He was named after his uncle, Ansel Easton.

He helped to stage that department's first photography exhibition, helped found the photography magazine Aperture, and co-founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.Īdams was born in the Fillmore District of San Francisco, the only child of Charles Hitchcock Adams and Olive Bray. For his work and his persistent advocacy, which helped expand the National Park system, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.Īdams was a key advisor in the founding and establishment of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an important landmark in securing photography's institutional legitimacy. He was later contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks. He developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club. At age 12, he was given his first camera during his first visit to Yosemite National Park. 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.Īdams was a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, and his photographic practice was deeply entwined with this advocacy. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating 'pure' photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. Foresta American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.Ansel Easton Adams (Febru– April 22, 1984) was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. Along with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke, Adams was a founding member of this group, dedicated to 'a simple and direct presentation purely photographic means.' Adams's work, in particular, is characterized by meticulous technique and dramatic celebration of the natural world. Adams's work in both media contributed greatly to the American conservationist movement.īy the mid-1930s, Adams had abandoned an earlier Pictorialist style in favor of the clean, sharp focus vision of Group f/64. Born in San Francisco and trained as a musician, by 1920 he had begun making trips into the High Sierra in 1924 he made his first important photographs there and began to publish both images and writings. One of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, Adams spent a significant part of his adult life in Yosemite National Park.

Ansel adams