Ansel Adams

He was four when the earthquake came, and the main shock did not touch him. Three hours later an aftershock threw him face-first into a garden wall, broke his nose and left it crooked, and he breathed through his mouth for 78 years. He was restless enough to be dismissed from several private schools, so his father pulled him out at 12 and had him taught by tutors, by an aunt who followed the agnostic Robert Ingersoll, and by the exhibits of the 1915 exposition, which he was required to study part of every day. His formal education ended with an eighth-grade diploma in 1917. He later hung it in the guest bathroom. He taught himself the piano and meant to be a musician until he was nearly 30.

A family trip to Yosemite in 1916 put a Kodak Brownie in his hands at 14, and the patron Albert Bender got his first portfolio printed in 1927, Monolith among the plates. In 1932 he helped form Group f/64 with Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham against the soft-focus pictorialists, and around 1940 he and Fred Archer worked out the Zone System, which turned exposure and development into arithmetic and taught two generations how to get the print they had already imagined. His limited-edition book Sierra Nevada and his testimony helped make Kings Canyon a national park in 1940. He photographed 27 of the 28 national parks on the first of three Guggenheims, advised the Museum of Modern Art on its new photography department, and helped found the magazine Aperture in 1952.

In 1943 the director of the Manzanar camp, an old friend, invited him to photograph the Japanese Americans held there, and the resulting book was called Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans. His purpose, as he described it, was to show people who had beaten defeat and despair by building a community in a magnificent and arid place. Dorothea Lange had been through the camps the year before for the War Relocation Authority and made a harsher record. Toyo Miyatake, held inside, built a camera from parts he smuggled past the gate. Even so the book was read as disloyal and refused. That same year Adams had a camera platform bolted to the roof of his station wagon, and most of the wilderness that made his name after 1943 was photographed from the car.

He died of cardiovascular disease on April 22, 1984, in intensive care at Monterey, with his wife, both children and five grandchildren there. Accounts of the ashes differ — scattered on Half Dome in one telling, carried to the summit of Mount Ansel Adams in another. The next year the government renamed the Minarets Wilderness and an 11,760-foot peak inside it after him. Two of his photographs are aboard the Voyager record, headed out of the solar system. The prices kept climbing after he was gone: a mural-sized print of The Tetons and the Snake River took 988,000 dollars at Sotheby's in 2020. A rights trust controls the pictures and the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson holds the negatives.

Ansel Adams's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Monolith, the Face of Half Dome artwork
  Made with a red filter and a decision taken before the shutter opened 1927
• Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail book
  The limited edition that helped argue Kings Canyon into a national park 1938
• The Zone System invention
  Worked out with Fred Archer at the Art Center School in Los Angeles 1940
• Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico artwork
  Dated to November 1, 1941 by the position of the moon. He printed it more than 1,369 times. 1941
• Born Free and Equal book
  The Manzanar photographs, published while the war was still on 1944
• Aperture company
  Co-founded as a serious journal for photography 1952

• April 18, 1906 aged 4 An aftershock of the San Francisco earthquake breaks his nose He was four. The nose stayed crooked and he was a mouth breather for life.
• 1916 aged ~14 First sees Yosemite, with a Kodak Brownie
• 1919 aged ~17 Joins the Sierra Club at 17 and takes the Yosemite lodge caretaker's job
• 1928 aged ~26 Marries Virginia Best, whose father kept the studio in Yosemite Valley He had gone there in the first place to find a piano to practise on.
• 1932 aged ~30 Group f/64 forms in San Francisco Straight photography against the pictorialists, named for the smallest aperture.
• 1937 aged ~35 A darkroom fire in Yosemite destroys thousands of negatives Edward Weston helped put it out. Hundreds of the lost negatives had never been printed.
• November 1, 1941 aged 39 Makes Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico He never wrote down the date. Astronomers worked it out in 1991.
• 1943 aged ~41 Photographs the Manzanar War Relocation Center
• April 22, 1984 aged 82 Dies at Monterey

• John Muir 1838–1914
  Naturalist and organizer whose advocacy helped create national parks and the modern wilderness movement. inherited the argument of
• Dorothea Lange 1895–1965
  Documentary photographer whose Depression-era images defined the visual record of the 1930s. photographed the same camp differently
• Alfred Stieglitz 1864–1946
  Photographer and gallerist who established photography as fine art and promoted American modernists. exhibited by
• Edwin Land 1909–1991
  Scientist and co-founder of Polaroid who invented instant photography. consulted for
• Jimmy Carter 1924–2024
  39th president who emphasized human rights, brokered the Camp David Accords, and built a major post-presidential humanitarian legacy. photographed and was decorated by
• David Brower 1912–2000
  Conservation leader who transformed the Sierra Club and helped build the modern American environmental movement. ally in conservation