Adam ansel biography francisco san
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The grandson of a wealthy timber baron, Adams grew up in a house set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate. Adams's goal then was to capture the true majesty of the natural world within a single frame and, if he could achieve this using a combination of technical skill, dogged leg-work and intuition, then the better the chances of producing landscapes that were more than just pictorial.
"The world is going to pieces," Cartier-Bresson chided "and people like [Ansel] Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!"
Gelatin silver print - Victoria and Albert Museum, London
1943
Roy Takeno, Editor, and Group Reading Paper in Front of Office, Manzanar Relocation Center, California
Three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, an Executive Order was issued which decreed that all Americans of Japanese descent living in California, Oregon, and Washington would be housed in temporary internment facilities.
The subject of countless documentaries, books, essays, and exhibitions, Adams's images appear on living room and museum walls, proving that his photographs of the great American landscape continue to resonate. Their relationship was intense and their correspondence frequent, rich, and insightful. Note: Manipulated in this instance meaning altering the clarity or content of the photographed subject matter.
The same year, Adams was commissioned to photograph the National Parks by Secretary of the Interior (Harold Ickes).
While illustrating his obvious concern with form and the effects thereon of natural light, this image makes clear that even as late as 1929, Adams was working with a soft focus, and with textured paper. Adams was invited to document life in the camp and travelled to Manzanar on two occasions: October 1943 and July 1944. Collection of Michael and Jeanne Adams.
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.
Although profoundly a man of the West, Adams spent a considerable amount of time in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Stieglitz circle played a vital role in his artistic life. The participants hiked each day to a new and beautiful campsite accompanied by a large contingent of pack mules, packers, cooks, and the like. Virginia's father owned a gallery in Yosemite, where Adams would later exhibit his photographs.
These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.
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By William Turnage, Reprinted courtesy of the author and Oxford University Press
This Ansel Adams biography was published by Oxford University Press for its American National Biography.
Ansel Adams in front of his most famous image, “Moonrise, Hernandez”
Adams, Ansel (Feb.
More than any other influential American of his epoch, Adams believed in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment. Bender’s friendship, encouragement, and tactful financial support changed Adams’s life dramatically. In the years that followed, he developed a close friendship with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, traveling with them to the Southwest and New England in the late 1940s.
Ansel Easton Adams
American, Photographer, February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984
San Francisco-born Ansel Adams took his first photograph in 1916. He died in Monterey, California in 1984, aged eighty-two. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and took his first HighTrip.
The group's name, f/64, referred to their use of the smallest aperture setting (f-stop) on a camera that created an image with the sharpest depth of field. Although he was kept busy with commissions and other commercial work, including the production of photography manuals, the financial strain of life as a professional photographer troubled him for most of his life.
Arguably his most satisfying personal triumph began in 1936 when, in his capacity as a member of its board of directors, the Sierra Club sent Adams to Washington, D.C.
to lobby for the creation of a Kings Canyon National Park. An Autobiography offers a somewhat rose-colored and selective view of Adams’s life. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians.