Ansel Easton Adams (1902 – 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park, says Wikipedia.
With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Adams primarily used large-format cameras despite their size, weight, setup time, and film cost, because their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images.
His photographs are reproduced on calendars, posters, and in books, making his photographs widely distributed.
After young Ansel was dismissed from several private schools for his restlessness and inattentiveness, his father decided to pull him out of school in 1915, at the age of 12. Adams was then educated by private tutors, his Aunt Mary, and by his father. His Aunt Mary was a follower of Robert G. Ingersoll, a 19th century agnostic, abolitionist and women's suffrage advocate. As a result of his Aunt's influence, Ingersoll's teachings were important to Ansel's upbringing.[11]
During the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, his father insisted that, as part of his education, Adams spend part of each day studying the exhibits.
He taught himself piano at age twelve. Music became the main focus of his later youth.
His father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Brownie box camera at age 14.
"I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate."[22] He decided that the purpose of his art, whether photography or music, was to reveal that beauty to others and to inspire them to the same calling.
In 1927, Adams produced his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, in his new style, which included his famous image Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, taken with his Korona view camera using glass plates and a dark red filter (to heighten the tonal contrasts). On that excursion, he had only one plate left and he "visualized" the effect of the blackened sky before risking the last shot. As he stated, "I had been able to realize a desired image: not the way the subject appeared in reality but how it felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print".
During the 1930s, many photographers including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans believed they had a social obligation to reveal the harsh times of the Depression through their art. Mostly resistant to the "art for life's sake" movement, Adams did begin in the 1930s to deploy his photographs in the cause of wilderness preservation. In part, he was inspired by the increasing desecration of Yosemite Valley by commercial development, including a pool hall, bowling alley, golf course, shops, and automobile traffic. He created a limited-edition book in 1938, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, as part of the Sierra Club's efforts to secure the designation of Sequoia and Kings Canyon as national parks. This book and his testimony before Congress played a vital role in the success of the effort, and Congress designated the area as a National Park in 1940.
Adams was distressed by the Japanese American Internment that occurred after the Pearl Harbor attack. He requested permission to visit the Manzanar War Relocation Center in the Owens Valley, at the foot of Mount Williamson. The resulting photo-essay first appeared in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit, and later was published as Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans.
Adams's black-and-white photographs of the West which became the foremost record of what many of the National Parks were like before tourism, and his persistent advocacy helped expand the National Park system. He skillfully used his works to promote many of the goals of the Sierra Club and of the nascent environmental movement, but always insisted that, as far as his photographs were concerned, "beauty comes first".
He reminded his students, "It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium."[73]
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