ANSEL ADAMS

Born in 1902 to an upper-class family in San Francisco, Ansel Adams was an unusually curious and precocious child. Trained by private tutors after the age of 12, he began preparing for a career as a concert pianist. At the age of 14, he simultaneously discovered photography and Yosemite, using his first camera to record views during a family trip. His enthusiasm for both photography and the California wilderness grew, challenging his commitment to a career in music. In 1928, Adams married Virginia Best, daughter of a Yosemite concessionaire, and devoted himself to photography. He had his first exhibition that year at the San Francisco headquarters of the Sierra Club, where he had been a member since the age of 17.

Adams’ earliest landscape photography reflected the prevailing soft-focus “pictorialism” common to art photography of the time. In 1930, he met New York photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand, who fused hard-edged modernist aesthetics with social concern in his pioneering work. Strand’s commitment to photography as a medium for direct, realistic depiction influenced Adams greatly. By the time of his first solo museum exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 1931, Adams had found his mature style.

In 1932, Adams joined with fellow photographers Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard van Dyke, among others, to form a group devoted to photographic realism. Organized in avant-garde reaction against pictorialism, Group f/64 crafted a manifesto and presented the work of its members in a show that year at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The photographers adopted their name from the smallest available camera lens aperture, the use of which guaranteed great image sharpness from foreground to background. The group’s stance was no mere aesthetic choice. Rather, it was a conviction, in Edward Weston’s words, that “the camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.” Group f/64’s devotion to a kind of photographic “purity,” and the success of its individual members, soon established their philosophy of “straight photography” as orthodoxy.

Adams’ sharply focused wilderness views became immensely popular, and his fame spread beyond the art world. His books Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography (1935) and Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (1938) were among the first artistic photography publications to reach a broad public in the United States. Adams’ reputation was further established by a 1936 show at Alfred Stieglitz’s New York gallery An American Place, and by his inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art’s first historical survey of the medium in 1937. During the 1930s and on through the 1950s, Adams promoted his own work through publications, exhibitions, and personal appearances. Later books, such as My Camera in the National Parks (1950) and This is the American Earth (1960), helped establish a standard of quality for photographic books, and built a large audience for landscape photography.

Legendary for his dedication to the medium, Adams developed many now-standard photographic practices, including his revolutionary “Zone System” for film exposure and development. Though known today principally for his imagery, he is perhaps equally important as a pioneering educator and a tireless crusader for the institutional recognition of photography as a fine art. Adams also played a seminal role in the development of the environmental movement in the United States. A longtime member of the Sierra Club’s board of directors, Adams intended his photographs to inspire the conservation of natural resources. His art had a great impact on public policy, particularly on the creation of Kings Canyon National Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.

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