Week of 3/31 - 4/7

Ansel Adams


Adams, Ansel Easton (1902-1984) is an American photographer, known for his black-and-white photographs of Yosemite National Park, the California coast, and other wilderness areas of the American West. Adams's painstaking control of tonality and detail made him unequalled as a technical master of the black and white print. His photographs convey both the vast scale and the intimate detail of a landscape.

Adams was born into a wealthy family in San Francisco, California, and first trained to become a concert pianist. His interest in photography began during a 1916 trip to Yosemite National Park. His earliest photographs were in the soft-focus style popular at that time. But after contact with American photographer Paul Strand and others in 1930, his work began to develop the sharp focus that became his trademark. It was at this time that he abandoned his musical career in favor of a career in photography. He moved to Yosemite in 1937 and later to Carmel, California.

Adams invented a method of exposure and development called the zone system, which he used to divide the gradations of light in a scene into ten zones from black to white; this allowed him to visualize the different levels of gray in the final photograph with great accuracy. The control he achieved with this system enabled him to capture such subtle changes of tone and light that he could return again and again to the same scene, yet produce images that were always fresh, never repetitive.

He spent much of his life photographing in the national parks, and served as an official photographer for the Sierra Club, a conservation organization, but his other activities and achievements were many and varied. In 1932 Adams and other California photographers, including Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, founded an influential group called f/64, which was devoted to taking straightforward photographs in sharp focus. In 1935 Adams published Making a Photograph, the first of a series of technical manuals. He helped found the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1940, the first such department in any museum. In 1946 he helped establish the first academic department to teach photography, at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute), and also taught at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. He took part in his first photography workshop at Yosemite in 1940, and from 1955 to 1981 he held annual photography workshops there. In 1943 he took photographs that documented the conditions of Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II.

Adams published more than two dozen books, including My Camera in the National Parks (1950), Ansel Adams: Images 1923-1974 (1974), Photographs of the Southwest (1976), and Yosemite and the Range of Light (1979). Shortly after his death Ansel Adams: An Autobiography was published in 1985.

In 1984 the United States Congress established the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area, between Yosemite National Park and the John Muir Wilderness Area in California. Mount Ansel Adams, at the head of the Lyell Fork of the Merced River on the southeast boundary of Yosemite National Park, was named for him in 1985. The Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco opened in 1989 to exhibit and promote his work along with that of other photographers.

**As taken from Encarta**


Masters of Photography
Adams Gallery
Ansel Adams: An American Icon
Ansel Adams: 1902-1984

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