Ansel Adams (b. 1902-1984)
Ansel Adams is the leading figure in twentieth century photography and the creator of the most famous art photograph in its history, "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941." He is best known for the hundreds of magnificent landscapes he made in a photographic style that has been emulated by tens of thousands of photographers. His vast body of work also included portraits, architecture, winter sports, industrial scenes, social documentation, and commercial photography. Adams wrote and taught about photography with tireless dedication and energy, educating countless students, teachers, curators, collectors and millions of people worldwide about its aesthetic, spiritual and technical components. EARLY YEARS Growing up in San Francisco in the early years of the 20th century, Adams was a hyperactive, temperamental child who struggled emotionally and scholastically. In Nancy Newhall's biography Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light (1980), she describes the young Adams as ". . . an odd looking boy, very thin, as fast and nimble as a squirrel. Indeed, with the wide dark eyes, the swollen nose and slightly open mouth — for years he had difficulty breathing — he resembled a squirrel. Obviously he possessed a vivid imagination: he suffered from nightmares, delighted in comedy and fantasy, and was profoundly moved by beauty." A maladjusted student, Adams was sent to various schools where he struggled with bullies, boredom and exasperating, incompetent teachers until his father in desperation decided to home-school him. Adams studied literature and language and began taking piano lessons which he adored, given his innate ability to play and read music. A series of music teachers instilled discipline into his previously chaotic life and encouraged the boy's desire to become a classical pianist. In 1915 when he was thirteen, his father gave him a year's pass to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal), explaining to his son that this exhibit was to be his "school" for that year. Here Adams made what are believed to be his first photographs, prints he included in an album that also contained his earliest photographs of Yosemite National Park. "I often wonder," wrote Adams, "at the strength and courage my father had in taking me out of the traditional school situation and providing me with these extraordinary learning experiences. I am certain he established the positive direction of my life that otherwise, given my native hyperactivity, could have been confused and catastrophic." In 1916 when Adams was fourteen his parents took him to Yosemite National Park where he made his first photographs with a Kodak Box Brownie. He would later write: “That first impression of the valley—white water, azaleas, cool fir caverns, tall pines and stolid oaks, cliffs rising to undreamed-of heights, the poignant sounds and smells of the Sierra . . . was a culmination of experience so intense as to be almost painful." In the summer of 1920 Adams took a job as the custodian of the LeConte Memorial Lodge, the Sierra Club's headquarters in Yosemite, which he held for four summers. By 1925 the 23 year old was guiding camping trips in the High Sierra where he was in charge of cooking, campfires and pack animals. Despite his duties he still managed to pack in his own glass plates, cameras and photographic equipment strapped to a mule. In 1927 Adams created a portfolio of 19 photographs of the High Sierra taken over the previous six years. Dubbed "Parmelian Prints" (a name he coined to describe silver gelatin prints on extremely thin Kodak Vitava Athena Parchment T), they were elegantly composed scenes of distant peaks, trails in the wilderness and scenic campsites. The following year he became the Sierra Club's High Trip's official photographer. Throughout the 1920s Adams worked in a Pictorialist style, but by the time he helped found Group f/64 in 1932 he had become an advocate of "straight," unmanipulated photography. THE SIERRA CLUB The Sierra Club proved to be vital to Adams's growing reputation as an artist and an environmentalist. Besides fostering his outdoor skills as a lodge caretaker, trail guide and campsite scout, it published his first photographs and writings in the Sierra Club Bulletin and later used his photographs to influence government policies to protect wilderness areas. Adams was elected to the Sierra Club's Board of Directors in 1934, a position he maintained until 1971. Due in part to his fame as an artist and environmentalist, the Club became a powerful national organization that lobbied to create national parks and protect the environment from destructive development. In 1960 Adams's photographs and prose that had first appeared in the club's Bulletin grew into the Sierra Club's first Exhibit Format (oversize) book, This Is The American Earth, a collaboration by Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall. It contributed greatly to the conservation movement of the 1960s and 70s. During the last years of his life Adams became allied with the Wilderness Society. In 1979 President Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. VISUALIZATION Adams had his first "visualization experience" while photographing Half Dome in Yosemite in 1927. Visualization is the ability to anticipate -- to see in the mind's eye, -- the final print while viewing the subject. It makes it possible for a photographer to apply the numerous controls of the craft in precise ways to achieve a desired result. Visualization would become an increasingly important concept to Adams as time went on. In his autobiography he described the first time he conceived of the idea. "After a long day