Ethnicity:
His family migrated from Northern Ireland in the early 18th century.
Ansel Easton Adams was born on February 20, 1902 in San Francisco, California, United States. He was a son of Olive Bray Adams and Charles Hitchcock Adams, a successful businessman, who owned an insurance agency and a chemical factory.
Ansel enjoyed a close bond with his father, who taught him to lead a modest life with equal responsibility to man and nature.
He was not successful in the various schools to which his parents sent him; consequently, his father and aunt tutored him at home. Ultimately, he managed to earn what he termed a “legitimizing diploma” from the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School — perhaps equivalent to having completed the eighth grade.
When he was twelve, he taught himself to play the piano and read music. Sometime later, Adams took piano lessons and the ardent pursuit of music became his substitute for formal schooling.
Also, Adams received an Honorary Artium Doctor degree from Harvard University and an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University.
When Adams was twelve he taught himself to play the piano and read music. Soon he was taking lessons, and the ardent pursuit of music became his substitute for formal schooling. For the next dozen years, the piano was Adams’s primary occupation and, by 1920, his intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography.
If Adams’s love of nature was nurtured in the Golden Gate, his life was, in his words, “colored and modulated by the great earth gesture” of the Yosemite Sierra (Adams, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, p. xiv). He spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had given him. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and self-confidence. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent the first of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as “keeper” of the club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge. He became friends with many of the club’s leaders, who were founders of America’s nascent conservation movement.
The Sierra Club was vital to Adams’s early success as a photographer. His first published photographs and writings appeared in the club’s 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one-man exhibition in 1928 at the club’s San Francisco headquarters. Each summer the club conducted a month-long High Trip, usually in the Sierra Nevada, which attracted up to two hundred members. The participants hiked each day to a new and beautiful campsite accompanied by a large contingent of pack mules, packers, cooks, and the like. As a photographer of these outings, in the late 1920s, Adams began to realize that he could earn enough to survive — indeed, that he was far more likely to prosper as a photographer than as a concert pianist. By 1934 Adams had been elected to the club’s board of directors and was well established as both the artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite.
Nineteen twenty-seven was the pivotal year of Adams’s life. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and took his first High Trip. More important, he came under the influence of Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance magnate and patron of arts and artists. Literally, the day after they met, Bender set in motion the preparation and publication of Adams’ first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. Bender’s friendship, encouragement, and tactful financial support changed Adams’s life dramatically. His creative energies and abilities as a photographer blossomed, and he began to have the confidence and wherewithal to pursue his dreams. Indeed, Bender’s benign patronage triggered the transformation of a journeyman concert pianist into the artist whose photographs, as critic Abigail Foerstner wrote in the Chicago Tribune (Dec. 3, 1992), “did for the national parks something comparable to what Homer’s epics did for Odysseus.”
Although Adams’s transition from musician to photographer did not happen at once, his passion shifted rapidly after Bender came into his life, and the projects and possibilities multiplied. In addition to spending summers photographing in the Sierra Nevada, Adams made several lengthy trips to the Southwest to work with Mary Austin, the grande dame of the western literati. Their magnificent limited edition book, Taos Pueblo, was published in 1930. In the same year, Adams met photographer Paul Strand, whose images had a powerful impact on Adams and helped to move him away from the “pictorial” style he had favored in the 1920s. Adams began to pursue “straight photography,” in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized, and the final print gave no appearance of being manipulated in the camera or the darkroom. Adams was soon to become straight photography’s most articulate and insistent champion.
In 1927 Adams met photographer, Edward Weston. They became increasingly important to each other as friends and colleagues. The renowned Group f/64, founded in 1932, coalesced around the recognized greatness of Weston and the dynamic energy of Adams. Although loosely organized and relatively short-lived, Group f/64 brought the new West Coast vision of straight photography to national attention and influence. San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum promptly gave f/64 an exhibition and, in that same year, gave Adams his first one-man museum show.
Adams’s star rose rapidly in the early 1930s, propelled in part by his ability and in part by his effusive energy and activity. He made his first visit to New York in 1933, on a pilgrimage to meet photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the artist whose work and philosophy Adams most admired and whose life of commitment to the medium he consciously emulated. Their relationship was intense and their correspondence frequent, rich, and insightful. Although profoundly a man of the West, Adams spent a considerable amount of time in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Stieglitz circle played a vital role in his artistic life. In 1933 the Delphic Gallery gave Adams his first New York show. His first series of technical articles were published in Camera Craft in 1934, and his first widely distributed book, Making a Photograph, appeared in 1935. Most important, in 1936 Stieglitz gave Adams a one-man show at An American Place.
Recognition, however, did not alleviate Adams’s financial pressures. In a letter dated 6 August 1935 he wrote Weston, “I have been busy but broke. Can’t seem to climb over the financial fence.” Adams was compelled to spend much of his time as a commercial photographer. Clients ran the gamut, including the Yosemite concessionaire, the National Park Service, Kodak, Zeiss, IBM, AT&T, a small women’s college, a dried fruit company, and Life, Fortune, and Arizona Highways magazines — in short, everything from portraits to catalogs to Coloramas. On 2 July 1938, he wrote to friend David McAlpin, “I have to do something in the relatively near future to regain the right track in photography. I am literally swamped with “commercial” work — necessary for practical reasons, but very restraining to my creative work.” Although Adams became an unusually skilled commercial photographer, the work was intermittent, and he constantly worried about paying the next month’s bills. His financial situation remained precarious and a source of considerable stress until late in life.
Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since he revealed in the theory and practice of the medium. Weston and Strand frequently consulted him for technical advice. He served as a principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other photographic concerns. Adams developed the famous and highly complex “zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization. He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most influential books ever written on the subject.
Adams’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal. He often labored for eighteen or more hours per day, for days and weeks on end. There were no vacations, no holidays, no Sundays in Ansel Adams’s life. Frequently, after an intense period of work, he would return to San Francisco or Yosemite, promptly contract the “flu,” and spend several days in bed. His hyper-kinetic existence was also fueled by alcohol, for which he had a particular fondness, and a constant whirl of social activity, friends, and colleagues.
Adams felt an intense commitment to promoting photography as fine art and played a key role in the establishment of the first museum department of photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work at the museum fostered the closest relationships of Adams’s life, with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, a historian and museum administrator and a writer-designer, respectively. Their partnership was arguably the most potent collaboration in twentieth-century photography. In the 1950s and 1960s, Nancy Newhall and Adams created a number of books and exhibitions of historic significance, particularly the Sierra Club’s This is the American Earth (1960), which, with Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, played a seminal role in launching the first broad-based citizen environmental movement.
Though wilderness and the environment were his grand passions, photography was his calling, his metier, his raison d’etre. Adams never made a creative photograph specifically for environmental purposes. Adams was often criticized for failing to include humans or evidence of “humanity” in his landscape photographs. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known comment that “the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees.”
On the contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions, precisely those wilderness and park areas that have been preserved for all time. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues.
In 1972, Adams contributed images to help publicize Proposition 20, which authorized the state to regulate development along portions of the California coast.
In 1974, he exhibited at the Rencontres d'Arles (formerly known as the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles), an annual summer photography festival in France. He also had a major retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 1975, he co-founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, which handles some of his estate matters.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter commissioned Adams to make the first official photographic portrait of a U.S. president.
Adams died from cardiovascular disease on April 22, 1984, in the Intensive-care unit at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, California, at age 82. He was surrounded by his wife, children Michael and Anne, and five grandchildren.
Ansel Adams gained prominence not only as a photographic technician, but a lifelong conservationist, who pleaded for understanding of, and respect for, the natural environment. Despite the fact, that he spent a large part of his career in commercial photography, he was best known for his majestic landscape photographs. Also, together with Fred Archer, Ansel developed the "Zone System" as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print.
The photo "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico", taken on November 1, 1941, is one of Ansel's most popular works. It became so famous, that at least 1, 300 photographic prints were made during his career. On October 17, 2006, a print of this photo was auctioned for $609,600 by Sotheby's.
Ansel was also known as a co-founder of "Group f/64' and magazine "Aperture".
Adams received a number of awards during his lifetime and posthumously, including Sierra Club John Muir Award in 1963, Conservation Service Award in 1968, Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, Hasselblad Award in 1981 and others. In 1983, he was made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.
In 1985, Minarets Wilderness in the Inyo National Forest and an 11,760-foot peak therein were renamed the Ansel Adams Wilderness and Mount Ansel Adams respectively. Also, in 2007, Ansel was inducted into the California Hall of Fame by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver.
Today, the photographer's works are kept in the collections of different museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and others.
(This work presents the finest selection of Adams' photogr...)
1948Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians. However, his great influence came from his photography. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, the often envisioned 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.
For Adams, the environmental issues of particular importance were Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and above all, the preservation of wilderness. He focused on what he termed the spiritual-emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly resisted the Park Service’s “resortism,” which had led to the overdevelopment of the national parks and their domination by private concessionaires. But the range of issues in which Adams involved himself was encyclopedic. He fought for new parks and wilderness areas, for the Wilderness Act, for wild Alaska and his beloved Big Sur coast of central California, for the mighty redwoods, for endangered sea lions and sea otters, and for clean air and water. An advocate of balanced, restrained use of resources, Adams also fought relentlessly against overbuilt highways, billboards, and all manner of environmental mendacity and shortsightedness. Yet he invariably treated his opponents with respect and courtesy.
Quotations:
"When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence."
"You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved."
"You don't take a photograph, you make it."
"No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit."
"A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed."
"There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs."
"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."
"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."
"Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs."
"In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration."
"A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety."
"Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum."
By 1934 Adams had been elected to the club’s board of directors and was well established as both the artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite.
Adams was also a member of Royal Photographic Society (London) and Photographic Society of America.
Natural shyness and a certain intensity of genius, coupled with the dramatically “earthquaked” nose, caused Adams to have problems fitting in at school. In later life, he noted that he might have been diagnosed as hyperactive. There is also the distinct possibility that he may have suffered from dyslexia.
Adams described himself as a photographer — lecturer — writer. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that he was simply — indeed, compulsively — a communicator. He endlessly traveled the country in pursuit of both the natural beauty he revered and photographed and the audiences he required.
Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists.
Quotes from others about the person
As Beaumont Newhall writes in his FOCUS: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (1993), “Ansel was a great party man and loved to entertain. He had a very dominating personality, and would always be the center of attention.”
In the early 1920s, while on a trip to Yosemite National Park, Ansel Adams met Virginia Best. In 1928, they married. Also, their marriage produced two children — Michael, born in 1933, and Anne, born in 1935.
Adams met Georgia O'Keeffe in Taos, New Mexico in 1929, and they became lifelong friends.
