AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Black-and-white pictures of Yosemite and the American West, above all Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941)
- Worked in
- Black and white
- Camera
- Large view cameras on a tripod; a Hasselblad in his last twenty years
- Also
- Worked out the Zone System with Fred Archer; sat on the Sierra Club board for 37 years
- Start with
- Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs (Little, Brown and Company, 2007)
Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was an American landscape photographer and conservationist. His black-and-white pictures of Yosemite and the national parks are among the best known in photography. With Fred Archer he worked out the Zone System, a method that photographers still learn today.
The story
It was late afternoon in the autumn of 1941. Ansel Adams was driving south through the Chama Valley, back to Santa Fe. The day had gone badly. He had tried to photograph a tree stump and finally given up. Then, through the car window, he saw it: the church, the cemetery and the moon above the village of Hernandez. “I thought, Ditch the car!” he remembered. He started yelling to his friends to get out the tripod.
There was no time to lose, and his exposure meter was nowhere to be found. Still, one number was in his head. The moon has a luminance of 250 candles per square foot. From that he worked out the exposure and made one negative. Excited, he turned the film holder over to make a second, just to be sure. By then the late sun had left the white crosses. “With the sun gone, the magic disappeared,” he said.
Being ready for a moment like that took years. At 14 he had a Kodak Brownie box camera and took snapshots on family trips to Yosemite. Music came first, though. For about ten years he trained as a classical pianist. In 1927, on a long day in Yosemite, he stood in front of Half Dome with only two glass plates left. The first exposure felt wrong. For the second he put on a red filter. Later he called it his first visualization: seeing the finished print in his mind before he pressed the shutter.
The Moonrise negative was not easy. While developing it, he feared it was underexposed. The first print showed light clouds that weakened the feeling. “So I kept printing the sky darker until I had it, the image I had seen in my mind’s eye,” he said. Over the years he made more than 1,300 prints of it.
The second negative never existed, but it was not needed. For the former pianist, a negative was like a score, and every print was a new way of playing it. “Each performance is a creation, the creation of something new.”
The work
- 1902Born in San Francisco on 20 February
- 1916First visit to Yosemite, with a Kodak Brownie camera
- 1919Joins the Sierra Club
- 1927Makes his first visualization at Half Dome; first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras
- 1932Co-founds Group f/64 with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and others
- 1941Makes Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico during the Mural Project for the Department of the Interior
- 1946Receives his first Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph the national parks
- 1980Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter
- 1984Dies in Monterey, California, on 22 April
Lessons
Know your numbers. His meter was lost, but he knew the brightness of the moon by heart. That one fact saved Moonrise.
See the print first. From 1927 on, he pictured the final print before the exposure. Then he chose the filter and exposure to get there.
Print it again. He kept printing the Moonrise sky darker until it matched what he had felt. Over the years his prints became bolder.
Try this: before you press the shutter, write one sentence about how the final print should look. Then make three versions of the picture, a few weeks apart, and compare them with your sentence.
Gear
Kodak Brownie box camera: his first camera, which he had in 1916, the year of his first visit to Yosemite.
View camera with glass plates: in 1927 he worked with a Korona view camera and 6½ x 8½ inch glass plates. A deep red filter darkened the sky for his first visualization.
Hasselblad: his camera of choice in his last twenty years. He made Moon and Half Dome (1960) with a Hasselblad and a 250mm Zeiss Sonnar lens.
Around 1939 and 1940, while teaching at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, he worked out the Zone System with the portrait photographer Fred Archer. It links exposure and development to the tones you want in the print.
Books
Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs (Little, Brown and Company, 2007). Edited by Andrea G. Stillman. The 440-page book follows his work in time order, in five periods. It starts with his first pictures of Yosemite and the High Sierra in 1916, goes through the national parks work of the 1940s and ends with his last major photographs from the 1960s. An introduction and short essays on selected pictures tell about his life, his technique and the way he saw. The best single book for anyone new to Adams.
Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (New York Graphic Society / Little, Brown, Boston, 1983). In this 177-page book Adams takes forty of his own photographs and tells how each one was made. Next to each picture he gives his memories of the day and the technical choices behind it. Here he tells the full story of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, with the lost meter and the luminance of the moon. A good book for photographers who want to understand how he thought in the field and in the darkroom.
Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Little, Brown / New York Graphic Society, Boston, 1985). Written with Mary Street Alinder and published the year after his death. Here Adams tells his life story in his own words. The book has 277 black-and-white photographs. Read it if you want to know the man as well as the pictures.
The Print (New York Graphic Society, Boston, 1983). Written with Robert Baker, it is the third book of a series with The Camera (1980) and The Negative (1981). The series is a new version of his Basic Photo books from 1948 onward. This volume is about the darkroom: how to turn a good negative into a fine print. Adams explains his ideas on visualization and shows many of his own photographs. Best for readers who work, or want to work, with film and paper.
Five well-known photographs and three names under each. Can you name the photographers? Open a hint if you get stuck.