Photographer, born in San Francisco, California, USA. His work is notable for his broad landscapes of W USA, especially the Yosemite in the 1930s. He was one of the founders with Edward Weston of the f/64 Group (1932), and helped to set up the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (1940). He was a prolific writer and lecturer, always stressing the importance of image quality at every stage of a photographer's work.
Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer, best known for his black and white photographs of California's Yosemite Valley.
Adams was also the author of numerous books about photography, including his trilogy of technical instruction manuals (The Camera, The Negative and The Print).
He and Fred Archer are credited with creating the zone system, a technique which allows photographers to translate the light they see into specific densities on negatives and paper, thus giving them better control over finished photographs. Adams also pioneered the idea of visualization (which he often called 'previsualization', though he later acknowledged that term to be a redundancy) of the finished print based upon the measured light values in the scene being photographed.
Life
Adams was born in San Francisco, California in an upper-class family.
Adams disliked the uniformity of the education system and left school in 1915, at the age of 12 to educate himself. His original passion was to become a concert pianist, but Adams became interested in photography after seeing Paul Strand's negatives. Adams long alternated between a career as a concert pianist and one as a photographer.
At age seventeen, Adams joined the Sierra Club, a group dedicated to preserving the natural world's wonders and resources. Adams was an avid mountaineer in his youth and participated in the club's annual "high trips", and was later responsible for several first ascents in the Sierra Nevada. Adams became an environmentalist, and his photographs are a record of what many of these national parks were like before human intervention and travel.
Photographs in Adams' limited edition book, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, along with his testimony, are credited with helping secure the designation of Sequoia and Kings Canyon as national parks in 1940.
During World War Two Adams worked on creating epic photographic murals for the Department of the Interior. Adams was distressed by the Japanese American Internment that occurred after the Pearl Harbor attack. The resulting photo-essay first appeared in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit, and later was published as Born Free and Equal: Photographs of the loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California.
In 1952 Adams was one of the founders of the magazine Aperture.
In March 1963, Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall accepted a commission from Clark Kerr, then President of the University of California, to produce a series of photographs of the University's campuses to commemorate the centennial celebration of the University.
Adams was the recipient of three Guggenheim fellowships during his career.
Ansel Adams died on April 22, 1984 from heart failure aggravated by cancer.
Publishing rights for the Adams' photographs are handled by the trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.
The Minarets Wilderness in the Inyo National Forest was renamed the Ansel Adams Wilderness in 1984 in his honor. Mount Ansel Adams, a 11,760 ft.
The full archive of Ansel Adams' work can be found at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
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