| Ansel Adams (1902-1984),
American photographer, known for his black-and-white photographs of Yosemite
National Park, the California coast, and other wilderness areas of the American
West. Adams’s painstaking control of tonality and detail made him unequalled as
a technical master of the black and white print. His photographs convey both the
vast scale and the intimate detail of a landscape.
Adams was born into a wealthy family in San Francisco,
California, and first trained to become a concert pianist. His interest in
photography began during a 1916 trip to Yosemite National Park. His earliest
photographs were in the soft-focus style popular at that time. But after contact
with American photographer Paul Strand and others in 1930, his work
began to develop the sharp focus that became his trademark. It was at this time
that he abandoned his musical career in favor of a career in photography. He
moved to Yosemite in 1937 and later to Carmel, California.
Adams invented a method of exposure and development called
the zone system, which he used to divide the gradations of light
in a scene into ten zones from black to white; this allowed him to visualize the
different levels of gray in the final photograph with great accuracy. The
control he achieved with this system enabled him to capture such subtle changes
of tone and light that he could return again and again to the same scene, yet
produce images that were always fresh, never repetitive.
He spent much of his life photographing in the national
parks, and served as an official photographer for the Sierra Club,
a conservation organization, but his other activities and achievements were many
and varied. In 1932 Adams and other California photographers, including
Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, founded an
influential group called f/64, which was devoted to taking straightforward
photographs in sharp focus. In 1935 Adams published Making a Photograph,
the first of a series of technical manuals. He helped found the photography
department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1940, the first such
department in any museum. In 1946 he helped establish the first academic
department to teach photography, at the California School of Fine Arts in San
Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute), and also taught at the Art
Center School in Los Angeles. He took part in his first photography workshop at
Yosemite in 1940, and from 1955 to 1981 he held annual photography workshops
there. In 1943 he took photographs that documented the conditions of Japanese
Americans held in internment camps during World War II.
Adams published more than two dozen books, including My
Camera in the National Parks (1950), Ansel Adams: Images 1923-1974
(1974), Photographs of the Southwest (1976), and Yosemite and the
Range of Light (1979). Shortly after his death Ansel Adams: An
Autobiography was published in 1985.
In 1984 the United States Congress established the Ansel
Adams Wilderness Area, between Yosemite National Park and the John Muir
Wilderness Area in California. Mount Ansel Adams, at the head of the Lyell Fork
of the Merced River on the southeast boundary of Yosemite National Park, was
named for him in 1985. The Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco opened in 1989 to
exhibit and promote his work along with that of other photographers. |
