Ansel Adams, Photography

Ansel Adams, Photography

As a young child, Adams was injured in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, when an aftershock threw him into a garden wall. His broken nose was never properly set, remaining crooked for the rest of his life.

Mount Williamson by Ansel Adams

The Grand Canyon

·  Ansel Adams was born on February 20, 1902, in San Francisco, California, with a career that spanned six decades.

·  Adams was a hyperactive and sickly child with few friends, dismissed from several schools for bad behavior, and educated by private tutors and members of his family from the age of 12.

·  Adams rose to prominence as a photographer of the American West, particularly Yosemite National Park, using his work to promote conservation of wilderness areas.

·  Known for his photos of Yosemite National Park, Adams is arguably the best black and white photographer in modern history.

·  He learned darkroom techniques, read photography magazines, attended camera club meetings, and developed a filter system that allowed all the values to show in black and white photographs, and back then, THAT was a huge deal!

·  His iconic black-and-white images helped to establish photography among the fine arts.

·  As a result, Adams was at once America’s foremost landscape photographer and one of its most respected environmentalists.

·  Adams’s role in the history of photography, however, goes beyond his achievements as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. As a leader in the study and appreciation of photography as an art, he played a major role in establishing the first department of photography in an art museum, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

·  He spent time in New Mexico with artists including Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe and Paul Strand. He began to publish essays and instructional books on photography.

·  Adams was a tireless advocate for improving the reproduction of photographs in books.

·  Although he devoted a lifetime to the cause of wilderness preservation, “Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service, but as a form of private worship.

·  By the 1960s, appreciation of photography as an art form had expanded to the point at which Adams’ images were shown in large galleries and museums.

·  Adams spent much of the 1970s printing negatives in order to satisfy demand for his iconic works.

·  Adams had a heart attack and died on April 22, 1984, at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, California, at the age of 82.