Ansel Adams was a photographer born in 1902 in San Francisco. He was born before the ‘big quake’ of San Francisco which took the lives of roughly 3, 000 people. Unfortunately, this event injured his nose breaking it. He never got the correct treatment for the break so the damage stayed permanently altering the construction of his face causing it too not heal and become disfigured. Because of this, he became very insecure and was a very quiet kid commonly perceived as very shy throughout his school life. This caused his father to move him school a handful of times, but Adams was never very settled or comfortable so his father decided to take him out of school and made the decision to home-school him with tutors. because of Ansel’s introverted personality, he took a fond liking to the outdoors and nature as a whole. His family home was luckily surrounded by nature, sand dunes and the famous Yosemite park in San Francisco. He took solace in the natural world and would often take walks through the dunes or the park to experience the joy that the nature brought him.

Adams initially wanted to be a musician as he played the piano religiously through his childhood. Sadly he did not make it as a pianist, since he slowly fell out of love and passion for the piano over time. He started experimenting with photography from a young age, on his 14th birthday, he was gifted his first camera, the brownie box. Because of his passion for nature Ansel wanted to capture the beauty, and with his new camera, he could. He often went on family trips to the south of Yosemite park, where there sat a mountain range where he would end up taking his first photo of the beauty of the mountain range.

Ansel Adams, a dedicated environmentalist whose love of the world was meant to encourage people to respect and care for their planet. His stark black and white images of rivers and canyons set the standards for all landscape photographers after him.

1927 was a very important time for Ansel’s life, he made his first fully visualized photograph ‘ Monolith, the Face of the Half Dome. ‘ His creative energies and abilities as a photographer blossomed after he met a good friend and role model Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance magnate and patron of arts and artists. Adams began to have the confidence to pursue his dreams when Bender came into his life, and the projects and possibilities multiplied. In addition to spending summers photographing in the Sierra Nevada, Adams made several lengthy trips to the southwest to work with Mary Austin. In the same year Adams met photographer Paul Strand, whose images had a powerful impact on Adams and helped move him away from the ‘pictorial’ style he had favoured in the 1920’s. Adams began to pursue ‘straight photography’, since the technology had improved by hen so the camera lens quality had improved significantly. Adams was soon to become straight photography’s most articulate and insistent champion.

His link to romanticism –

Adams always loved the outdoors, as you know now, and he was always extremely passionate about the beauty of the natural world. Ansel hoped that his sharp focused, black and white photographs would help persuade Americans to value creativity as well as too conserve and expand American freedoms and wilderness preserves. This shows his romantic thoughts as he cares a lot about the nature and animals in the conserves and wants to look out for them and help as much as he could.

In his photos, he would cut out any trace of human activity, showing the raw untouched wilderness. He wanted to show that the world is beautiful without the mechanic infiltration that came around during the industrial revolution, covering almost 40% of the land to be covered with mechanical advances such as train tracks or factorys.