Ansel Adams, born February 20, 1902, is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential photographers of all time-even to this day, more than three decades after his death in 1984.
While presenting Adams with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, President James E. Carter said, “At one with the power of the American landscape, and renowned for the patient skill and timeless beauty of his work, photographer Ansel Adams has been a visionary in his efforts to preserve this country’s wild and scenic areas, both on film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature’s monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. It is through his foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans.”
In life, Adams was primarily a landscape photographer, who also wrote several books containing his photos meant to help aspiring photographers to get introduced to the craft.
His photographs of the American mid-west, specifically the Yosemite National Park, have been widely reproduced, whether it be on the Internet, in calendars, or in other formats.
He was also known for being an active environmentalist who did everything he could to protect the planet.
Adams was born in San Francisco, California, to Charles Hitchcock, a businessman, and Olive Bray. The family was fairly wealthy and lived in a house among the sand dunes of the Golden Gate.
When Adams was four years old, an aftershock of the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 through him to the ground and broke his nose, marking him in a unique way for life.
Just a year later, Adams’s family lost their fortune to the financial panic of 1907, and his father spent the rest of his life fighting to win the fortune back, without any success.
Due to natural shyness, and certain other factors, Adams always had trouble fitting in at school, and in later life, he also stated that it is likely he was hyperactive, as well as possibly dyslexic. Thus, his parents ended up sending him to several different schools, none of which he managed to succeed at, and eventually, his father and aunt chose to home-tutor him instead of sending him to even more schools that he was unlikely to succeed at.
Ultimately, he managed to receive what he called a “legitimizing diploma” from the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School-approximately equivalent to completing the eighth grade.
This solitary lifetime caused Adams to develop a great love for nature, which is shown by the fact that he often took long walks in the still-wild reaches of The Golden Gate.
When Adams was twelve, he taught himself to play the piano and to read music. Soon after, he was taking lessons in music and even considered it as a future profession, although he ultimately abandoned music for photography.
Adams first published photos in the 1922 bulletin of the Sierra Club, and his first ever one-man exhibition was in 1928 at the club’s San Francisco headquarters.
In the late 1920’s Adams began to realize that he could actually earn more money as a professional photographer than he ever could as a concert pianist.
1927 was perhaps the most important year of Adam’s life. In that year, he took his first fully visualized photograph, titled The Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and more importantly, he met Albert M. Bender, a patron of arts and artists.
Exactly a day after first meeting Adams, Bender started working on putting together the photographer’s first portfolio-which they titled Parmelian Prints of the High Scenarios. Bender’s support of Adams and his work changed the young artist’s life for the better.
In fact, many believe that it was Bender’s friendship and support that changed Adams from a concert pianist to a professional photographer and an artist. Although Adam’s career didn’t change overnight, after meeting Bender, his passion rapidly changed from music to photography.
In the year 1927, Adams met a fellow photographer named Edward Weston, and the two instantly formed a friendship that would affect their lives and the lives of many others for years to come.
The two became very important to each other as friends and colleagues, and eventually worked together as co-founders of the famous photography group known as F/64. F/64 was a popular photographic group during the time period, consisting of photographers who shared a similar style in their works, characterized by sharply focused, and carefully composed images showing events through a Westerner's viewpoint.
The group quickly gained popularity, and their work was shown in numerous exhibits across the country.
Even after his death, Adams was considered a great photographer, and today, he is widely considered to be one of the greatest landscape photographers of all time.
