Ansel Adams was a member of the Western school of photography, which included others such as Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham and as a group were nature-oriented, nature encompassing everything from a desert landscape to closeup floral forms, to studies in humans. Adams was a member of the Western school that brought together an unsurpassed technical mastery of the photographic medium, a keen eye for natural beauty, and the passionate concerns of a conservationist. Like generations of Romantic poets, painters, and musicians before him, Adams drew his inspiration from the natural world around him, and his unique perspective and photographic prowess spoke of a reverence for natural beauty.
Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco, California just two years after the turn of the twentieth century and just four years before the great earthquake of 1906 that destroyed much of the city. Even at a young age, the power and glory of the natural world made its presence known to young Ansel, and during an aftershock from the great earthquake the young boy was thrown to the ground where he broke his nose; Adams would bear the mark of this young injury for the rest of his life[1]. Growing up, young Adams lived overlooking the Golden Gate where he would play in the sand dunes and gained an appreciation for nature that would last the rest of his life. Ansel was a shy young child, due in large part to insecurity he felt over his nose which had been damaged during the great earthquake as well as the intensity of his simmering artistic genius.[2] As a child, he experienced difficulty in school and was finally removed and home schooled by his father and his aunt. The aspects of young Ansel’s introverted personality and solitary existence resulted in an immense joy of nature, as almost every day he would hike the dunes or meander along Lobos Creek, down to Baker Beach, or out to the very edge of the American continent.[3] In his autobiography, Adams discusses poetically the impact that the natural environment of his childhood home had on him and his art: “A spring morning in about 1910 came clearly to me. I was up early and out in the sand dunes near our home. A gale blew out of the northwest, difficult to stand against. It was cold and clear, and the grasses and flowers were shivering violently in their shallow little spaces above the ground. The brittle-blue distances, including the horizon of the sea, were of crystal incisiveness. The ocean was flecked with whitecaps that appeared as countless white threads in a blue tapestry. My experience that day was a form of revelation that in some way became part of my creative structure.”[4] The power inherent in the wind, the sky, the trees, the sea, and the earth touched young Adams and he never denies the impact of nature on his artistic sensibilities. His love of nature would have a significant impact on his teenage years, and set the tone for his photographic life.
In 1916, Adams convinced his parents to take him to Yosemite Valley as a teenager, and he was overwhelmed by the natural beauty he found around him. After taking some pictures of Yosemite’s natural beauty when he was only fourteen, Adams knew he had found what he wanted to do with the rest of his life: “It is difficult to explain the magic: to lie in a small recess of the granite matrix of the Sierra and watch the progress of dusk to night, the incredible brilliance of the stars, the waning of the glittering sky into dawn, and the following sunrise on the peaks and domes around me… These qualities to which I still deeply respond were distilled into my pictures over the decades. I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite.”[5] Only a few years after his first visit to Yosemite, Adams began his lifelong association with the conservation organization the Sierra Club. While continuing to improve his photographic skills and his knowledge of the environment of Yosemite, in 1919 Adams became a custodian of the Club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge, the Club headquarters in Yosemite National Park.[6] During this time, Adams would often take a mule into the mountains and take pictures of the geological formations, plants, and spectacular vistas of Yosemite. His association with the Sierra Club would come full circle when in 1927 he participated in the Club’s yearly outing into the wilderness, known as the High Trip, and became the Sierra Club’s official trip photographer.[7] This period not only began his association with the influential conservation organization, but many of his most famous photographs would come from this period.
Adams’s early success as a photographer owed a great deal to the Sierra Club and his shared love of nature with the organization. The first photographs that Adams published, along with some essays, appeared in a 1922 Bulletin put out by the club, and his employment with them led to his first professional photography assignment, and one of his first exhibitions of his photographs was at the club’s San Francisco headquarters.[8] In 1927, the twenty-five year old Adams went with his fiancée, Virginia into the mountains of Yosemite and he found the subject that would become his first iconic photograph in a lifetime of iconic photographs. Adams later detailed his experience discovering his subject, describing the spectacular geological formation known as Half Dome as a “wondrous place… a great shelf of granite, slightly overhanging, and nearly 4000 feet above its base…the most exciting subject awaiting me.”[9] Adams was not just talented in capturing natural landscapes and subjects with his lens, but was highly skilled in mastering light and shadows. He took the photograph Monolith, the Face of Half Dome at around noon when it was in full shadow. The rhythmic, linear striations on the surface of the massive geological formation build to a majestic climax at the mountain’s crest. The photographer was careful to establish a scale of grandeur by including the pine trees at the lower left, which are dwarfed by the giant that towers over them. Adams also took advantage of the snow on the high crest, which forms a thin white line that gives definition to the rounded top of the monolith[10]. Ansel combined his sharp eye for natural wonder and time to create a provocative image of his surroundings: “In early mid-afternoon, while the sun was creeping upon it, I set up and composed my image…I did not have much space to move about in: an abyss was on my left, rocks and brush on my right.”[11] The inspiration that Adams continued to harness from his surroundings contributed to his early success and continued to catapult his popularity into the sphere of great American artists and citizens.
