Kaumron Eidgahy

Ms. Smolonsky
Photography 1: Period 1
21 August 2014
Famous Photographer Research Notes Ansel Adams
The king of wilderness landscape photography and the deviser of the zone
system for metering and exposure.
Lived from February 20, 1902 to April 22,1984
When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of
1906 threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him
for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in the financial panic of 1907,
and Adamss father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly attempting to
recoup.
The most important result of Adamss somewhat solitary and unmistakably
different childhood was the joy that he found in nature, as evidenced by his taking
long walks in the still-wild reaches of the Golden Gate.
For the next dozen years the piano was Adamss primary occupation and, by
1920, his intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for
photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his
frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft
required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his
influential writings and teachings on photography.
He met his wife, Virginia Best, in Yosemite; they were married in 1928. The
couple had two children.
The Sierra Club was vital to Adamss early success as a photographer. His first
published photographs and writings appeared in the clubs 1922 Bulletin, and he
had his first one man exhibition in 1928 at the clubs San Francisco headquarters.
Nineteen twenty seven was the pivotal year of Adamss life. He made his first
fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and took his first
High Trip. More important, he came under the influence of Albert M. Bender, a
San Francisco insurance magnate and patron of arts and artists. Literally the day
after they met, Bender set in motion the preparation and publication of Adams
first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras.
In the same year Adams met photographer Paul Strand, whose images had a
powerful impact on Adams and helped to move him away from the pictorial
style he had favored in the 1920s. Adams began to pursue straight photography,
in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized, and the final print gave no
appearance of being manipulated in the camera or the darkroom. Adams was soon
to become straight photographys mast articulate and insistent champion.
San Franciscos DeYoung Museum promptly gave f/64 (coalesced around the
recognized greatness of Weston and the dynamic energy of Adams) an exhibition
and, in that same year, gave Adams his first one-man museum show.
Adamss star rose rapidly in the early 1930s, propelled in part by his ability and in
part by his effusive energy and activity. He made his first visit to New York in
1933 and in 1933 the Delphic Gallery gave Adams his first New York show. His
first series of technical articles was published in Camera Craft in 1934, and his
first widely distributed book, Making a Photograph, appeared in 1935. Most
important, in 1936 Stieglitz gave Adams a one-man show at An American Place.
Recognition, however, did not alleviate Adamss financial pressures. In a letter
dated 6 August 1935 he wrote Weston, I have been busy, but broke. Cant seem
to climb over the financial fence.
Adams developed the famous and highly complex zone system of controlling
and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively
visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that
visualization. He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography,
which are the most influential books ever written on the subject.
Adams felt an intense commitment to promoting photography as a fine art and
played a key role in the establishment of the first museum department of
photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the
environment. However, his great influence came from his photography. When
people thought of national parks they envisioned Adams photographs. He created
a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the
emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing
Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining
figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape
painting and photography.