Ansel Adams Posters, Prints, Photography

Tetons and Snake River Grand Teton National Park

Moon and Half Dome Yosemite National Park

Nevada Fall Rainbow Yosemite National Park

Oak Tree Sunset City California Art Print

Half Dome Merced River Art Print

Mt. McKinley Range Clouds Denali National Park Alaska

Monolith Face of Half Dome Yosemite National Park Art Print

Aspens Northern New Mexico Art Print

Pine Forest in Snow Yosemite National Park

Oak Tree Snowstorm Yosemite National Park

Clearing Winter Storm Yosemite National Park

Mt. McKinley Wonder Lake Denali National Park Alaska

Ansel Adams was born in his parents bed. At the age of four, he was thrown face first into a garden wall in an aftershock of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and broke his nose. One of his earliest remembering had been seeing the resulting fire that rampaged through the city only mere miles from his home. His left angled, broken nose had not been set at the time of the accident and stayed crooked for life.

Adams was an overactive youngster and inclined to regular illness. He did not have many friends, although his family home, as well as his environment which was located upon elevations overlooking San Francisco Bay, allowed for plenty of boyhood activities. He had not the patience for games or athletics however the inquisitive youngster displayed a keen interest in nature at an young age. His boyhood was spent collecting assorted insects and exploring on a nearby beach. His father purchased a telescope and the two shared the pastime of astronomy with enthusiasm. Adams' parents had raised him knowing the teachings of naturalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, and so as a boy, Ansel was to live a humble, ethical life and to be aware of social duty not only to man but nature as well.

Following the death of his grandfather, coupled with the consequences of the Panic of 1907, his father's company took large economic losses and by 1912, the family's standard of life had been reduced. By 1915, when young Ansel had been discharged from numerous private schools for being fidgety and his inattention, his father decided to remove him from when Ansel was 12. He was then taught by private instructors, his Aunt Mary, as well as receiving lessons from his father. In the Panama-Pacific International Exposition during 1915, his father incorporated into his son's education that he pass a good portion of every day taking in the exhibits. After time Ansel would return to private schools rand finish his conventional education up to eighth grade.

Rose and Driftwood San Francisco California

Moonrise Hernandez New Mexico

El Capitan Winter Sunrise Yosemite National Park

Tenaya Creek Dogwood Rain Yosemite National Park

Entrance to Manzanar Relocation Center

Redwoods Founders Grove Art Print

Desert Valley Art Print

Pacific Vista Art Print

Thunderheads Art Print

Birds on a Beach Art Print

Palm Grove Art Print

Old Faithful Art Print

Roy Takeno Editor and Group Manzanar Relocation Center California

Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox

Sand Dunes Sunrise Death Valley National Park

Music would become the primary center of his later youth. Having a photographic memory, Ansel rapidly learned to read music as well as play piano. With a set piano instructors, the regime of arduous piano drills and stern discipline calmed his hyperactivity while his musical accomplishments quickly developed. Music likewise allowed for a release of his channeled emotions. Ansel applied himself in earnest to becoming a concert pianist.

Adams initially traveled to Yosemite National Park during 1916 accompanied by his family. The celebrated valley was the first parcel of land in the United States to be specified a protected nature area by Congressional act, signed by Abraham Lincoln during 1864. His father handed Ansel his first camera, which was a Kodak Brownie box style, while taking this trip and Ansel took his initial pictures accompanied by his "usual hyperactive enthusiasm". He went back to Yosemite by himself the next year using better cameras as well as a tripod. During the winter, Ansel was able to study primary darkroom methods while working part-time for a San Francisco photograph finisher. Adams avidly read photo magazines, attended camera club meets and also attended photo and art shows. Accompanied by his Uncle Frank he traveled the High Sierra, both during the summertime and winter, growing the stamina as well as skill demanded to photograph at high elevation and while under adverse weather conditions.

When in Yosemite, Ansel had regular contact with a family named Best, who were the proprietors of Best's Studio. The Best's allowed Adams to rehearse and keep up his music skills on their aged piano. During 1928, Ansel Adams wed Virginia Best at their Studio at Yosemite Valley. When her father died, Virginia inherited the studio during 1935, and the Adams would work at the studio up to 1971. The studio, today called the Ansel Adams Gallery and is in the custody of the Adams family.

By age seventeen, Adams had joined the Sierra Club, a group committed to maintaining the natural world's marvels as well as resources. He became a keeper of the group's home office at Yosemite over four years. Adams stayed on as a member all through his life and served as a director, as did his wife. Adams took part in the club's yearly high trips and had been afterward responsible for many initial climbs in the Sierra Nevada. In 1919, he caught the deadly influenza that scourged the world and became severely ill but convalesced following several months to and took up his life outdoors once again.

In his twenties, many of his acquaintances had musical backgrounds, in particular violinist as well as recreational photographer Cedric Wright, who would become his closest friend along with his ideological and social mentor. A common doctrine was derived from Edward Carpenter's Toward Democracy, a formal work which embraced beauty in life as well as art. Adams constantly had a pocket version with him when he visited Yosemite. This belief system would become ingrained as his personal philosophy. He resolved that the function of his art from now on, be it photographs or with his music, would be to show this beauty to other people as well as to hopefully attract others to a similar belief.

During the summer, Adams would savor a life of hiking, camping out, and also shooting photos, while the remainder of the year he worked to better his piano playing, building his piano method and musical skills. To bring in extra income, Ansel also gave piano instruction and was eventually able to afford a grand piano worthy of his musical aspirations. His initial photographs had been printed during 1921 and Best's Studio started distributing his Yosemite prints the next year. His early on photographs already indicated deliberate composition as well as a careful predisposition to tonal balance. In letters to family, he also conveys tales of his adventurous climbs to his preferred vantage points and stories of weathering the toughest elements. By this time, all the same, Adams still planned for music to be his chosen profession, although his hands were small and could be easily bruised with bravura playing. This fact confined his repertoire to rehearsed works which accented his gift of a fine touch and superior musicality. It was not until seven years later, however, that Adams would at last confess that at most he could be a concert pianist of moderate range, an accompanist, or a piano instructor.

During the mid-1920s, Adams tried out soft-focus, engraving, bromoil, and alternative techniques of photographers learned from photographers such as photo-secession forerunner Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz endeavored to re-create Impressionism as well as attempted to place photography on an equivalent artistic level with painting through attempting to copy paintings. All the same, Adams stayed away from the hand coloring style that was fashionable during the time. Instead, he applied an assortment of lenses to achieve new effects, but finally castaway pictorialism for a more realist process which counted more on crisp focus, enhanced contrast, accurate exposure as well as darkroom skill.

During 1927, Adams put together his first portfolio, and being new to this, included his celebrated picture Monolith, which is a shot of the upright western font Half Dome. It had been shot with his Korona view camera using glass plates and also a deep red filter for enhancing tonal contrasts. When he had been on the expedition the particular picture had been taken, he had merely a single plate remaining and he "visualized" the outcome of the blackened sky prior to chancing the final shot with the last of his plates.

Under the sponsorship and publicity of Albert Bender, who was a prominent art affiliated businessman, Adams' original portfolio became successful and before long he was able to accept commercial appointments to photograph the affluent patrons who purchased his portfolio. Adams began to realize how important it would be that his precisely crafted photographs were reproduced with the highest quality outcome. At Bender's request, he joined the esteemed Roxburghe Club, an organization which was dedicated to quality printing as well as high criteria in the book arts field. Adams picked up a great deal on printing techniques, layouts, inking and designing that he would be able to apply in later projects. Regrettably, during this period, much of his darkroom work was being produced in the cellar of his parent's house, and he was was held back because he was using scarcely capable equipment.

Following a time of separation with Virginia Best throughout 1925-6, in which he held short relationships with assorted women, several of them had been pupils of his mentor Cedric Wright, Adams wed Virginia during 1928. The couple settled in his parent's home in order to be able to save money. His wedding also labeled the closing of his earnest endeavor at a musical vocation, as well as Virginia's aspirations to become a classical singer.

Through 1929 and 1942, Adams' art was more mature and he grew more accomplished. Through his sixty year career, the 1930's had been an especially fertile and experimental era for him. Adams extended his works, centering on careful close-ups along with big shapes from mountains to mills. In 1930 Taos Pueblo, Adams second portfolio of photographs had been released with text written by author Mary Austin. In New Mexico, he was presented to other notable people from Stieglitz's group, which includes Stieglitz's wife, artist Georgia O'Keeffe, artist John Marin, as well as photographer Paul Strand, each of whom produced beautiful works of their own during their stops in the Southwest. Ansel's chatty, exuberant nature blended with his superior piano playing made him a success inside his growing circle of elite artist colleagues. Strand particularly was particularly influential on Adams, divulging secrets of his method with his fellow photographer, and at length persuading Adams to follow photography with all his aptitude and vigor and not merely as a well skilled hobby. Among Strand's advices, that Adams took to immediately and applied in his work, was to apply glossy paper instead of matte to heighten tonal quality.

Through Washington associations Adams was in touch with, he was allowed to hold his first solo museum show with the Smithsonian Institution during 1931, boasting sixty prints shot he had taken in the High Sierra. The solo exhibit earned the photographer high praise the Washington Post, "His photographs are like portraits of the giant peaks, which seem to be inhabited by mythical gods". In spite of his success, Adams thought he wasn't yet adequate to the criteria of Strand.