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Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park. With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. Adams primarily used large-format cameras, despite their size, weight, setup time, and film cost, because their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images. Adams founded the Group f/64 along with fellow photographers Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, which in turn created the Museum of Modern Art's department of photography. Adams's timeless and visually stunning photographs are reproduced on calendars, posters, and in books, making his photographs widely recognizable.
Life Childhood Adams was born in the Western Addition of San Francisco, California, to distinctly upper-class parents Charles Hitchcock Adams and Olive Bray Adams. The Adams family came from New England, having migrated from the north of Ireland in the early 1700s. Later in life, Adams would condemn that very same industry for cutting down many of the great redwood forests. Uninjured in the initial shaking, the four-year-old Ansel Adams was tossed face-first into a garden wall during an aftershock three hours later, breaking his nose. as a result, Adams's nose remained crooked for his entire life. Adams was then educated by private tutors, his Aunt Mary, and by his father. During the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, his father insisted that, as part of his education, Adams spend part of each day studying the exhibits. After a while, Adams resumed and then completed his formal education by attending the Mrs. Kate M. Adams had a warm, loving and supportive relationship with his father, but had a distant relationship with his mother, who did not approve of his interest in photography. Possessing a photographic memory, Adams quickly learned to read music and play the piano. For the next dozen years the piano was Adams's primary occupation and, by 1920, his intended profession. Adams first visited Yosemite National Park in 1916 with his family. Adams avidly read photography magazines, attended camera club meetings, and went to photography and art exhibits. In 1928, Ansel Adams married Virginia Best in Best's Studio in Yosemite Valley. Virginia inherited the studio from her artist father on his death in 1935, and the Adams continued to operate the studio until 1971. The studio, now known as the Ansel Adams Gallery, remains in the hands of the Adams family. At age 17, Adams joined the Sierra Club, a group dedicated to preserving the natural world's wonders and resources, and he was hired as the summer caretaker of the Sierra Club visitor center in Yosemite Valley, the LeConte Memorial Lodge from 1920 to 1924. Adams participated in the club's annual High Trips, and was later responsible for several first ascents in the Sierra Nevada. Adams fell seriously ill but recovered after several months to resume his outdoor life. For several years, Adams carried a pocket edition with him while at Yosemite. It soon became his personal philosophy as well, as Adams later stated, "I believe in beauty. In summer, Adams would enjoy a life of hiking, camping, and photographing, and the rest of the year he worked to improve his piano playing, expanding his piano technique and musical expression. At this point, however, Adams was still planning a career in music, even though his small hands, easily bruised by bravura playing, limited his repertoire to practiced works which benefited from his strengths of fine touch and excellent musicality. It took seven more years for Adams to finally concede that at best he might become a concert pianist of limited range, an accompanist, or a piano teacher. In the mid-1920s, Adams experimented with soft-focus, etching, Bromoil Process, and other techniques of the pictorial photographers, such as Photo-Secession leader Alfred Stieglitz who strove to put photography on an equal artistic plane with painting by trying to mimic it. However, Adams steered clear of hand-coloring which was also popular at the time. Adams used a variety of lenses to get different effects, but eventually rejected pictorialism for a more realistic approach which relied more heavily on sharp focus, heightened contrast, precise exposure, and darkroom craftsmanship. Career In 1927, Adams contracted for his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, in his new style, which included his famous image Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, taken with his Korona view camera using glass plates and a dark red filter (to heighten the tonal contrasts). With the sponsorship and promotion of Albert Bender, an arts-connected businessman, Adams's first portfolio was a success (earning nearly $3,900) and soon he received commercial assignments to photograph the wealthy patrons who bought his portfolio. Adams also came to understand how important it was that his carefully crafted photos were reproduced to best effect. Adams expanded his works, focusing on detailed close-ups as well as large forms from mountains to factories. In 1930 Taos Pueblo, Adams's second portfolio, was published with text by writer Mary Hunter Austin. Adams's talkative, high-spirited nature combined with his excellent piano playing made him a hit within his enlarging circle of elite artist friends. Strand especially proved influential, sharing secrets of his technique with Adams, and finally convincing Adams to pursue photography with all his talent and energy. Farquhar, Adams was able to put on his first solo museum exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 1931, featuring 60prints taken in the High Sierra. In 1932, Adams had a group show at the M. By these standards, not only were "soft focus" lenses prohibited but Adams's earlier photo Monolith, which used a strong red filter to create a black sky, would have been considered unacceptable. Following Stieglitz's example, in 1933 Adams opened his own art and photography gallery in San Francisco which eventually became the Danysh Gallery after Adams's commitments grew too burdensome. Adams also began to publish essays in photography magazines and wrote his first instructional book Making a Photograph in 1935. Mostly resistant to the "art for life's sake" movement, Adams did begin in the 1930s to deploy his photographs in the cause of wilderness preservation. Ansel Adams, The Portfolios Of Ansel Adams In 1935, Adams created many new photos of the Sierra and one of his most famous photographs, Clearing Winter Storm, captured the entire valley just as a winter storm relented, leaving a fresh coat of snow. After courting Stieglitz for three years, Adams gathered his recent work and had a solo show at the Stieglitz gallery "An American Place" in New York in 1936. The exhibition proved successful with both the critics and the buying public, and earned Adams strong praise from the revered Stieglitz. During the balance of the 1930s, Adams took on many commercial assignments to supplement the income from the struggling Best's Studio. Until the 1970s, Adams was financially dependent on commercial projects. With his wife, Adams completed a children's book and the very successful Illustrated Guide to Yosemite Valley during 1940 and 1941. Adams also began his first serious stint of teaching in 1941 at the Art Center School of Los Angeles, which included the training of military photographers. In 1943, Adams had a camera platform mounted on his station wagon, to afford him a better vantage point over the immediate foreground and a better angle for expansive backgrounds. On a trip in New Mexico weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Adams shot a scene of the Moon rising above a modest village with snow-covered mountains in the background, under a dominating black sky. The photograph's fame was probably enhanced by Adams's description in his later books of how it was made: the light on the crosses in the foreground was rapidly fading, and he could not find his exposure meter; Adams's earlier account was less dramatic, stating simply that the photograph was made after sunset, with exposure determined using his Weston Master meter. Over nearly 40 years, Adams re-interpreted the image, his most popular by far, using the latest darkroom equipment at his disposal, making over 1,300 unique prints, most in 16 by 20 format. Many of the prints were made in the 1970s, finally giving Adams financial independence from commercial projects. Although Adams kept meticulous records of his travel and expenses,he was less disciplined about recording the dates of his images, and neglected to note the date of Moonrise, so it was not clear whether it belonged to Adams or to the U.S. Government. But the position of the Moon allowed the image to eventually be dated from astronomical calculations, and it was determined that Moonrise was made on November 1, 1941, a day for which he had not billed the Department, so the image belonged to Adams. When Edward Steichen formed his Naval Aviation Photographic Unit in early 1942, he wanted Adams to be a member, to build and direct a state-of-the-art darkroom and laboratory in Washington, D.C. In approximately February, 1942, Steichen asked Adams to join. Steichen, who wanted the team assembled as quickly as possible, passed Adams by, and had his other photographers ready to go by early April. Adams was the recipient of three Guggenheim fellowships during his career, the first in 1946 to photograph every National Park. In 1945, Adams was asked to form the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). Adams invited Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston to be guest lecturers and Minor White to be lead instructor. In 1952 Adams was one of the founders of the magazine Aperture, which was intended as a serious journal of photography showcasing its best practitioners and newest innovations. In June 1955, Adams began his annual workshops, teaching thousands of students until 1981. By the 1950s, Adams came to believe that he was on the down side of his creative life. In the 1960s, a few mainstream art galleries (without a photographic emphasis) which originally would have considered photos unworthy of exhibit alongside fine paintings decided to show