Who?

Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favoured sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.

Childhood

One of Adams’s earliest memories was watching the smoke from the fires caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Then four years old, Adams was uninjured in the initial shaking but was tossed face-first into a garden wall during an aftershock three hours later, breaking and scarring his nose. A doctor recommended that his nose be reset once he reached maturity, but it remained crooked and necessitated mouth breathing for the rest of his life.

Adams was a hyperactive child and prone to frequent sickness and hypochondria. He had few friends, but his family home and surroundings on the heights facing the Golden Gate provided ample childhood activities. He had little patience for games or sports; but he enjoyed the beauty of nature from an early age, collecting bugs and exploring Lobos Creek all the way to Baker Beach and the sea cliffs leading to Lands End, “San Francisco’s wildest and rockiest coast, a place strewn with shipwrecks and rife with landslides.

At age 14, he was given his first camera during his first visit to Yosemite National Park. He developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club. He was later contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks.

Sierra Club

The Sierra Club’s stated mission is “To explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth; To practice and promote the responsible use of the earth’s ecosystems and resources; To educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and to use all lawful means to carry out these objectives.”

Ansel Adams was an official director of the Sierra Club from 1934-1971.

1927

In 1927, Adams began working with Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance magnate and arts patron. Bender helped Adams produce his first portfolio in his new style, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, which included his famous image Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, which was taken with his Korona view camera, using glass plates and a dark red filter (to heighten the tonal contrasts). On that excursion, he had only one plate left, and he “visualized” the effect of the blackened sky before risking the last image. He later said, “I had been able to realize a desired image: not the way the subject appeared in reality but how it felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print.” One biographer calls Monolith Adams’s most significant photograph because the “extreme manipulation of tonal values” was a departure from all previous photography. Adams’s concept of visualization, which he first defined in print in 1934, became a core principle in his photography.

1930s

Bender took Adams on visits to Taos, New Mexico, where Adams met and made friends with the poet Robinson Jeffers, artists John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe, and photographer Paul Strand. His talkative, high-spirited nature combined with his excellent piano playing made him popular among his artist friends. His first book, Taos Pueblo, was published in 1930 with text by writer Mary Hunter Austin.

During the 1930s, Adams began to deploy his photographs in the cause of wilderness preservation. He was inspired partly by the increasing incursion into Yosemite Valley of commercial development, including a pool hall, bowling alley, golf course, shops, and automobile traffic. He created the limited-edition book Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail in 1938, as part of the Sierra Club’s efforts to secure the designation of Kings Canyon as a national park. This book and his testimony before Congress played a vital role in the success of that effort, and Congress designated Kings Canyon as a national park in 1940, despite previous failures to get the creation of the national park approved.

Kings Canyon Crisis

Kings Canyon was targeted by water supply and power interests including the city of Los Angeles, who wanted to build hydroelectric dams in Kings Canyon. Due to its heavy flow and long drop – 11,000 feet (3,400 m) in less than 80 miles (130 km) – the Kings River has considerable hydroelectric potential, and reservoirs were proposed for Cedar Grove, Tehipite Valley and Simpson Meadow, among other sites. Development interests blocked legislation that would have made the area a national park, but at the same time, the environmental lobby prevented any of these projects from being built.

Later, Ansel Adams was tasked to photograph and document the area, generating publicity for the preservation movement. However, in order to placate the local irrigation districts – who wanted to leave open the option of reservoirs – Cedar Grove and Tehipite Valley were specifically excluded from the new park. On March 4, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the bill to create Kings Canyon National Park, which added the original General Grant National Park to over 400,000 acres (160,000 ha) of the High Sierra above Cedar Grove.

Presidential Medal

 For his work and his persistent advocacy, which helped expand the National Park system, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.

Visualisation

Ansel Adams on visualisation:

“Visualisation is a conscious process of projecting the final photographic image in the mind before taking the first steps in actually photographing the subject.”

“The term visualisation refers to the entire emotional-mental process of creating a photograph, and as such, it is of the most important concepts in photography.”

“To visualise an image (in whole or in part) is to see it clearly in the mind prior to exposure, a continuous projection from composing the image through the final print.” Visualisation is more accurately viewed as an attitude toward photography . . .”

In simpler terms, visualisation is about imagining a scene and figuring out the best shot before taking a photograph.

Zone System

The 11 zones in Ansel Adams’ system were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle grey.  Zone 0 is pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 is pure white (with no detail).  Each zone represents one f-stop in exposure. There is an 11-stop difference between pure black and pure white, with a 7-stop difference between the darkest black with detail and the lightest white with detail.

Image Analysis

Technical – The lighting in this image is natural, likely during the day although a deep red-filter has been used to darken the sky. The aperture is definitely high, like f/64 since Ansel Adams liked to capture every single aspect of the image in focus.

Visual – Adams has captured the side of a mountain, taking up roughly 2/3 of the frame with a darkened sky visible in the top left as well as a snowy landscape littered with trees in the bottom left and bottom right. The image uses every zone in the zone system, with zones 0-3 being visible in the sky and zone 10 being seen on the snow in the right side of the image.

Contextual – Adams initially took this photograph using a yellow filter but didn’t like the tone of the sky so redid it using a deep red-filter, and was very pleased with the result. A very high aperture was also used since Ansel Adams and the f/64 Group as photographers liked ‘pure’ images, capturing every little detail of landscapes in focus.

Conceptual – Adams was very keen of ‘visualisation’, capturing an image in his mind’s eye before taking the actual image which is what he did when he positioned himself and pointed his camera at the mountain.