Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West. His studio, which is still owned by the Adams family, is now the “Ansel Adams Gallery”.Adams was born in the Western Addition of San Francisco, California to distinctly upper-class parents Charles and Olive Adams. He was an only child and was named after his uncle Ansel Easton. The Adams family came from New England, having migrated from Northern Ireland in the early 1700’s but were not connected with the Presidential Adams family. His grandfather founded and built a prosperous lumber business, which his father later ran, though his father’s natural talents lay more with sciences than with business. Later in life, Adams would condemn that very same industry for cutting down many of the great redwood forests.
Adams was not the first artist to celebrate Yosemite and the vast Western wilderness. Romantic landscapists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran had portrayed the Grand Canyon and Yosemite at the end of their reign, and were subsequently displaced by daredevil photographers Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and George Fiske. But it was his black-and-white photographs of the West which became the foremost record of what many of the National Parks were like before tourism, and his persistent advocacy helped expand the National Park system. He skillfully used his works to promote many of the goals of the Sierra Club and of the nascent environmental movement, but always insisted that, as far as his photographs were concerned, “beauty comes first”. His stirring images are still very popular in calendars, posters, and books.