Adams's imagesnotably the Kenmore Gallery in Philadelphia. In March 1963, Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall accepted a commission from Clark Kerr, the President of the University of California, to produce a series of photographs of the University's campuses to commemorate its centennial celebration. In 1974, Adams had a major retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. President Jimmy Carter commissioned Adams to make the first official portrait of a president made by a photograph. But it was Adams's black-and-white photographs of the West which became the foremost record of what many of the National Parks were like before tourism, and his persistent advocacy helped expand the National Park system. Realistic about development and the subsequent loss of habitat, Adams advocated for balanced growth, but was pained by the ravages of "progress". Adams also advocated the idea of visualization (which he often called "previsualization", though he later acknowledged that term to be a redundancy) whereby the final image is "seen" in the mind's eye before taking the photo, toward the goal of achieving all together the aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual, and mechanical effects desired. Adams's photograph The Tetons and the Snake River has the distinction of being one of the 115 images recorded on the Voyager Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft. "Ansel Adams", wrote John Szarkowski {New York Museum of Modern Art), "attuned himself more precisely than any photographer before him to a visual understanding of the specific quality of the light that fell on a specific place at a specific moment. For Adams the natural landscape is not a fixed and solid sculpture but an insubstantial image, as transient as the light that continually redefines it. This sensibility to the specificity of light was the motive that forced Adams to develop his legendary photographic technique." Death In September 1983, Adams was confined to his bed for four weeks after leg surgery to remove a cancer. Adams died on April 22, 1984, in Carmel, California at the age of 82 from a heart attack. Publishing rights for Adams's photographs are now handled by the trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. The full archive of Ansel Adams's work is located at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson. John Szarkowski states in the introduction to Ansel Adams: Classic Images (1985, p.5), "The love that Americans poured out for the work and person of Ansel Adams during his old age, and that they have continued to express with undiminished enthusiasm since his death, is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even unparalleled in our country's response to a visual artist." Awards Ansel Adams received a number of awards during his lifetime and posthumously, and there have been a few awards named for him. Adams received a Doctor of Arts from both Harvard and Yale universities. The Minarets Wilderness in the Inyo National Forest and a 11,760-foot (3,580m) peak therein were renamed the Ansel Adams Wilderness and Mount Ansel Adams respectively in 1985. The Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography was established in 1971, and the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation was established in 1980 by The Wilderness Society. Works Notable photographs The information for each photograph is taken from Adams's 1983 book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs.
A black-and-white close-up photograph of palmate, conifer, and small fern-like leaves overlapping, all visibly damp.
Allied Arts Guild, in Menlo Park, California, where Adams took commercial photographs of artists' work
Zone System, a unique approach to film exposure and development invented by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 19391940
Adams, Ansel (1989). Ansel Adams: A Biography. Adams, Ansel; Ansel Adams: Letters and Images 19161984. http://www.andrewsmithgallery.com/exhibitions/Arrington_adams/.
Ansel Adams Gallery. Ansel Adams Gallery. "Ansel Adams at the Phoenix Art Museum". "Adams inducted into California Hall of Fame". "Ansel Adams Yosemite photo fetches $722K in record-setting auction". Ansel Adams, New light: Essays on His Legacy and Legend. "Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club: About Ansel Adams". ISBN1558241620.
PBS Documentary: Ansel Adams Transcript of the Ric Burns feature documentary Ansel Adams (2002).
Ansel Adams Memorial Grove A restoration and preservation project of Ansel Adams in San Francisco.
American Memory Ansel Adams "Suffering Under a Great Injustice" Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar From the American Memory Collection of the Library of Congress.
Picturing the Century Ansel Adams Selection of photos at the National Archives.
Records of the National Park Service Ansel Adams Photographs 226 high-resolution photographs from National Archives Still Picture Branch.
All Ansel Adams Images Online Center for Creative Photography (CCP) CCP at the University of Arizona has released a digital catalog of all Adams's images.