Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was one of
America’s greatest photographers, famous for his black and white photographs of
natural landscapes of the American West, especially of Yosemite National Park.[1] His first encounter with photography was when he
visited Yosemite in 1916 when he was only 14 years old and took pictures with a
Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie camera from his parents. The connection he felt with
the landscape there transformed his life and he returned to Yosemite each year
to photograph it until his death.[2] Although
Adams was trained as a concert pianist from an early age, by the age 30, he had changed his mind and chose a career in
photography instead. Adams’ photographs were significant in three main ways.
Firstly, because he was very artistic, Adams’ photographs helped to establish photography
as an art form. His photographs were also significant because he developed photographic
techniques and processes in the dark room that improved the creativity of the images.
Finally, his photographs inspired an appreciation of the wilderness and became
very influential in protecting it.[3]
Ansel Adams Photographing in Yosemite
One of the main reasons that Ansel Adams’
photographs were important was because he was a great artist and could bring
together different elements in a landscape and produce a photograph that was a
work of art. [4] In 1933
when he visited Alfred Stieglitz, a famous photographer in New York, Stieglitz
said, “these are some of the finest photos I’ve ever seen”.[5] Stieglitz’s
appreciation of Adams’ artistic ability played a vital role in his career and
in 1936 he gave Adams his own show at An American Place. Adams had begun his
career in the 1920’s with a pictorial style where the idea was to make photographs look like paintings
rather than reflections of reality.[6] But
by the 1930’s he dedicated himself to the principles of “pure” photography
where the artistic power of a photograph came from trying to capture reality
rather than avoid it.[7] He
became one of the most successful photographers at achieving this through his
ability to convey the full range of tones, light and texture. In 1932 he
founded the Group f/64 with another photographer, Edward Weston, which was very
influential in bringing the idea of pure photography to the rest of the photography
world.[8] The Mount
Williamson photograph is a good example of Adams’ artistic ability because he uses the clearing
storm clouds and lighting on the mountains to contrast with the sky. He manages
to keep a sharp focus on both the rocks in the foreground and the distant peaks
in the background to create a feeling of depth and uses shadows and tonal
variations to bring out the texture of the rocks.
The significance of Adams’ photographs came not only from
the fact that they were artistic but because they reflected the importance
Adams put on the technical side of photography as the other half of the
creative process. Adams was disappointed with his first photographs which were just
snapshots so he learnt how to develop his own prints and negatives and
experimented with different processes in the dark room.[10] He started in the 1920’s by using techniques
that achieved the softened and blurred images of pictorialism. But in 1927 he took a pivotal
photograph, called the “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome” that made him abandon the pictorial style. By using a red filter and compensating
with a longer exposure time, he produced a negative in which the sky was darker and achieved the dramatic
contrast with the distant white peak that he wanted in order to match what he had seen and felt, or “visualized”, at the time
of taking the photograph.[11] This was the day he
started to develop his theory of “visualization” that then led to his
scientific technique called the “Zone system”
which allowed a photographer
to control and relate exposure and development in order to produce an image that matched their
creative visualization at the time of taking the photograph.[12] By the end of his career,
Adams had produced many of the most influential technical books on photography
that had ever been written.[13]
Mount Williamson, The Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1945
Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California, 1927
Although Adams never set out to take his landscape photographs specifically for environmental purposes, his artistic and technical skills allowed his photographs to reflect his message that the natural world was beautiful and needed to be preserved. In this way Adams’ photographs became significant in influencing the protection of the environment from the effects of human activities.[14] Adams was criticized in the 1930’s by Henri Cartier-Bresson for not photographing humans and their social problems during the Depression, but ironically the environment became the number one issue by the end of the century.[15] Adams influenced President Franklin Roosevelt to create the Kings Canyon National Park in 1940, after he took photographs from his book “Sierra Nevada: John Muir Trail” with him to lobby Senate on behalf of the Sierra Club, an environmental group of which he was a board director. The “Rae Lake” photograph is an example of one of the photographs from his book and demonstrates Adams’ ability to inspire an appreciation for the natural beauty of the wilderness and the need to conserve it. Adams continued to be committed as a photographer and environmentalist for the rest of his career. After his death, as a tribute to Adams’ environmental contribution, Congress set aside a vast tract of wilderness of the Sierra Nevada and named it “The Ansel Adams Wilderness”.
Rae Lake, Sierra Nevada: John Muir Trail, 1938
[1] Turnage, William. "Ansel Adams
Biography." Anseladams.com.
The Ansel Adams
Gallery, 2012.
Web.
[2] Ansel Adams. Dir. Rick
Burns. Narr. David Ogden Stiers. PBS - Warner Home Video, 2002. DVD.
[3] Sierra Club.
"Ansel Adams History." Sierra
Club.org. Sierra Club, 2012. Web. 7 Jan. 2012.
[4] Ansel Adams
[5] Ansel Adams
[6] Turnage
[7] Ansel Adams
[8] Turnage
[9] Hausatonic Museum of Art. "ANSEL ADAMS:
Classic Images – Mount Williamson, The Sierra
Nevada." Hcc.commnet.edu. Housatonic Community
College. Web.
[10] Ansel Adams
[11] Hausatonic Museum of Art. "ANSEL ADAMS:
Classic Images - Monolith, The Face of
Half Dome." Hcc.commnet.edu. Housatonic Community College. Web.
[12] Turnage
[13] Turnage
[14] Sierra Club
[15] Ansel Adams
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