American genius behind the shutter

"The exhibition 'Ansel Adams' gives us the opportunity to explore the hidden EIE depths of an artist known for just a few iconic images. The wide range and high quality of pictures ... reveal a photographer with many dimensions, not just the well-known maker of dramatic landscapes," notes Paul Roth, curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Adams' photographic style, which fuses romanticism, poetic vision, technical precision, and environmental advocacy, has had an unparalleled influence on all landscape photography in its wake--and on how Americans see and think about their country's wilderness areas.

Born in 1902 to an upper class family in San Francisco, Adams was an unusually curious and precocious child. Trained by private tutors after the age of 12, he began preparing for a career as a concert pianist. At 14, he simultaneously discovered photography and Yosemite Valley National Park in California, using his first camera to record views during a family trip. After his 1928 marriage to Virginia Best, daughter of a Yosemite concessionaire, Adams devoted himself to photography.

His earliest landscapes reflected the prevailing soft-focus "pictorialism" common to art photography of the time. In 1930, he met New York photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand, who fused hard-edged modernist aesthetics with social concern in his pioneering work. Strand's commitment to photography as a medium for direct, realistic depiction influenced Adams greatly. By the time of his first solo museum exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 1931, Adams had found his mature style.

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In 1932, Adams joined fellow photographers Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard van Dyke, and John Paul Edwards, among others, to form Group f/64, a coalition of artists devoted to photographic realism. The modernist evolution of Adams' technique began a lifetime of dedication to craft. Adams became a restless and innovative experimentalist, developing many now-standard photographic practices and reinventing his approach at many stages in his career.

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Adams' sharply-focused wilderness views became immensely popular, and his fame spread beyond the art world. His books, Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography (1935) and Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (1938), expanded his audience from camera hobbyists to a broad public interested in America's western landscape. Adams' reputation was further established by a 1936 show at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery (called An American Place) and by his inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's first historical survey of the medium in 1937. Throughout that decade and into the 1950s, Adams photographed the natural scene and promoted his own work through publications, exhibitions, and personal appearances. Later books, such as Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada (1948), My Camera in the National Parks (1950), and This is the American Earth (1960), made Adams the best-known and most widely respected photographic artist in the world. Though known principally for his imagery, Adams perhaps equally is important as a pioneering educator and a tireless crusader for the institutional recognition of photography as a fine art. He was a driving force behind the establishment of the photography departments at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1946, he founded the Department of Photography at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute). With photographer Minor White and others, Adams created the photo journal Aperture in 1952, and his Yosemite Workshops revolutionized photographic education from their inception in 1955. In later years, Adams continued to advocate for photography's acceptance as an art form, co-founding The Friends of Photography in 1967 and the Center for Creative Photography in 1975.

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Adams equally is recognized for his important role in the development of the environmental movement in the U.S. A longtime member of the Sierra Club's board of directors, Adams intended his photographs to inspire the conservation of natural resources. His art had a great impact on public policy throughout his career, particularly on the creation of the Kings Canyon National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. His fame gave him unusual access to national leaders, and he tirelessly lobbied congressmen, Secretaries of the Interior, and presidents from the 1930s onward.

By the late 1950s, Adams' environmentalism and energetic efforts on behalf of the medium began to supersede his own creative work. Experiments with new techniques, tools, and materials led to diverse types of imagery, and he made fewer of the iconic landscapes for which he was best known. As demand for his older work increased, Adams began to print many of his earlier images in a more graphic style, using dramatic tonal contrasts to recast his original vision (in the manner, he said, that older musical compositions are reinterpreted by subsequent generations of musicians). The popularity of these new prints, and the increasing ubiquity of Adams' imagery in books and on posters and calendars, played a significant role in the establishment of a market for fine art photography. By the time of his death, Adams was as widely known and celebrated as any other artist before him.