Artist Series – Ansel Adams

Introduction

This is my first part of what I hope to be a ongoing series on artist in different mediums that I find to have influenced my career in the arts. Following my second part of my introduction to photography, I thought it appropriate to start with one of the most respected American photographers, Ansel Adams.

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” - Ansel Adams

A Brief Biography

Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West and primarily Yosemite National Park.

Adams was born in the Western Addition of San Francisco, California to distinctly upper-class parents Charles and Olive Adams. He was an only child and was named after his uncle Ansel Easton.

When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of 1906 threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in the financial panic of 1907, and Adams’s father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly attempting to recoup.

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.

Music became the main focus of his later youth. Possessing a photographic memory, Adams quickly learned to read music and play the piano.

Adams first visited Yosemite National Park in 1916 with his family. His father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Brownie box camera, during that stay and he took his first photographs with his “usual hyperactive enthusiasm”. He returned to Yosemite on his own the following year with better cameras and a tripod. In the winter, he learned basic darkroom technique working part-time for a San Francisco photo finisher.

In 1928, Ansel Adams married Virginia Best in Best’s Studio in Yosemite Valley. Virginia inherited the studio from her artist father on his death in 1935, and the Adams continued to operate the studio until 1971. The studio, now known as the Ansel Adams Gallery, remains in the hands of the Adams family.

For the first two years of their marriage, he wavered between his two possible career choices, music and photography. After viewing the wonderful work of a new friend, photographer Paul Strand, Adams decided on his course.

In March 1933 he met the renowned photographer and patron, Alfred Stieglitz, husband of Georgia O’Keefe, owner of An American Place gallery. Stieglitz was favorably impressed with the young photographer and his work, and mounted an exhibition for him in November of 1936. Adams wrote in his 1985 autobiography “Steiglitz taught me what became my first commandment: “Art is the affirmation of life.”

Adams’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal. He often labored for eighteen or more hours per day, for days and weeks on end. Adams was a perfectionist, often spending hours or days perfecting a print to match what he saw with his “mind’s eye”.

Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium. He served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad. He developed the famous and highly complex “zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development. This system enabled photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization.

He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most influential books ever written on the subject.

“The (photographic) negative is the equivalent of the composers score… and the print is the equivalent of the conductors performance.” - Ansel Adams

“In my mind’s eye, I visualize how a particular . . . sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.” - Ansel Adams