Ansel Adams 1902-1984

By Patrick Heath

Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, Gelatine silver print, 14 7/8 × 19" (37.8 × 48.3 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2021 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was a photographer whose oeuvre is filled with the captivating landscapes of the American West. Adams is noted for his outstanding technical precision, pioneering ‘straight’ photography that advocated a departure from the Pictorialist method preferred by the majority of Western landscape photographers of the early 20th Century. Adams is also remembered for his passionate commitment to environmentalist causes; he was deeply involved in the Sierra Club, a conservationist organisation that lobbied the government in the creation of National Parks. Adams’ principal impression on the discipline was his collection of photographs, commissioned by the Department of the Interior, documenting various National Parks across America in the Modernist style, with laudable attention to natural structures and light.

 Adams was born in 1902, the only son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. His early life was relatively turbulent. In 1906 an earthquake in his native town of San Francisco caused him to break his nose badly - he would carry these scars and the subsequent disfigurement for the rest of his life (Adams later referred to his nose as ‘Earthquaked’). The following year, a national financial downturn ravaged his family’s timber business and, in turn, caused his father a life-long pecuniary ruin. Despite harbouring qualities of genius, Adams was a rather rebellious student and had a despondent attitude to his academic work; his father eventually allowed him to leave school in 1914, aged 12. San Francisco was relatively underdeveloped when Adams was a child, he spent his life after school hiking and soon became enamoured with the natural habitat of the Golden Gate. Incidentally, his father gave him his first camera (a Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie) in 1914 during a trip to Yosemite, a place that he was “coloured and modulated by the great earth gesture”. Adams would also prove himself to be a talented pianist, autodidactically learning for a few years before taking up lessons with the hope of perusing professional work. Whilst his passion for photography ultimately took command of his life, the piano was an important grounding for Adams in the midst of a tempestuous childhood. Adams joined the Sierra Club in 1920, and he was hired as the summer caretaker of the visitor facility in Yosemite Valley for three years. During this time, he associated with the violinist and amateur photographer Cedric Wright with whom he, of course, shared interest in music and art, but they also both ardently followed the philosophy of Edward Carpenter, the English socialist utopian who was a notable proponent of vegetarianism and wrote passionately on the environment and against vivisection. Adams would express the influence that Carpenter had on him, stating "I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate."

Adams’ first foray into the world of professional photography was with the Sierra Club where he was hired as the official photographer for trips in the Sierra Nevada. His initial Yosemite photographs were published in 1920 with prints being sold by Harry Best the following year. His earliest photographs are marked by the Pictorial style; his ‘Lodgepole Pines, Lyell Fork of the Merced River, Yosemite National Park’ (1921) is an example of this, utilising a soft-focus lens and the bromoil method in the processing of the negative to assuage any remaining harsh structures in the image. However, by 1925 Adams had ceased his commitment to Pictorialism, opting instead for the ‘visualisation’ method using his 5x7 large format Korona View Camera. One can perceive the stark difference in photographic process in the 1927 ‘Monolith-The Face of Half Dome’, a subject that he was desperate to make a photograph of that would accurately depict and represent the image in his mind’s eye. Adams remarked that the resulting print was the first that “achieved… true visualisation”; the use of a red filter allowed him to manipulate the tones of the sky and the rock face, creating a dark and imposing scene with the Half-Dome dominating the composition. The 1930s saw Adams transition fully from music to photography, he met the esteemed photographer Paul Strand at the start of the decade and together they cultivated a passion for ‘straight photography’ with an emphasis on simple compositions and sharp focusing lenses. Adams would also meet Edward Weston in 1927 with whom he would create the seminal, but short lived, Group f/64 whose manifesto pledged a form of photography that accepted the limitations of the medium and focused on ‘pure’ picture-making. Adams had garnered an illustrious reputation by the end of the 1930s, his contributions to the magazine ‘Camera Craft’ and his book ‘Making a Photograph’ (1935) demonstrated his incredible technical ability and understanding of camera mechanics. Works such as ‘Rocks and Clouds, Sierra Nevada Foothills, California’ (1938) demanded a phenomenal comprehension of the relationship between the mechanics of the lens and the camera; the resulting image seems to illustrate sunlight seeping between a rock formation. Adams also spent a significant amount of time in New York during the 1930s being mentored by Alfred Stieglitz, a hero of his. Stieglitz gave Adams his first New York solo exhibition in 1936 in which he displayed photographs of landscapes from across Western America, but he also revealed his competency for creating images of close-up subjects. In his series ‘Leaves - Mills College Campus, California’ (1935) one can discern his affinity for natural subjects. Once again, using a red filter, Adams managed to make his photographs dark and emotional, but he retained the precise detail that defined him stylistically.

The 1940s saw Adams use his notoriety as a photographer to elevate the genre in the public consciousness. In 1940, he worked with the Museum of Modern Art in New York and founded the first curatorial department devoted to photography as an art form. The following year, Adams was contracted by the National Park Service to create murals for the department’s new office buildings; unfortunately, due to the America’s involvement in the Second World War, Adam’s photographs were never installed. However, despite the Department’s ownership of the negatives, Adams was able to illegally keep hold of a number of them. One of these was ‘Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico’ (1941), a juxtaposition of a black sky hovering above a well-lit, rural farm. The moon hangs above the composition, a single white spot amidst the oppressive ether. During the war, Adams worked for Edward Steichen’s Naval Aviation Photographic Unit; his most notable work from this period was the photographic essay ‘Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans’ (1945). Adams felt that the backlash against Japanese-Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbour was entirely unjustified and he sought to document their struggle to maintain themselves in American society. In 1952, Adams cofounded the photographic magazine, ‘Aperture’ and continued his work in Yosemite throughout the decade; his annual workshops in the Park amassed a great following and they would continue for three decades. Most of Adams’ notable artistic output was completed by 1950; however, in the latter stages of his career he opted for the square format using a Hasselblad 6x6 camera and continued to make celebrated images. He also had an uptick in environmental work, publishing number of volumes on the subject. ‘This Is the American Earth’ (1960) was developed in conjunction with the Sierra Club, which he would remain a director of until 1971; it was one of the essential books in the reawakening of the conservation movement of the 1960s and ’70s. The 1970s would see Adams revising old negatives and creating sizable mural prints that ranged up to 150cm in width. In 1975, Adams co-founded the Centre for Creative Photography, a neoteric research facility and gallery for the history of photography located in Arizona. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour, for "his efforts to preserve this country's wild and scenic areas, both on film and on earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature's monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a national institution." The President also commissioned a portrait by Adams the year before. Adams died from cardiovascular disease on April 22, 1984, in the intensive-care unit at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, California, at age 82.

Bibliography:

Adams, Ansel; Alinder, Mary Street (1985). Ansel Adams, an Autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown.

Alinder, Mary; Stillman, Andrea; Adams, Ansel; Stegner, Wallace (1988). Ansel Adams: Letters and Images 1916–1984

Sierra Club (2008). "Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club: About Ansel Adams". Sierra Club. Archived from the original on February 1, 2010. Retrieved February 14, 2021

Sierra Club "Ansel Adams – History". Sierra Club. Retrieved March 4, 2019.

Szarkowski, J. (2020, April 18). Ansel Adams. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ansel-Adams-American-photographer