The Yosemite valley, carved out by the Merced river, became accessible in the 1860’s, previously it had been the homeland of a particularly fierce tribe of Indians called the Yo-Semite (Grizzly Bear) who were pacified or had moved on by this time.
Adams came from a reasonably well-to-do San Francisco family. He first visited Yosemite in 1916 at the age of 14 with his box brownie camera, an experience that mapped out the rest of his life. "I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite" he wrote.
By 1927, at the age of 25, he had to make a decision, whether to continue as a full-time concert pianist, or to devote all his energies to photography on a professional basis, a risky and mostly untried career path at that time. To our gain, he chose Photography, or rather chose the High Sierra which was to be his most well-known backdrop for the next 50 years. His first exhibition was in San Francisco in 1939 and a year later Adams became the Vice chair of the Department of Photography of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and later in 1948 curator of the George Eastman House, also in New York, though he spent as much time as he could in the Sierra.
At the time he did not know of the work done 50-60 years earlier by Carleton Watkins and Timothy H. O’Sullivan in Yosemite. It is said by some that Watkins photographed geology whereas Adams photographed the weather, Though Watkins could not have made the same photographs that Adams had made, this was mainly due to technology. Adams was one of the first generation of photographers to have the luxury of dry film with high speed and panchromatic colour response.
That is not to say that Adams was lazy, by no means. He once described the High Sierra as "not being very high" and "no peak that could not be climbed and returned from in a day". An all-day climb to take some photographs, there’s dedication! He recounts that on a particular climb resulting in the photograph "Monolith, The Face of Half Dome (1927)" he took a 6˝" x 8˝" view camera, two lenses, two filters, a heavy wooden tripod, 12 glass plates and a heavy pack returning only at dusk. Needless to say the photograph in question was taken with the last available plate. The taking of this photograph was his first conscious visualisation, "In my mind’s eye I saw...the final image made with the red filter." This visualisation later became the basis for his Zone system.
His chosen genre was not well received by his contemporaries who followed the stuffy high-art viewpoint. Landscape in itself was not considered worthy as a subject for photography, as Cartier-Bresson wrote in 1952, "Now in this moment of crisis with the world maybe going to pieces - to photograph a landscape!" Adams was also criticised for the lack of humanity, or any other kind of life for that matter, in his published photographs, no animals - humans - camp-fire smoke, just nature in all its austere beauty. Adams himself insisted that the were always two people in a photograph, the photographer and the viewer, and has admitted in his writings to have taken photographs of his wife during these expeditions.
Adams was not just interested in taking photographs but to educate and enlighten all with the knowledge he has gained over the years. He conceived the zone system for pre-visualisation of images, considered by him to be the crucial element between artistic interpretation and photographic technology. He has also authored many books including the ‘must-have’ technical series, "The Camera", "The Negative" and "The Print" detailing everything he knew on a technical level, as well as books of his photographs, the most well known being "Yosemite and the range of light".
Ansel Adams was Black and White photography. It was his chosen medium, and though later in his career he did take colour photographs those these seem somewhat bland compared to his Black and White images.
To me Adams’ photographs are dazzlingly beautiful. Visual and Technical masterpieces showing some of the most majestic sights on earth. The detail is astonishing, and caused much frustration and disillusionment when I first started to process my own Black and White prints. I could achieve nothing like his quality 50 years on, even allowing for the fact that the world I inhabit is not as beautiful as the Yosemite valley. I felt a little better when I discovered that his negatives were mostly 6˝" x 8˝" or 8" x 10" with 40 to 60 times the surface area of a 35mm negative, (though only a little).