Adams, Ansel (b. Feb. 20, 1902, San Francisco, Calif.), important landscape photographer of the 20th century, especially known for technical innovations and masterly representations of the dramatic sweep of mountainous terrain. He took his first photographs when he was 14 years old, but music then dominated his attention; he began seriously to study piano and composition at the age of 18. He continued to photograph as an avocation, however, and, in 1927, published his first portfolio, Parmellian Prints of the High Sierras, photographs in the style of the pictorialists, photographers who imitated Impressionistic painting by suppressing detail in favour of soft, misty effects. The success of this portfolio led him to devote his life to photography. In 1930 Adams met the U.S. photographer Paul Strand whose photographs emphasized beauty of tone and sharp detail. Adams was so impressed by them that he adopted Strand’s approach, called “straight photography.” With such photographers as Edward Weston, Adams in 1932 formed Group f. 64, a loose association of photographers who used large cameras and small apertures to capture nature’s infinite variety of light and textures. Holding as paragons the crisp brilliance of daguerreotypes and the landscapes of the 19th- century photographers Timothy H. O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, Adams became one of the outstanding technicians in the history of photography, producing exquisite prints often melancholic in mood. In 1935 he published Making a Photograph, the first of many books on photographic technique.

It was illustrated with reproductions of his own prints, the virtuosity of which immediately won him an international reputation. In 1941 Adams began making photo-murals for the U.S. Department of the Interior. Forced by the large scale of this work to master the light and space of such immense landscapes as “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” (1941), he developed the zone system, a method of predetermining precisely what tone each part of the scene to be photographed will produce in the final print. The zone system was subsequently accepted as a basic approach to photography. Thoughout most of his career, Adams worked to increase public acceptance of photography as a fine art. He directed the Pag eantof Photography exhibition at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1940 and, in the same year, helped found the world’s first museum collection of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Similarly, in 1946, he established at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the first academic department to teach photography as a profession. An ardent conservationist since adolescence, Adams served from 1936 as a director of the Sierra Club, a conservationist organization. Many of his photographic books, such as My Camera in the National Parks and This Is the American Earth (1960), are specific pleas for the preservation of the wildernesses of the U.S.


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Author Resource BoxMarried, 43, living in Ohio and working as a financial consultant. Working on my second degree in history.Read John Bernham Profile