ANSEL ADAMS ANSEL ADAMS (Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22, 1984), photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of 1906 threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life.
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ANSEL ADAMS
ANSEL ADAMS (Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22,
1984), photographer and environmentalist,
was born in San Francisco, California, the
son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a
businessman, and Olive Bray. When Adams
was only four, an aftershock of the great
earthquake and fire of 1906 threw him to the
ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly
marking him for life.
TIMELINE OF HIS LIFE1902 - Ansel Easton Adams born on February 20, at 114
Maple Street, San Francisco, the only child of Olive and
Charles
1915 - Despises the regimentation of a regular education,
and is taken out of school. For that year, his father buys
him a season pass to the Panama-Pacific Exposition,
which he visits nearly every day. Private tutors provide
further instruction.
1916: Family Trip to Yosemite, California.
1925: Decides to become a pianist. Buys a grand piano.
1927: First acknowledged photograph.
1940 - Teaches first Yosemite workshop, the U. S. Camera
Photographic Forum, in Yosemite with Edward Weston.
1953 he collaborated with Dorothea Lange on a Life
commission for a photo essay on the Mormons in Utah
In 1962 Adams moved to Carmel, California, where in
1967 he was instrumental in the foundation of the Friends
of Photography
1984 - Dies April 22 of heart failure aggravated by cancer
CHILDHOOD
An only child, Adams was born when his
mother was nearly forty. His relatively
elderly parents, affluent family history,
and the live-in presence of his mother’s
maiden sister and aged father all
combined to create an environment that
was decidedly Victorian and both socially
and emotionally conservative. Natural
shyness and a certain intensity of genius,
coupled with the dramatically
“earthquaked” nose, caused Adams to
have problems fitting in at
school. Ultimately, he managed to earn
what he termed a “legitimizing diploma”
from the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private
School — perhaps equivalent to having
completed the eighth grade.
HIS INTEREST IN MUSIC AND
PHOTOGRAPHY
When Adams was twelve he taught himself to play the piano and read music. Soon he was taking lessons, and the ardent pursuit of music became his substitute for formal schooling. For the next dozen years the piano was Adams’s primary occupation and, by 1920, his intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography.
If Adams’s love of nature was nurtured in the Golden Gate, his life was, in his words, “colored and modulated by the great earth gesture” of the Yosemite Sierra (Adams, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, p. xiv). He spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had given him. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and self-confidence. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent the first of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as “keeper” of the club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge. He became friends with many of the club’s leaders, who were founders of America’s nascent conservation movement. He met his wife, Virginia Best, in Yosemite; they were married in 1928. The couple had two children.
START OF CAREER
• The Sierra Club was vital to Adams’s early success as a
photographer. His first published photographs and writings
appeared in the club’s 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one
man exhibition in 1928 at the club’s San Francisco
headquarters. Adams began to realize that he could earn
enough to survive — indeed, that he was far more likely to
prosper as a photographer than as a concert pianist
• Nineteen twenty seven was the pivotal year of Adams’s life
Bender’s friendship, encouragement, and tactful financial
support changed Adams’s life dramatically. His creative
energies and abilities as a photographer blossomed, and he
began to have the confidence and wherewithal to pursue his
dreams. Indeed, Bender’s benign patronage triggered the
transformation of a journeyman concert pianist into the artist
whose photographs, as critic Abigail Foerstner wrote in the
Chicago Tribune (Dec. 3, 1992)
MIDDLE LIFE
After a prolonged and
sometimes painful courtship,
Ansel Adams and Virginia Best
were married in January 1929,
and for the first two years of
their marriage, he wavered
between his two possible career
choices, music and photography.
After viewing the wonderful work
of a new friend, photographer Paul
Strand, Adams decided on his
course. Happily for all those who
would enjoy his work in the
future, he would be a
professional photographer
FIRST GRAND EXHIBITION
March 1933 was an important time for Adams. It was then that he
met the renowned photographer and patron, Alfred Stieglitz,
husband of Georgia O'Keefe, owner of An American Place gallery, and
a powerful influence on artists of that time. Stieglitz was favorably
impressed with the young photographer and his work, and mounted
an exhibition for him in November of 1936. Adams wrote in his 1985
autobiography "Steiglitz taught me what became my first
Adams did not work exclusively in black and white—he experimented with color, as well. A few examples of his color work are available in the online archive of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. There are two main reasons, according to an expert source, why Adams preferred black and white.
The first was that he felt color could be distracting, and could therefore divert an artist’s attention away from achieving his full potential when taking a photograph. Adams actually claimed that he could get “a far greater sense of ‘color’ through a well-planned and executed black-and-white image than [he had] ever achieved with color photography”
DEATH AND LEGACY
• In September 1983, Adams was confined to his bed for four weeks after leg surgery to remove a tumor.[80] Adams died on April 22, 1984, in the ICU at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, California, at the age of 82 from a heart attack. He was survived by his wife, two children (Michael, born August 1933, and Anne, born 1935) and five grandchildren.
• Publishing rights for most of Adams's photographs are now handled by the trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. An archive of Ansel Adams's work is located at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson.