Meet The Author: Ansel Adams

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.’”

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Exhibitions

Ansel Adams Exhibitions

Recent

  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Ansel Adams In Our Time, December 13, 2018 through February 24, 2019
  • Pacific Heritage Museum (San Francisco, CA): Inspired by Nature: Works by Ansel Adams and Hon Beiren, October 4, 2018 through March 31, 2019
  • Longmont Museum (Longmont, CO): Ansel Adams: Early Works, January through May 2019
  • Oklahoma City Museum of Art (Oklahoma City, OK): Ansel Adams and the Photographers of the West, February 1 through May 26, 2019
  • The Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ): Ansel Adams: Examples, February 23, 2019 through May 4, 2019

 

Current and upcoming

  • Ellen Noël Art Museum (Odessa, TX); Sight & Feeling: Photographs by Ansel Adams, August 29—November 24, 2019
  • William D. Cannon Art Gallery (Carlsbad, CA): Ansel Adams: Early Works, September through December, 2019
  • Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA); West x Southwest: Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, September 26, 2019 - January 6, 2020
  • William D. Cannon Art Gallery (Carlsbad, CA): Ansel Adams: Early Works, September through December, 2019
  • Fenimore Art Museum (Cooperstown, NY); Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams, May 22 through September 7, 2020
  • Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR); Ansel Adams In Our Time, May 23 through September 7, 2020
  • Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, VA); Ansel Adams: Masterworks, August 15 through November 29, 2020
  • Bess Bower Dunn Museum (Libertyville, IL); Ansel Adams: Early Works, September 2020 through January 2021
  • Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR); Ansel Adams In Our Time, October 17, 2020 - January 24, 2021
  • Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (Colorado Springs, CO); Ansel Adams: Masterworks, May 29 - September 5, 2021

Looking at Ansel Adams App

Looking at Ansel Adams: The Photographs and the Man is an innovative app providing an insightful look at the man behind some of the most beloved photographs made in the twentieth century, including Moonrise, Hernandez, Clearing Winter Storm, and Moon and Half Dome.

 

A must have for any Ansel fan, the app brings you closer to the photographer than ever before, with exclusive content, narration by leading Adams expert Andrea Stillman, and interactive features exploring Ansel's process and vision.

 

Created in close collaboration with The Ansel Adams Trust and Ansel's expert colleagues, the App will enable you to see the American wilderness through "Anselian" eyes.

 

The app includes:

    • Stunning Retina quality photographs and artifacts.
    • Slideshow of iconic images by Adams, with exclusive audio commentary by author Andrea Stillman.
    • Supporting stories and images that give insight to the man and his legendary photographs.
    • Side-by-side print comparisons demonstrating Ansel's evolving vision in the darkroom.
    • Letters and postcards between Adams and colleagues in the art world, including Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, and Garry Trudeau.
    • Interactive location map providing geographic context for the 20 iconic images (available with In-App Purchase).

 

An interactive companion to the book Looking at Ansel Adams: The Photographs and the Man by Andrea Stillman, the app both complements the book and stands on its own as a rich compendium exploring Ansel's life and work.

 

Free to download, the app includes material augmenting all twenty of the book's chapters.

 

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) is the most honored American photographer. Through the exhibition and publication of his work, his writing, and his leadership in the Sierra Club, Adams was also a prescient and highly effective voice in the fight to preserve the America wilderness.

 

About Andrea Stillman

Andrea Stillman is the leading expert on Ansel Adams and worked closely with Adams for seven years in the 1970s as his executive assistant, after being on staff at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has edited a number Ansel Adams books, including Ansel Adams Letters and Images 1916-1984, Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs and Ansel Adams in Color.