Ansel Adams 2 Essay, Research Paper

Ansel Adams

Musician, teacher, scientist, advocate, and conservationist, are some of the few terms that describe Ansel Adams. He grew up in San Francisco where he was born in 1902 and was first introduced to the expanse of California s Yosemite Valley while on vacation at the age of 14. At this time he was also given a Number 1 Brownie Box camera. These two seemingly small events strongly influenced the course of Adam s life. Fascinated by photography and impressed with the beauty of the Sierra mountains, Adam s worked with a photofinisher in commercial processing in San Francisco during the winter and he returned to Yosemite every summer.

As a teenager, Adams decided to become a concert pianist, but by 1930, after viewing negatives made by east coast photographer Paul Strand, he chose instead a career in photography. His decision to become a full-time photographer contributed to the formation of a new vision in photography in the West.

For four years, beginning at age seventeen, he was the custodian of the Sierra Club s LeConte Memorial Building in Yosemite. This introduced him to an arena that became a driving force throughout the rest of his life the preservation and conservation of wilderness areas and national parks in the United States. Among his many later accomplishments in this field, he served as board member and, ultimately, director of the Sierra Club and as environmental spokesperson for land protection before Congress. He also conducted annual photographic workshops in Yosemite that combined appreciation of the landscape s aesthetic beauty with technical instruction.

By 1935, Adams published his first book, Making a Photograph, which was enthusiastically received. Six years later, his groundbreaking Zone System was formulated, which introduced a way for the amateur and professional alike to determine and control the exposure and development of prints for maximum visual acuity.

Adams s sense of social responsibility and obligation to share knowledge with succeeding generations is evident in his life s work. Over the years, he became well known for the clarity of his instruction and his hands-on workshop approach to the medium. He influenced generations of photographers through his teaching and publishing. He was instrumental in the formation of the museum and research center at the University of Arizona in Tucson, known today as the Center for Creative Photography. Adams s dream was to ensure the preservation and conservation of photographs as well as to make them available for public education purposes. Today, the Ansel Adams Archive at the Center includes his fine prints, correspondence, negatives, study prints, and memorabilia.

His technical ability in the darkroom remains unsurpassed. It is true no one could print my negatives as I did, but they might well get more out of them by electronic means , Ansel quoted. He set the standard for black-and-white printing for the Pacific coast group, and his discriminating taste and meticulously produced prints continue to amaze those who see his original work. His large encompassing landscapes, for which he is best known, are inspired by the archetypal nineteenth-century idealized panorama, which was a typical genre in early painted and photographic depictions of the American West. Adams was influenced by these examples, but he was also an experimenter and a modernist.

His close-up, intense studies of isolated natural objects that capture nature s most intimate details were often made on the same day as his more famous dramatic vistas. Adams advocated the role of photography as a fine art inspiring new ways of seeing and communicating. All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation. Adams remained active as a photographer and conservationist until his death in April 1984. The following year, a mountain peak on the southeast boundary of Yosemite National Park was officially named Mount Ansel Adams in his honor.

Ansel Adam s work has inspired me in many different ways. The main thing that I really enjoyed about his work was the nature shots. He made nature look so appealing to the point where I feel that anyone would enjoy his work, and in fact many people did enjoy his work. I also did enjoy that he only used black and white film. I thought that looking at nature with black and white film would look incomplete and lacking fullness, but instead it made the picture look calm.