with my camera, I had only two photographic plates left. I found myself staring at Half Dome, facing the monolith, seeing and feeling things that only the photograph itself can tell you. I took the first exposure and, somehow, I knew it was inadequate. It did not capture what I was feeling. It was not going to reflect the tremendous experience. Then, to use Stieglitz’s expression, I saw in my mind’s eye what the picture should look like and I realized how I must get it. I put on a red filter and figured out the exposure correctly, and I succeeded! When I made the prints, it proved my concept was correct. The first exposure came out just all right. It was a good photograph, but it in no way had the spirit and excitement I had felt. The second was Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, which speaks for itself." ANSEL ADAMS AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ Adams saw Paul Strand's photographs for the first time in 1930 and knew instantly that photography, not music, would be his life's work. In March 1933, during the height of the Great Depression, he and his wife Virginia traveled to New York City to meet Alfred Stieglitz, the world’s acknowledged photographic leader. Stieglitz looked through Adams’ portfolio and said he liked the “straight” photographs seen with “sensitivity.” “You are always welcome here,” he told the nervous young photographer. Stieglitz gave Adams his first exhibit at An American Place in 1936. Over the next half century Adams would become Alfred Stieglitz's successor in promoting the art of photography to the world. His optimistic, gregarious, generous personality, coupled with prodigious talent won him the admiration and attention of curators, art patrons, photographers, naturalists, environmentalists, teachers, students, and consumers of popular culture. In his quest to solidify photography's status in the pantheon of fine art, Adams helped establish the department of photography at New York City's Museum of Modem Art (1940), founded the school of photography at what is now the San Francisco Art Institute (1946), had his own successful series of educational workshops on photography in Yosemite and Carmel, was instrumental in founding the Friends of Photography in Carmel, California (1966), and helped create the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson (1975). ANSEL ADAMS AND GEORGIA O'KEEFFE Adams met Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico in 1930 at the home of Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan in Taos. Over the years they became such good friends that when Stieglitz died in 1946 O’Keeffe gave Adams a valuable Stieglitz photograph titled “The City at Night” as a memento. During the 1930s and 40s O'Keeffe began spending long stretches of time in New Mexico and in 1945 bought and renovated a sprawling 18th-century adobe hacienda in Abiquiu. Three years after Stieglitz's death, the 62-year-old artist moved permanently to the Chama Valley. On one of Adams’s many trips through New Mexico O'Keeffe invited him and David McAlpin (a philanthropist and investment banker) to visit her in Abiquiu in the autumn of 1937. Adams took photographs of her painting the landscape near her home before the three embarked on a camping trip through New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado guided by Orville Cox, the head wrangler from Ghost Ranch. In his 1937 photograph titled “George O’Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, AZ,” Adams caught the usually formidable O’Keeffe in a delightfully unguarded moment. In 1941 Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, hired Adams to photograph western lands and Native Americans under his department's jurisdiction. Adams was paid at the highest rate then made to consultants by the government; $22.22 per day. His intention was to make some thirty-six photographic murals to hang on the walls of the Department of the Interior that would positively influence congressmen, lobbyists, and government officials. Adams understood the visual force of monumental photographs and chose his finest pictures to print up to 6.5 x 9.5 feet. The technology to make these prints was so cumbersome that he used Moulin Studio facilities in San Francisco. When he undertook the mural project, Adams was still saddled with his duties as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Advisors of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art which he had helped found in 1940. Thus, he was unable to start the project until June 1942 when he headed west to take pictures. He planned to photograph in Colorado, Yellowstone, the Tetons, Glacier National Park, Mount Rainier and Crater Lake. Given his late start and the fact that World War II prevented his contract from being renewed, he made a number of now classic photographs but never finished the mural project. Except in the last few years of his life, Adams did not sign his murals or screens. He felt these large prints should be flush mounted with the frame directly on the edge of the print, leaving no mount board to sign on. THE ZONE SYSTEM Feeling there was too much chance involved in picture taking, Adams struggled to find a proved, efficient, repeatable system that could be taught to people with a variety of individual styles. The Zone System he invented enabled photographers to anticipate and control the tonal range of prints based on a series of "zones" or shades of gray ranging from black, which is zero, to white, which is ten. The zones corresponded to exposure settings on the camera and could be used to identify the relative brightness of separate parts of the subject being photographed as they would appear on the print. Liz Kay |