Ansel Adams

About the Author

In a career that spanned six decades, Ansel Adams was at once America’s foremost landscape photographer and one of its most respected environmentalists.

In Ansel Adams at 100, John Szarkowski notes that Adams’s role in the history of photography goes beyond his achievements as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. As a leader in the study and appreciation of photography as an art, he played a major role in establishing the first department of photography in an art museum, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (the same department that Szarkowski led from 1962 to 1991). Moreover, as a tireless advocate for improving the reproduction of photographs in books, Adams “badgered and cajoled his printers and platemakers” till they had “achieved in ink an unprecedented degree of fidelity to the chemical print.”

Although he devoted a lifetime to the cause of wilderness preservation, “Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service, but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save,” Szarkowski writes, adding that “Ansel Adams’s great work was done under the stimulus of a profound and mystical experience of the natural world.” Szarkowski dates that experience to the early 1920s and a camping trip in the High Sierra. As Adams later recalled, “I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light…. I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks.”

Commenting on this moment of vision, Szarkowski writes, “One might guess that Adams spent the next quarter century trying to make a photograph that would give objective form to the sense of ineffable knowledge that on occasion, in his youth, inhabited him in the high mountains. Yosemite and the Sierra gave him not only his principal subject, but also the experience that provided the basis for a useful artistic idea: ‘The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor.’”

Ansel Adams 2026 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2026 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2025 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2025 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2025 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2025 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2024 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2024 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2022 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2022 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2021 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2021 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams’ Yosemite

Ansel Adams’ Yosemite

by Ansel Adams, Foreword by Pete Souza

Ansel Adams 2020 Color Mini Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2020 Color Mini Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2020 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2020 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2020 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2020 Engagement Calendar

The Grand Canyon and the Southwest

The Grand Canyon and the Southwest

by Ansel Adams, Edited by Andrea G. Stillman

Ansel Adams 2019 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2019 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2018 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2018 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2018 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2018 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2017 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2017 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2017 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2017 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2016 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2016 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2016 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2016 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley

Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley

by Ansel Adams, by Peter Galassi

Ansel Adams 2015 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2015 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2015 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2015 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs

Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs

Edited by Andrea G. Stillman, by Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams 2014 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2014 Wall Calendar

Ansel Adams 2014 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams 2014 Engagement Calendar

Ansel Adams in the National Parks

Ansel Adams in the National Parks

by Ansel Adams, Edited by Andrea G. Stillman

Ansel Adams in Color

Ansel Adams in Color

Edited by John P. Schaefer, Edited by Andrea G. Stillman, Photographs by Ansel Adams

Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California, 1960

Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California, 1960

Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942

Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941

Mount Clarence King, Pool, Kings Canyon National Park, c. 1925

Mount Clarence King, Pool, Kings Canyon National Park, c. 1925

White Branches, Mono Lake, California, 1947

White Branches, Mono Lake, California, 1947

Thunderstorm Over the Great Plains, Near Cimarron, New Mexico 1967

Thunderstorm Over the Great Plains, Near Cimarron, New Mexico 1967

Autumn Tree Against Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite 1944

Autumn Tree Against Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite 1944

Tenaya Lake, Mount Conness, Yosemite National Park, California, Circa 1946

Tenaya Lake, Mount Conness, Yosemite National Park, California, Circa 1946

Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 1942

Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 1942

Our National Parks

Our National Parks

Yosemite National Park

Yosemite National Park

Georgia O’Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon De Chelly

Georgia O’Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon De Chelly

Rose and Driftwood, San Francisco, California 1932

Rose and Driftwood, San Francisco, California 1932

Half Dome, Merced River, Winter, Yosemite National Park

Half Dome, Merced River, Winter, Yosemite National Park

El Capitan, Winter, Yosemite

El Capitan, Winter, Yosemite

Oak Tree, Sunset City, California 1932

Oak Tree, Sunset City, California 1932

Pine Forest in Snow, Yosemite National Park, California, 1932

Pine Forest in Snow, Yosemite National Park, California, 1932

Tenaya Creek, Dogwood, Rain, Yosemite National Park, Cailfornia, 1948

Tenaya Creek, Dogwood, Rain, Yosemite National Park, Cailfornia, 1948

Canyon de Chelly National Monument

Canyon de Chelly National Monument

Nevada Fall, Rainbow, Yosemite

Nevada Fall, Rainbow, Yosemite

Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942

Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942

Ansel Adams: An Autobiography

Ansel Adams: An Autobiography

by Mary Street Alinder, by Ansel Adams

The Camera

The Camera

by Ansel Adams, With Robert Baker

The Print

The Print

Other Robert Baker, by Ansel Adams

The Negative

The Negative

Other Robert Baker, by Ansel Adams

Examples

Examples