Origin of Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was born February 20, 1902, in San Francisco, California. His family came to California from New England, having migrated from Ireland in the early 1700s. His grandfather founded a prosperous lumber business, which Adams’ father eventually inherited. Adams is most known for his stunning photos of the American wilderness.
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. Ansel’s photography is known for its realist style. Rather than using a pictorialism style. Adams’s career spans over seven decades and a wide range of subject matter, including portraits, still life’s and the landscapes for which he is most famous.
Visualization
Ansel Adams describes it as the ability to see the scene you photograph and recreate in your mind, relying on the information you receive from the scene and on your developing intentions that you picture inside your head and the way you take the photo can resemble you as a person as your the one who pictured it to be or look a certain way.
A Legacy exhibition is a comprehensive survey of Adams’ artistic career which he is famous for and made loads of money from it.
What is Ansel Adams famous for?
Ansel Adams is one of America’s most famous photographers and is known for his stunning photos of the American wilderness and his passion for conservation. He outlines the beauty within America with the way he looked at art and his perspective towards it.
Here is one of his quotes.
This quote shows us how and why he loved photography. He perceived them in a way of a beauty and such natural photos. He didn’t go over the top and just took photos of a his natural setting.
Adams assisted Beaumont Newhall and David McAlpin in forming the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940.
Group f/64
This was created when Ansel Adams and Willard Van Dyke, an apprentice of Edward Weston, decided to organize some of their photographers for the purposes of promoting an aesthetic principle.
Where landscape artists used colour and brushstrokes to show the beauty of the places that became part of the National Park System, many of Ansel’s photographs were minimalist, shot in black and white using sharp contrast and deep focus. Ansel’s photography is known for its realist which also relates to romanticism and sums it all up in nutshell.
The zone system
The Zone System assigns numbers from 0 through 10 to different brightness values, with 0 representing black, 5 middle grey, and 10 pure white and there known as zones.
Analysing Adams photos
Many of Adams photos have either balance or symmetry but mostly balance as its a landscape with some elements of romanticism in them. He goes into a lot of depth in his photos and shows us beautiful, aesthetic nature. The mid ground are usually all in line and the background are usually calm with dark colours. The scale of each photograph is large. It shows a massive background and loads of different elements to be looked at, not all drawn or focused on one thing as it has a wide variety of things in the image which is what makes it so interesting and unique. The light intensity of Adams photos are usually quiet dark colours such as grey black and white, usually not using many colours, the temperature is cold and intense. the colours are cold and the effects of these colours are a lot as it sums up the whole picture. There are quiet a lot of shadows in his images as they are all quiet dark colours. It has a strength evoke emotion and energy, reflect mood, and give a narrative to images. The texture seems to be quiet smooth with some edges and corner because of the landscape photography and the surface is very detailed. Last but not least his tonal values are quiet low as shown in the image below.
