Ansel Adams, arguably the best-known photographer in the history of the medium, was the quintessential 20th-century American artist. His subject matter was wilderness and the American West, his medium was photography, and his tools and techniques were entirely modern, though rooted in the America of Thoreau, Emerson, and Muir. A renowned environmental activist, passionate explorer of wilderness, and unrelenting workaholic, Adams, through his lifelong leadership in the Sierra Club and his tireless writing, lecturing, and lobbying, helped launch history's first broad-based citizens' environmental movement.
Adams' photographs are icons of wild America. From his earliest hikes in the Yosemite Sierra in 1916, when he began photographing its magnificent vistas with a Kodak Box Brownie camera, Adams soon became committed to a personal mission to preserve the American wilderness, protect the National Parks system, and advance a wide range of environmental issues and philosophies.
If there is one quality that particularly defines Adams' photographs, it is light. Even in his early works, such as Lodgepole Pines, Lyell Fork of the Merced River, California, 1921, made with a soft-focus lens, the dominant characteristic of the image is the sense of light in the slender trees along the water's edge. In the 1930s, when Adams was honing his photographic craft by concentrating on still lifes, such as Rose and Driftwood, San Francisco, California, ca. 1932, and "found arrangements" such as Boards and Thistles, San Francisco, California, 1932, it was again light that he explored, light as it delineates the subject.
With his mature work from the 1940s and 1950s, Adams moved into the genre for which he is most known and loved: his sweeping, dramatic photographs of America's wild places illuminated by every kind of light�from sunrise to sunset to moonrise. To make his most famous photograph, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, he raced against time to set up his camera before the sun set behind him and no longer illuminated the white graveyard crosses beneath the rising moon. And in his photograph entitled Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Long Pine, California, 1944, Adams patiently waited in the dark to capture the sun's dawn rays as they illuminated the mountains and meadow where a horse grazed. In this attention to the ever-changing quality of light as it described the elemental Western landscape, Adams is the direct descendant of 19th-century American painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran and 19th-century photographers such as T.H. O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins.
Adams was in his seventies before he began to make enough money from sales of his creative photographs and books to support himself. Until that time, he had worked on commercial projects ranging from portraiture to catalogs to photojournalism, taught photography, and served as a consultant to Polaroid, Hasselblad, and others. He lectured extensively and wrote many "how-to" articles. Adams developed the well-known Zone System to control and relate exposure and development, and wrote a six-volume technical photography manual that remains the most influential text on photography.
Adams was deeply committed to promoting photography as a fine art. He played a key role in establishing the world's first museum department of photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was one of the moving forces behind the photographic periodical Aperture, and he wrote articles for and contributed photographs to many hundreds of other magazines. He published eight portfolios of original photographic prints and more than four dozen books.
As an artist and activist, Ansel Adams holds a beloved place in the American pantheon. The eminent curator and art historian John Szarkowski has written, "The love that Americans poured out for the work and person of Ansel Adams during his old age, and that they have continued to express with undiminished enthusiasm since his death, is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even one unparalleled in our country's response to a visual artist." More than any other influential American of his epoch, Ansel Adams believed in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment. His art spoke to the best in the American soul.
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