Who is Ansel Adams?
Ansel Adams was an American photographer who spent much of his career documenting the American landscape and is often described as one of the most important landscape photographers of the 20th century. He was born into a large, wealthy family in California.
His first major work was The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He is best known for his iconic photographs of the Yosemite Valley, which were used by the National Park Service as their emblem for more than a decade.
Adams’s photographs are frequently cited as being among the best-known photographic images of the twentieth century. They are often characterized as naturalistic and poetic. They also have a strong emotional impact.
A prolific photographer, Adams made thousands of photographs, but only a few hundred were published during his lifetime. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and reproduced in books, magazines, calendars, posters, and greeting cards. In 1977, he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for a book of his photographs titled The Orchids of Hawai’i. Adams is most often associated with the naturalist style of photography, which was inspired by his exposure to the American landscape. He often used the camera as an instrument of discovery, recording the landscape as he found it.
Although he did not pursue photography professionally until 1909, he maintained a studio in San Francisco throughout his career. In 1910, he became the curator of the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, where he remained until his retirement in
Adams continued to pursue photography throughout his life, making more than 8,000 negatives and 500 contact sheets. Many of these were used as illustrations in books by other authors.
The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is an oil painting by Adams that depicts the aftermath of the destruction of the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which are described in the Book of Genesis in the Bible. The work shows a wide variety of objects strewn across the barren landscape, including a pair of disembodied eyes, two disembodied hands, and a broken column. In the background, a cloud of smoke billows into the sky from the ruins of the two cities, while at the top center is an opening leading to the heavens.
Adams was deeply affected by the loss of his brother during his time at Stanford. He began using the camera as a way of dealing with his grief and documenting the American landscape, using his photography as a means of discovery. He visited Yosemite Valley in 1908 and, in 1910, began making photographs of the park.
In 1911 he returned to Yosemite Valley to continue photographing and made an additional series of photographs depicting the destruction of the valley.
During World War I Adams joined the Army Signal Corps and served in France, where he met Georgia O’Keeffe, who was working as a nurse. In 1919 Adams returned to California and continued to photograph the landscape, spending the summers in Yosemite Valley. He also traveled throughout the West, visiting various locations and photographing the landscape there. He was often accompanied by his friend Alfred Stieglitz, who had been the founder of The Camera Club of America and an early supporter of his photography career.
The first major publication of Adams’s photographs was The New Ansel Adams. It included over 500 of his best photographs, many of which were previously unpublished, along with essays and a personal reminiscence by Stieglitz. The following year he was given a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1934 he traveled to the Sierra Nevada Mountains to photograph the landscape, and in 1935 he completed The Yosemite Book, a photographic guide to the Yosemite Valley that included a preface by Stieglitz. During this period, Adams also worked on a number of other projects, including writing a series of articles for The Saturday Evening Post, making illustrations for several books, and illustrating The Story of Photography.
The Orchids of Hawai’i is a book of photographs by Adams that includes nearly 400 photographs of the Hawaiian islands taken between 1941 and 1949, along with an introduction written by his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe.
Ansel Adams Quotes
- “I believe that the single most important thing in any photograph is light.” – Ansel Adams
- “Photography is not a ‘thing’ that you do. It’s a ‘feeling’ that you have. The feeling of being in that moment of time when you open the camera and look through the viewfinder and see what you have been waiting for and hoping for all of your life.” – Ansel Adams
- “When you want to take a picture, just take a picture. Don’t try to achieve something.” – Ansel Adams
- “The best camera is the one that you have with you.” – Ansel Adams
- “A good photograph has an immediate impact on your viewer, but a great photograph will remain with you forever. It can change your life.” – Ansel Adams
- “I think that any art worth having requires discipline and persistence. But I am also convinced that if you put your heart into it and are true to yourself, it will pay off in the end. You just need to hang in there long enough and keep working at it.” – Ansel Adams
- “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
- “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
- “We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.”
- “When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.”
- “Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”
- “In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.”
- “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!”
- “I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.”
- “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”
- “Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.”
- “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”
- “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”
- “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
- “Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.”
- “Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”
- “In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.”
- “You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
- “Today, we must realize that nature is revealed in the simplest meadow, wood lot, marsh, stream, or tidepool, as well as in the remote grandeur of our parks and wilderness areas.”
- “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!”
- “We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.”
- “There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.”
- “I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.”
- “No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.”
- “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
- “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”
- “Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.”
- “A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.”
- “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”
- “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”
- “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
- “I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful – an endless prospect of magic and wonder.”
- “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
- “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
- “A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into.”
- “You don’t make a photograph just with a camera”
- “I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.”
- “It is all very beautiful and magical here – a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake into you.”
- “I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.”
- “The whole world is, to me, very much “alive” – all the little growing things, even the rocks. I can’t look at a swell bit of grass and earth, for instance, without feeling the essential life – the things going on – within them. The same goes for a mountain, or a bit of the ocean, or a magnificent piece of old wood.”
- “Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.”
- “Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.”
- “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”