Ansel Adams

BIOGRAPHY

Ansel Adams, photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. An only child, Adams was born when his mother was nearly forty. He was raised in an environment that was deeply Victorian, and Adams was a solitary child; at the age of twelve, he taught himself to play the piano and read music. Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography.

Always a lover of nature, Adams life was, in his words, "colored and modulated by the great earth gesture" of the Yosemite Sierra; he spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death. There, he began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had given him, joined the Sierra Club, and met his wife, Virginia Best; they were married in 1928. The couple had two children.

When Ansel Adams traveled to New Mexico for his fourth time in April 1929, the majesty of the desert had already started to ingrain itself deep in his soul. During this particular trip, Ansel began to develop a lasting and very rewarding collaboration with feminist writer and bohemian Mary Austin. The artistic duet between Ansel and Mary in this particular case spawned the creation of "Taos Pueblo," an exceptional project at the intersection of their two careers as photographer and writer.

Their dream came to fruition with the help of friend Tony Lujan, a Taos Indian, whose wife Mabel, heiress and patron of the arts, hosted Ansel and Mary at her home in Los Gallos, Taos. Tony Lujan approached the Governor of Taos, who in turn held a Council Meeting, and the following day granted Ansel permission to photograph the Pueblo. Ansel was thrilled to begin this project, greatly inspired by the stunning subject matter of “great pile[s] of adobe five stories high with the Taos peaks rising a tremendous way behind. And the Indians [so] majestic, wearing as they do their blankets as Arabs.” (Ansel Adams, Letters 1916-1984)

Adams felt an intense commitment to promoting photography as a fine art, as well as being an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:

Smithsonian Institution, 60 prints of the Sierra Nevada & Canadian mountains, 1931

Alfred Stieglitz's An American Place Gallery, 1936

Manzanar Relocation Center, 1944

Musuem of Modern Art, NY, 1944

SELECTED AWARDS:

Vice Chairman of the Photography Department, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 1940

Hired photographer for the Department of Interior, 1941

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1946

Commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery for a portrait of President Jimmy Carter, 1979

PARTIAL LIST OF COLLECTIONS:

Musuem of Modern Art, NYC