Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams was a American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black and white of the American west.

Adams was a life-long advocate for environmental conservation and his photographic practice was deeply entwined with this advocacy. 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. For his work and his persistent advocacy, which helped expand the National Park system, he was awarded the  Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.

This photograph captures Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, and Wonder Lake in Alaska, with the peak looming high above the lake. The photograph is known for its striking contrast and the way it evokes a sense of wildness and adventure.

in the spring of 1929, Adams and his wife Virginia spent several months with writer Mary Austin in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was during this trip that Adams and Austin decided to collaborate on a book about Santa Fe and the surrounding area. Austin introduced Adams to Mabel Dodge Luhan, the Santa Fe arts patron who was hosting artists of the caliber of Georgia O’Keeffe around the same time. Luhan was married to Tony Lujan, who was a member of the Taos tribal council and it was he who gave Adams permission to photograph at the Taos Pueblo.

One of Adams’s most famous photographs, and one of the most iconic photographs of the modern era, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, is a dramatic image of a moon rising over the small southwest town, near Santa Fe. A scene that is momentarily both dark and light, Moonrise, shows the town’s buildings bathed in late evening light just moments before the sun will set and darkness will envelop the town. Here Adams approached photography as he would a piece of music, interpreting the negative and print like a conductor interprets a score. Adams often repeated the mantra that “a photograph is made, not taken” and in this regard, as Anne Hammond has noted, “the technical controls that Adams had perfected enabled him to realize the mortality of individual human existence confronting the eternity of the universe, the theme of life and death.”