The photograph taken of Half Dome stands not only as a testament to Adams’s emphasis on and talent for capturing natural beauty, but also the creation of his artistic techniques that would stay with him for the rest of his life. Adams developed the theory of “visualization” that led to the Zone system: “This photograph represents my first conscious visualization; in my mind’s eye I saw (with reasonable completeness) the final image as made with the red filter…The red filter did what I expected it to do.”[12] The young artist would continue to learn his craft, and Monolith, the Face of Half Dome serves as a great representation of the artist’s ideals and photographic talents. For the rest of his life, Adams would continue to travel throughout the wilderness of the American west taking hundreds of photographs of many different subjects. However, nature continued to dominate his work and his ability to depict nature made him an ideal spokesperson for conservation.
Adams continued his association with the Sierra Club, as well as the conservation movement in general, for his entire life. Many of his most iconic images were first used for environmental purposes when the Sierra Club sought the creation of a national park in the Kings River region of the Sierra Nevada.[13] Adams would continue to use his photographs and his words to lobby politicians for more extensive conservation efforts, and to a large degree succeed. Adams’s association with the Sierra Club would also see the artist use the notoriety gained from his photographs to get politically in the Club, suggesting proposals for improving parks and wilderness, and soon became known as both an artist and defender of Yosemite.[14] He continued to work with the Sierra Club for decades, and saw the club become a powerful national conservational organization during his association.
Ansel Adams loved nature his entire life, as reflected in his art and his life. His photographs of the American west and his beloved Yosemite stand as testaments to American artistic achievement and individual love of the planet. His talent was evident early and was inexorably tied to his fascination with nature. He spoke of its inspiration not only in his art but also in the volumes of conservationalist essays and articles. In his autobiography, he spoke of the education he received from nature that stayed with him his entire life and affected every aspect of his art: “I constantly return to the elements of nature that surrounded me in my childhood, to both the vision and the mood. More than seventy years later I can visualize certain photographs I might make today as equivalents of those early experiences. My childhood was very much the father to the man I became.”[15] The man that Ansel Adams became was one of the most influential and talented photographers and seminal figures in protecting the natural environment.
Bibliography:
Adams, Ansel and Mary Street Alinder. Ansel Adams: An Autobiography. (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1985.)
“Ansel Adams.” Biography List. Internet on-line.
<http://biographylist.com/ansel-adams/biography>. [April 24, 2008]
“Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club.” Sierra Club. Internet on-line.
<http://www.sierraclub.org/ansel_adams/about.asp>. [April 24, 2008]
Craven, Wayne. American Art History and Culture. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1994.)
“Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California, 1927.” The
Housatonic Museum of Art. Internet on-line. <http://www.hctc.commnet.edu/artmuseum/anseladams/details/monolith.html>. [April 24, 2008]
[1] “Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club.” Sierra Club. Internet on-line. <http://www.sierraclub.org/ansel_adams/about.asp>. [April 24, 2008]
[2] “Ansel Adams.” Biography List. Internet on-line.
<http://biographylist.com/ansel-adams/biography>. [April 24, 2008]
[3] Ibid.
[4] Adams, Ansel and Mary Street Alinder. Ansel Adams: An Autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985, 4.
[5] Ibid, 67.
[6] “Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club.” Sierra Club. Internet on-line. <http://www.sierraclub.org/ansel_adams/about.asp>. [April 24, 2008]
[7] Ibid.
[8] “Ansel Adams.” Biography List. Internet on-line.
<http://biographylist.com/ansel-adams/biography>. [April 24, 2008]
[9] “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California, 1927.” The Housatonic Museum of Art. Internet on-line. <http://www.hctc.commnet.edu/artmuseum/anseladams/details/monolith.html>. [April 24, 2008]
[10] Craven, W. (1994). American Art. New York: McGraw Hill, 481.
[11] “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California, 1927.” The Housatonic Museum of Art. Internet on-line. <http://www.hctc.commnet.edu/artmuseum/anseladams/details/monolith.html>. [April 24, 2008]
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Adams, Ansel and Mary Street Alinder. Ansel Adams: An Autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985, 4.
