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ANSEL ADAMS BIOGRAPHY

Ansel Adams, Photographer

By William Turnage

This biography has been published by Oxford University Press for its American National Biography and is reprinted courtesy OUP

and the author.

Adams, Ansel (Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22, 1984), photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son

of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. The grandson of a wealthy timber baron, Adams grew up in a house

set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate. When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of 1906

threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in thefinancial panic of 1907, and Adams’s father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly attempting to recoup.

An only child, Adams was born when his mother was nearly forty. His relatively elderly parents, affluent family history, and the live-in

presence of his mother’s maiden sister and aged father all combined to create an environment that was decidedly Victorian and bothsocially and emotionally conservative. Adams’s mother spent much of her time brooding and fretting over her husband’s inability to

restore the Adams fortune, leaving an ambivalent imprint on her son. Charles Adams, on the other hand, deeply and patiently

influenced, encouraged, and supported his son.

Natural shyness and a certain intensity of genius, coupled with the dramatically “earthquaked” nose, caused Adams to have

problems fitting in at school. In later life he noted that he might have been diagnosed as hyperactive. There is also the distinct

possibility that he may have suffered from dyslexia. He was not successful in the various schools to which his parents sent him;

consequently, his father and aunt tutored him at home. Ultimately, he managed to earn what he termed a “legitimizing diploma” from

the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School — perhaps equivalent to having completed the eighth grade.

The most important result of Adams’s somewhat solitary and unmistakably different childhood was the joy that he found in nature, as

evidenced by his taking long walks in the still-wild reaches of the Golden Gate. Nearly every day found him hiking the dunes ormeandering along Lobos Creek, down to Baker Beach, or out to the very edge of the American continent.

When Adams was twelve he taught himself to play the piano and read music. Soon he was taking lessons, and the ardent pursuit of

music became his substitute for formal schooling. For the next dozen years the piano was Adams’s primary occupation and, by1920, his intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and

structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician profoundly

informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography.

If Adams’s love of nature was nurtured in the Golden Gate, his life was, in his words, “colored and modulated by the great earth

gesture” of the Yosemite Sierra (Adams, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, p. xiv). He spent substantial time there every year from

1916 until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his

parents had given him. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and self-confidence. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club

and spent the first of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as “keeper” of the club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge. He became friends withmany of the club’s leaders, who were founders of America’s nascent conservation movement. He met his wife, Virginia Best, in

Yosemite; they were married in 1928. The couple had two children.

The Sierra Club was vital to Adams’s early success as a photographer. His first published photographs and writings appeared in theclub’s 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one man exhibition in 1928 at the club’s San Francisco headquarters. Each summer the

club conducted a month-long High Trip, usually in the Sierra Nevada, which attracted up to two hundred members. The participants

hiked each day to a new and beautiful campsite accompanied by a large contingent of pack mules, packers, cooks, and the like. As

photographer of these outings, in the late 1920s, Adams began to realize that he could earn enough to survive — indeed, that he

was far more likely to prosper as a photographer than as a concert pianist. By 1934 Adams had been elected to the club’s board ofdirectors and was well established as both the artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite.

Nineteen twenty seven was the pivotal year of Adams’s life. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of HalfDome, and took his first High Trip. More important, he came under the influence of Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance

magnate and patron of arts and artists. Literally the day after they met, Bender set in motion the preparation and publication of

Adams’ first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras [sic]. Bender’s friendship, encouragement, and tactful financial support

changed Adams’s life dramatically. His creative energies and abilities as a photographer blossomed, and he began to have the

confidence and wherewithal to pursue his dreams. Indeed, Bender’s benign patronage triggered the transformation of a journeymanconcert pianist into the artist whose photographs, as critic Abigail Foerstner wrote in the Chicago Tribune (Dec. 3, 1992), “did for the

national parks something comparable to what Homer’s epics did for Odysseus.”

Although Adams’s transition from musician to photographer did not happen at once, his passion shifted rapidly after Bender cameinto 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, grande dame of the western literati. Their magnificent

limited edition book, Taos Pueblo, was published in 1930. In the same year Adams met photographer Paul Strand, whose images

had a powerful impact on Adams and helped to move him away from the “pictorial” style he had favored in the 1920s. Adams began

to pursue “straight photography,” in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized, and the final print gave no appearance of beingmanipulated in the camera or the darkroom. Adams was soon to become straight photography’s mast articulate and insistent

champion. [Ed. Note: Manipulated in this instance meaning altering the clarity or content of the photographed subject matter.

Techniques such as "burning" and "dodging", as well as the Zone System, a scientific system developed by Adams, is used

specifically to "manipulate" the tonality and give the artist the ability to create as opposed to record.]

In 1927 Adams met photographer Edward Weston. They became increasingly important to each other as friends and colleagues.

The renowned Group f/64, founded in 1932, coalesced around the recognized greatness of Weston and the dynamic energy of

Adams. Although loosely organized and relatively short-lived, Group f/64 brought the new West Coast vision of straight photography

to national attention and influence. San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum promptly gave f/64 an exhibition and, in that same year, gave

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