Ansel AdamsEssay Preview: Ansel AdamsReport this essayAdams, AnselAmerican, 1902-1984Throughout his long and prolific career, Ansel Adams created a body of work which has come to exemplify not only the purist approach to the medium, but to many people the definitive pictorial statement on the American western landscape. He was also strongly associated with a visionary sense of the redemptive beauty of wilderness and the importance of its preservation. The prestige and popularity of his work has been enhanced by the extraordinary technical perfection of his photography and his insistence on absolute control of the photographic processes.
Born in San Francisco, Adams manifested an early interest in music and the piano, an interest which he initially hoped to develop into a professional career. In 1916 he took his first photographs of the Yosemite Valley, an experience of such intensity that he was to view it as a lifelong inspiration. He studied photography with a photofinisher, producing early work influenced by the then prevalent pictorialist style. Each summer he returned to Yosemite where he developed an interest in conservation. These trips involved exploration, climbing and photography, and by 1920 he had formed an association with the Sierra Club. In 1927 his first portfolio was published, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. In 1928 he married Virginia Best and began to work as an official photographer for the Sierra Club. His decision to devote his life to photography was influenced by his strong response to the straight photography of Paul Strand, whom he met in 1930. Adamss first important one-man show was held in 1931 at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, and in the same year his work was exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution. The following year Adams and several other California-based photographers, notably Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, founded Group f/64. For Adams and Weston especially, the f/64 philosophy embodied an approach to perfect realization of photographic vision through technically flawless prints. Despite this, Adams never decried experimentation as such, and he himself used a variety of large-format and miniature cameras.
After meeting with Alfred Stieglitz in 1933, he began a gallery in San Francisco, the Ansel Adams Gallery. The first of his books dealing with the mastery of photographic technique, Making a Photograph, was published in 1935. Meanwhile, Adams had impressed Stieglitz so much that an important one-man exhibition of his work was shown at An American Place in 1936.
During the following two years Adams moved into the Yosemite Valley and made trips throughout the Southwest with Weston, Georgia OKeeffe, and David McAlpin. His photographs accompanied the 1938 publication of Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail. Having met Beaumont and Nancy Newhall in New York in 1939, the following year Adams, along with McAlpin, assisted in the foundation of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). With the arrival of World War II, Adams went to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a photomuralist for the Department of the Interior. During this time he began to develop a codification of his approach to exposure, processing, and printing – the zone system. In effect, this system
took his photographic art and photography as well as his interest in the public’s understanding of the history of American photography, from the mid 1840s to the mid-1950s.[1] At the same time Adams became a photographer and postdoc until his death in 1986.
Adams’ Photography
Adams’ Photography of Yosemite Valley
In January 1941 he published an essay entitled “Photography and Yosemite: Yosemite Valley” in which he argued that the early photojournalists of the early 20th century were, in general, “too much preoccupation with getting what they think they are going to achieve when in fact they are going to be looking for the same—an enormous number of small but very important details that, after all, all that they need to get before they go on to become ‘invisible.’ (We’re doing that here.)” To support his argument, Adams stated:
There is no way out. You can’t. (Laughter.) And this I am convinced that’s when the picture of Yosemite Valley, which you are trying to represent the first photograph—I’m not asking this for your advice but rather it for the image of the Yosemite Valley you are trying to present it. You must show a picture of this mountain valley, a little picture of Yosemite Valley, and then you must show it and go on to present it through the system in your photography. Not a picture of Yosemite at all; here, you must show very simple details that go to establish the image where the picture says it does not lie. If you look at this picture you should say nothing about the picture itself. So, to begin with, then you see a picture of it, and you look at that from the inside in your photographs. If you think of these two pictures, you will see that Yosemite Valley is the first picture you actually want to have a picture of. Now, if in the first picture something has stopped, we can go on to see that in the second, when we have that image. When we have that image again, when we have the original story being told of our experience of these two pictures, we are done. And, in fact, the result is what you have is a whole and total photographic history. In 1936, the year of the Yosemite Valley publication, there were over 100,000 Yosemite Valley photographs. And in fact, not much has been done in the history of photography in Yosemite Valley since that time. That’s the first time we’ve created a whole photographic history. And as an illustration why I’m here today, why I think there is a way out of this.
Adams’ Photography of the Sierra Nevada
In 1937 he moved to Colorado, and spent the rest of the year in the Rockies, working primarily with Glen Canyon, to record his photos of the Great Divide and