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Ansel Adams (1902-1984)

Ansel Adams, the monumental American photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California in 1902. Shy and intense as a young boy, he grew up exploring his wild surroundings, and he found in nature the joy that would mark him for life.

In 1916, taking a Kodak No. 1 Box camera given to him by his parents, Adams visited the Yosemite Sierra. He was captured and transformed by its vast beauty and he would spend time there each year until he died. In 1919, he joined the Sierra Club, a new group dedicated to preserving the wilderness. He started to photograph their month-long trips into the High Sierra and his first published photos were in their club bulletins.

In the Sierra in 1927 he made his first fully pictorial photograph and found that he could make photographs that were, as he said, "...an austere and blazing poetry of the real." He then began to meet other influential photographers such Edward Weston. Together he and Weston formed the renowned Group f/64, which led to Adams' first one-man show in San Francisco. He then went on to New York to meet the well-known photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, who would play a significant role in Adams' career. Still, in spite of his growing success, Adams was compelled to support himself with commercial photography for many years.

A man of enormous energy and charisma, he would work tirelessly as a photographer, lecturer, and writer. He was a technical master of photography, the author of ten of the most influential books ever written on photography, and he played a key role in establishing photography as a fine art. He was also a relentless environmental activist, writing thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy and fighting to preserve the American wilderness.

However his greatest influence were his black and white photographs, which became icons of wild America: Oaktree, Sunrise, Northern California, 1966; Birds on a Beach, Evening, 1966; Nevada Fall, Rainbow, Yosemite National Park-1946; and The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942.

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