He spent his childhood days playing in the sand dunes beyond the Golden Gate where he gained an appreciation for nature, which would become his primary source of photographic inspiration. Adams first visited Yosemite in -- only two years after John Muir's death and three months before the founding of the National Park Service -- and was transfixed by the beautiful valley.
Adams' interest in photography grew and often brought him up to the mountains accompanied by a mule laden with photographic gear and supplies. In , Adams participated in the Club's annual outing, known as the High Trip, and, the next year, he became the Club's official trip photographer.
In he became assistant manager of the outings which consisted of month-long excursions of up to people. Adams' role in the Sierra Club grew rapidly and the Club became vital to his early success as a photographer.
His broken nose was never properly set, remaining crooked for the rest of his life. Adams was a hyperactive and sickly child with few friends. Dismissed from several schools for bad behavior, he was educated by private tutors and members of his family from the age of Adams taught himself the piano, which would become his early passion. In , following a trip to Yosemite National Park, he also began experimenting with photography. He learned darkroom techniques and read photography magazines, attended camera club meetings, and went to photography and art exhibits.
Virginia inherited the studio from her artist father on his death in , and the Adamses continued to operate the studio until The business, now known as the Ansel Adams Gallery, remains in the family. Colby and Stephen T. Mather, first director of the National Park Service. Ansel continued working summers at the Le Conte Lodge until Through the s he made many climbs in the Sierra high country, including several first ascents.
Through these early high-country experiences, Ansel became aware of aesthetic qualities in the wilderness that he had not anticipated.
Clark…I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching push up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light ….
I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks. There area no words to convey the moods of those moments. By this time his photography was becoming increasingly important, exercising a claim on his time and energy that was competing with a beckoning career as a concert pianist.
One spring day in he perched precariously on a cliff with his camera and the unwieldy photographic glass plates of the day.
He hoped to capture an imposing perspective of the face of Half Dome, the snow-laden high country and a crystal-clear sky. Only two unexposed plates remained. With one he made a conventional exposure.
Suddenly, he realized that he wanted an image with more emotional impact. But that was the first time I realized how the print was going to look—what I now call visualization—and was actually thinking about the emotional effect of the image…I began to visualize the black rock and deep sky.
I really wanted to give it a monumental, dark quality. So I used the last plate I had with a No. In Ansel met Albert Bender, a perceptive and generous patron of the arts.
Bender took to the young photographer at once. Recognizing an extraordinary talent, he proposed that Ansel issue a collection of his mountain photographs. The result, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras , was stunningly beautiful. He also found a degree of financial security, enough so that the next year he married his Yosemite sweetheart, Virginia Best, daughter of the painter Harry Best, who had a studio in the valley.
For years young Ansel had come to the Best home to practice on their piano. In Virginia he found someone sharing his interests in both music and the natural world.
He made the photographs to illustrate a Mary Austin text on the Taos Pueblo, receiving equal billing with the author. This was unusual for a photographer in those days and a measure of how rapidly he was distinguishing himself.
Yet he was still ambivalent about the future. Many of his friends insisted that photography, unlike music, was not capable of expressing the finer emotions of art. But there was persuasive counter-evidence. On one of his visits to Taos he met the noted photographer Paul Strand. But some independent spirits such as Edward Weston were taking the opposite tack, producing sharply focused pictures and printing on glossy papers.
Subterfuge becomes impossible. Every defect is exposed, all weakness equally with strength. There is a reason. The machine does not do the whole thing. Looking over many of his negatives, he saw he would have to start over. The number designates a very small lens aperture capable of producing an image with maximum definition. By landscapes, I mean every physical aspect of a region—weather, soil, wildflowers, mountain peaks—and its effect on the psyche and physical appearance of the people.
In Adams met the old master Alfred Stieglitz, who exerted a further clarifying influence on his artistic direction. I would not have believed before I met him that a man could be so psychically and emotionally powerful.
Adams was the first new photographer Stieglitz had introduced to the public at An American Place since Paul Strand in Lovers of wilderness echoed this feeling. What does matter is that the mutuality was important. Ansel Adams in honor of their irrepressible playwright-photographer. Then someone nominated Ansel, which precipitated a humorous situation. Ansel insisted that Virginia , having done a fine job on the board, should remain on it. In the end Ansel was elected. He quickly proved such a valuable member that he repeatedly was reelected by the club membership until his voluntary retirement in Adams was chosen in to represent the club at a national and state parks conference in Washington to be attended by the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture.
The club wanted him to present its proposal for a wilderness park in the Kings River Sierra, feeling that his photographs of the area would be very persuasive. The Sierra Club was mindful of the key role photography had played in the creation of earlier parks.
When Ansel reached Washington , he carried his portfolio to the offices of the heads of the National Park Service and U. One happy result of the visit was an invitation from Secretary of the Interior Harold L. In the years that followed, he developed a close friendship with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, traveling with them to the Southwest and New England in the late s.
In addition to their work at the museum, Adams and Nancy Newhall collaborated in the s and s on several books and exhibitions. Adams's willingness to share his knowledge of photography meant he was much in demand as a teacher and in he took up a teaching post at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.
The resulting photographs were meant to be printed at mural size and hung at the Washington D. Department of the Interior building. However, the project was halted later that year when funding for the project was withdrawn an unforeseen consequence of America's participation in World War II. Though he never produced the large-scale prints for the Interior Department, Adams remained so committed to the project that he applied for, and received, a Guggenheim grant to complete the project in He created an enormous body of work for the project that was published as a book and a limited-edition portfolio.
Though his most important and influential work was probably behind him, in his later years Adams spent much of his time working on books of his photographs and reinterpreting his earlier negatives; very often to dramatic new effect.
In he helped set up the Friends of Photography, a group founded to promote photography as a fine art. Adams remained an active member of the Sierra Club until acting as its president from He died in Monterey, California in , aged eighty-two.
In his honor, a section of the Sierra Nevada mountains that he loved so much was renamed the Ansel Adams Wilderness shortly after his passing. As a conservationist, writer, teacher, and photographer, Ansel Adams has been profoundly influential on future generations of artists, photographers, and environmentalists.
There can be little doubt that he produced some of the most iconic images of the great American wilderness. Following in a long tradition of American landscape photographers, including Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge , Timothy O'Sullivan, and William Henry Jackson, Adams brought landscape photography into the realm of modernism by fusing technical precision with a profound and abiding love of the natural world.
His work has inspired a range of artists and photographers working in the landscape tradition, from Eliot Porter and Robert Adams, to Edward Burtynsky and Richard Misrach. The subject of countless documentaries, books, essays, and exhibitions, Adams's images appear on living room and museum walls, proving that his photographs of the great American landscape continue to resonate.
The award was in recognition of Adams's contribution to photography and the preservation of the great American landscape. In his citation, President Carter stated that "It is through [Adams's] foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans. Content compiled and written by Karen Barber. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Antony Todd.
The Art Story. Straight Photography. Overview and Artworks.
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