In the first of a series highlighting some of the great photographers of history, I’m starting with Ansel Adams. Adams holds a special place in the hearts of Americans and many others around the World. His mastery of light and tone, and his passion for the environment that he captured so beautifully cannot be over estimated.
“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” (Ansel Adams)
Ansel Adams’ career spans seven decades and a wide range of subject matter, including portraits, still lives, architecture, and the landscapes for which he is most famous. Viewers often associate his lifelong environmentalism and advocacy for America’s wilderness places with his dramatic, panoramic photographs that celebrate the redemptive potential of the natural world. Many of his best-known images were made in the American West, including a large group of works made in Yosemite Valley.
© The Trustees of the Ansel Adams
Publishing Rights Trust
Adams first learned about photography and the Sierra Nevada Mountains as a child, on family vacation. His love for the medium and the place grew in tandem, and after his initial 1916 visit, Adams visited Yosemite annually. Originally working in the Pictorialist style, widely popular in the 1910s and 1920s, Adams encountered Paul Strand’s photography in 1930, and rejected his earlier painterly, soft focus style for a new “pure” and sharp focus approach.
Adams was a co-founder of Group f/64 with other master photographers like Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, and Imogen Cunningham. With Fred Archer, he pioneered the Zone System, a technique for translating perceived light into specific densities on negatives and paper, giving photographers better control over finished photographs.
Adams also advocated the idea of visualization 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. He taught these and other photography techniques to thousands of amateur photographers through his publications and his workshops.
“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.”
(Ansel Adams)
Adams’ technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium. He served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other photographic concerns.
© The Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
In 1935, Adams created one of his most famous photographs and one of the great photographs of all time, ‘Clearing Winter Storm’, captured the entire valley just as a winter storm relented, leaving a fresh coat of snow.
His images have become the symbols of wild America. When people think about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, they often envision them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph. His black-and-white images were not “realistic” documents of nature. Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty. He created a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing.
© The Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
Adams’ 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. These images were selected to convey information about humans, plants and animals, and geological features of the Earth to a possible alien civilisation.
His lasting legacy includes helping to elevate photography to an art comparable with painting and music, and equally capable of expressing emotion and beauty. As he reminded his students, “It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.”
Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography.
A large collection of his images are available to view online at the
Center for Creative Photography’s Ansel Adams Archive.
Recommended Ansel Adams Books
Ansel Adams in the National Parks: Photographs from America’s Wild Places
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