthand account of his working methods. For a deeper understanding of his thinking see his essays "What is good photography?" (1940), "A personal credo" (1944), and "Introduction to Portfolio One" (1948) all in Nathan Lyons, Photographers on Photography (1966). In 1985 Ansel Adams: An Autobiography, written with Mary S. Alinder, was published with 277 illustrations.

For more information on Ansel Adams, visit Britannica.com.

Adams, Ansel (1902-84), American photographer, best known for his landscapes of the American West, although his legacy also includes portraits and documentary work, and writings on photographic technique.

Born in San Francisco, Adams took his first photographs on visiting Yosemite in 1916, aged 14; he later set up a studio there, and photographed extensively in the Sierra Nevada. In the 1920s his photographs were included in exhibitions mounted by the conservationist Sierra Club. His first major solo show was at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, in 1931. The first of many books (including eventually his journals, letters, and memoirs) appeared in 1930: Taos Pueblo, a study of a New Mexico Indian community produced with the writer Mary Austin.

Adams's landscapes stemmed both from his fascination with the natural environment, and from his conception of it as a space of spiritual redemption. In the face of intensifying exploitation, indeed desecration, of the West in the 20th century, his images reflected a commitment to conservation. He photographed at different times and seasons, exploring the effects of changing patterns and intensities of light. The resulting pictures are remarkable in terms of composition, tonal contrast, registration of detail, and printing quality.

Adams initially trained as a pianist, a discipline echoed in his emphasis on tone, rhythm, and technical proficiency, and explicitly invoked in his famous analogies between the negative and the musical score, and between the print and interpretation through performance. His contribution to photographic method stemmed from his insistence on visualization and control of the photographic process from framing and exposure to printing. His technical publications included The Complete Photographer (1942) and a five-volume series (1948-56) on Camera and Lens, The Negative, The Print, Natural Light Photography, and Artificial Light Photography. He devised the Zone System for determining exposure and emphasized the relationship between the quality of the negative and the potential for producing a fine print. He worked almost exclusively in monochrome, though later experimenting with colour.

Adams was a founding member of the anti- pictorialist f.64 Group dedicated to ‘pure’ photography. His aesthetic preferences changed over time, his later prints offering markedly more tonal contrast than earlier examples. In the 2002 retrospective his celebrated Moonrise over Hernandez (1941) was shown in three different versions, increasingly dramatic in tone. In considering provenance, not only subject matter and style but also the date of a particular print is significant.

Although Adams remains a towering figure in the history of American photography, with prices to match, his visionary interpretation of the Western landscape was eventually challenged by younger photographers associated with the 1975 New Topographics exhibition, who concentrated on the impact of human activity on the land.

— Liz Wells

Bibliography

• Adams, A., Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (1985).
• Spaulding, J., Ansel Adams and the American Landscape (1995).
• Ansel Adams at 100 (2002).
• Hammond, A., Ansel Adams: Divine Performance (2002)

1902–84, American photographer, b. San Francisco. He began taking photographs in the High Sierra and Yosemite Valley, with which his name is permanently associated, becoming professional in 1930. That year he published the first of many books of his photographs, Taos Pueblo. With Edward Weston and others he founded the Group f/64 in reaction to the painterly photographic aesthetic then current. He specialized in characteristic regional landscape, particularly of the Southwest, and worked to emphasize the conservation of nature. In addition to heroic vistas of the American wilderness, he also made smaller and more intimate images of such landscape elements as trees, rocks, driftwood, and grasses.

Adams wrote numerous technical manuals, including the classic Basic Photo-Books series, and helped to found photographic art departments at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (the first such department) and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His book Born Free and Equal (1944) was an effort to aid Japanese Americans incarcerated in “relocation camps” during World War II. In 1946 he established the first college department of photography at the California School of Fine Art. Adams also published the first superb portfolio reproductions of his own and others' photographs. His work has become known to a wide audience through the many books, posters, and calendars that have featured his photographs.

Bibliography

See aperture monograph (1972); M. S. Alinder and A. G. Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, 1916–1984 (1988); J. Szarkowski, Ansel Adams at 100 (2001).

A twentieth-century American photographer particularly noted for his black-and-white depictions of the American West, including Yosemite National Park. Adams stressed the importance of straightforward photography and high-quality printing techniques.

Quotes:

"I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -- meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching -- there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster."

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