Before social media was the common forum for sharing and reflecting on others’ photographs and artwork, artists and photographers struggled to find publishers, gallery openings, and patrons, among the many avenues of publicity. One artist who experienced this pre-digital age struggle in the art world was Ansel Adams.
A San Francisco-born child of financially unstable parents, Adams grew up in a home of traditionally stoic middle-class values. As a child, he spent hours playing piano and learning to read complex musical scores. Due to severe hyperactivity and dyslexia, Adams found solace in this occupation, especially since his school teachers found him to be a problematic student. By 1920 (Adams was eighteen at the time), Adams intended to become a professional concert pianist.
Though his piano playing remained a central part of Adams’s childhood and early adulthood, living in coastal California, he would hike almost every day along the dunes of Lobos Creek, Baker Beach. Here, Adams first encountered the feeling of standing upon the edge of the American continent, something he would later translate into his photographs.
In 1919, Adams joined the Sierra Club—an American environmental organization started in 1892 by preservationist John Muir—allowing him to engage in nature-activities such as hiking, reading works of environmental literature, and exploring parts of the United States through the lens of the land’s intrinsic value. Adams would spend the following four summers as the “keeper” of LeConte Memorial Lodge in the Yosemite Sierra. He became a trustworthy member of the Club, propelling him into the nature world and the world of organizational leadership. By 1934, Adams was elected to the Club’s board of directors, engaging in some of the crucial decision-making processes of the Sierra Club. All throughout these years, Adams worked—and succeeded—to establish himself as the preeminent photographer of the Sierra Nevada region.
While producing unique black and white photographs of vast landscapes, valleys, and classic “sublime” imagery that echoed the paintings of Thomas Cole and the other artists of the Hudson River School, Adams struggled with alcoholism and financial stability. Though he gained increasing publicity through gallery exhibits and the guidance of art patron Albert M. Bender, Adams’s photographs were not lucrative enough to sustain him. To counter this, he began writing photography manuals, eventually publishing ten volumes of such writings, a startling and unprecedented achievement in photography.
Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Adams held numerous gallery shows, through which he became even better known for his unique style. By applying a “zone system” in his photography, Adams controlled the exposure of his lenses, producing what modernist photographer Paul Strand called a “pictorial style.” Alfred Stieglitz, another contemporary of Adams and a close collaborator with Strand, offered Adams the chance to host his first New York show, revealing Adams’s west-coast style to the east coast elite. During this time Adams also worked as a photographic consultant for Hasselblad and Polaroid, two of the premiere photography companies of the time.
Though Adams worked in collaboration with others’ varied photographic-styles, he became the American nature photographer in a way that no other photographer had yet achieved. As one biographer stated, “Adams’s subject matter, the magnificent natural beauty of the West, was absolutely, unmistakably American.” While artists like Strand, Stieglitz and even Edward Weston (who was much more modernist and abstract than Adams) were also innovative and at the forefront an “American style,” Adams’s return to the natural landscape produced an unmistakable visual version of Muir’s written contemplations. As the biographer mentioned above recalled, “Adams believed in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment,” something which many artists and naturalists thought had been lost after the American Romantic period had passed.
Writer, designer, historian, and museum administrator Nancy Newhall stated that, as Adams grew to represent a style and approach to naturalist photography, he “revered” nature and successfully conveyed this ethic consistently throughout his photographs. As a result of the respect Adams received from the art world, he was asked to help develop New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography.
In the 1960s, along with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Adams’s photographs and publications served as the foundation for the modern American environmental movement. As Adams’s estate has said, “his black-and-white images… sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty,” something that had become marginal since the popularity of Thoreau, Muir, and Aldo Leopold. However, like his predecessors, his focus was often on the “spiritual-emotional” approach to the preservation of wilderness. For Adams, photography was the mode of expression through which he expressed a reverberation of Thoreau’s sentiment that, “in Wildness is the Preservation of the World.” As a result, Adams pushed for saving the Big Sur coast in California, a space filled with redwoods, sea lions and sea otters, that was being threatened by corporate production and development. This philosophy appeared in his photographs in the distance between the camera and the subject being photographed. For Adams, the subject—the natural landscape—was not to be disturbed in the process of capturing images; instead, the landscape was respected and left to its own purposes, apart from his camera. According to the Ansel Adams Gallery, he was deeply influenced by Theodore Roosevelt’s “‘muscular’ Americanism,” along with the American philosophy of manifest destiny.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter awarded Adams with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and declared that Adam’s “foresight and fortitude” is the reason why “so much of America has been saved for future Americans.” This idea that America was saved through Adams’s photographs remains true today, as there are fewer nature photographers who are known for their deep reverence of the subjects they observe. After a lifetime of eighteen-hour workdays, Ansel Adams never took a vacation or a holiday, and never rested on weekends. Adams died in 1984; he was eighty-two.