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<\/a>At the age of 4 the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 hit.\u00a0 The Adams family house made it through the initial quake unscathed, but Adams\u2019 father thought it best if they sit out the aftershocks outside.\u00a0 A particularly large aftershock caught Adams by surprise, knocking him down.\u00a0 He landed face down against a brick wall and broke his nose.\u00a0 A physician suggested that it would be best to wait until Adams matured to set the broken nose.\u00a0 Later in life, Adams said, \u201capparently I never matured, as I have yet to see a surgeon about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Adams was a problem child.\u00a0 He was sickly, sometimes spending as much as a month in bed.\u00a0 His Aunt Mary gave him books to occupy his time.\u00a0 One was the Heart of the Sierras which apparently planted an interest in these magnificent mountains in his young mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When he started school, he was so rebellious that he got expelled from one school after another.\u00a0 Finally, when Adams was 12, his father faced the inevitable and withdrew him from school for a year.\u00a0 A private tutor was hired so that Adams could continue his education.\u00a0 During his time, he was exposed to the works of the great artists.\u00a0 This lasted for one year before he returned to Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School where he graduated from the 8th<\/sup> grade on June 8, 1917.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During this time Adams started playing the piano.\u00a0 At first, he was self-taught but when he was 12, he started receiving lessons.\u00a0 The discipline of daily practice apparently helped him to gain some control over his disruptive behavior.\u00a0 Adams commented about that time.\u00a0 \u201cThe change from a hyperactive Sloppy Joe was not overnight, but was sufficiently abrupt to make some startled people ask, \u2018What happened?\u2019 I still recall that the Bach Inventions taxed my concentration, especially when a sunny breeze carrying the sound of the ocean stole through the open window.\u201d As he progressed, his passion for the piano continued to grow so that he planned on becoming a world-class concert pianist.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, the tide started to change imperceptibly.\u00a0 In 1916 he persuaded his \u201cUncle Frank\u201d to take him to Yosemite, a destination that he was inspired to see from the books his aunt had given him while he laid ill in bed.\u00a0 And at the same time his father gave him is first camera, an Eastman Kodak Brownie box camera.\u00a0 It was on that trip that he took his first photographs of Yosemite.\u00a0 He later commented, \u201cThe splendor of Yosemite burst upon us, and it was glorious.\u00a0 There was light everywhere. \u00a0A new era began for me.\u201d\u00a0 That was the first of an annual pilgrimage to Yosemite that would continue throughout his life.\u00a0 But he still planned on being a concert pianist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n His interest in photography continued to grow.\u00a0 He started reading photography magazines and attending photography club meetings.\u00a0 In 1917 to 1918 he worked in a photography lab part-time, learning basic darkroom technique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Adams attempted to mix his music with his annual trip to Yosemite and the Sierra.\u00a0 A park ranger introduced him to a landscape painter, Harry Best who, besides his paining ran a studio in the valley.\u00a0 Best had a piano that he made available to Adams so he could practice while away from home.\u00a0 And wouldn\u2019t you know it \u2013 Best also had a beautiful young daughter, Virginia, who caught Adam\u2019s eye.\u00a0 They were married in 1928.\u00a0 Adams began showing his photograph in Best\u2019s studio and when Harry died in 1936, Virginia inherited the studio.\u00a0 Adams continued to display his photographs there.\u00a0 In 1971 the name of the studio changed to the Ansel Adams Gallery and remains that to this day.\u00a0 The family continues to run it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1919, Adams contracted the deadly Spanish Flu and recuperated in Yosemite.\u00a0 That same year he became active in the Sierra Club.\u00a0 For four years, from 1920 to 1923, he was the summer caretaker of the Sierra Club visitor center in the valley, the La Conte Memorial Lodge.\u00a0 He also became a member of the Club\u2019s board of directors in 1934 and served in that capacity for 37 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the early 1920s, Adams began experimenting with the soft-focus, etching, bromoil process, and other techniques that were hallmarks of the Pictorialist movement.\u00a0 His skills developed and his first photograph was published in 1922 in the Sierra Club Bulletin<\/em>.\u00a0 But before long, Adams stopped hand coloring his prints, another hallmark of Pictorialist prints although he continued with some of the other practices.\u00a0 It was in 1930 that he met Paul Strand<\/a> and Georgia O\u2019Keeffe during a two month stay in Taos, New Mexico.\u00a0 Strand was an advocate of straight photography; namely, photographs that featured sharp focus and no manipulation of negatives or prints as practiced by the Pictorialists.\u00a0 Stand shared his techniques with Adams which he immediately adopted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During this same period, Adams came to realize that his small hands would prevent him from being successful as a concert pianist.\u00a0 And he didn\u2019t like the egos so frequently found on the concert circuit.\u00a0 While he continued to play the piano, he clearly saw his future in photography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1927, Adams made a photograph of Half Dome titled, \u201cMonolith, the Face of Half Dome.\u201d\u00a0 This resulted in “a brooding form, with deep shadows and a distant sharp white peak against a dark sky.”\u00a0 He used a red filter to achieve the effect he envisioned.\u00a0 The result was an image that was almost surreal.\u00a0 The creation of this print was a turning point in his development.\u00a0 It was the first image that he previsualized the final print, a practice that would become his hallmark.\u00a0 He exclaimed that he had finally achieved, \u201cmy first conscious visualization\u201d that allowed him to capture \u201cnot the way the subject appeared in reality, but how it felt to me\u201d. \u00a0\u00a0This photograph was included in the publication that same year of Adams\u2019 first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras<\/em>.\u00a0 It received wide-spread critical acclaim.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1931, Adams received a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, titled \u201cPictorial Photographs of the Sierra Nevada Mountains by Ansel Adams.\u201d\u00a0 It contained 60 prints of the Sierra Nevada and Canadian mountains.\u00a0 The review in the Washington Post had this to say:\u00a0 “His photographs are like portraits of the giant peaks, which seem to be inhabited by mythical gods.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the following year, several things of import occurred.\u00a0 First, Adams participated in a group exhibition with Imogen Cunningham<\/a> and Edward Weston<\/a> at the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco.\u00a0 That same year, these plus several other prominent West Coast photographers formed Group f\/64.\u00a0 They advocated sharp focus, the use of the full photographic gray scale from black to white, and the avoidance of any techniques that are taken from other art forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n n 1933, Adams opened the Ansel Adams Gallery for the Arts in San Francisco and in 1935 he published his first book, Making a Photograph<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1936, Adams met Alfred Stieglitz<\/a>, the legendary promoter of photography as art.\u00a0 Stieglitz was so impressed with the importance of Adams\u2019 work that he mounted only the second one-artist show in his gallery An American Place (the first was Paul Strand 20 years earlier).\u00a0 The show raised criticisms from some critics.\u00a0 Most of the photographers of the day were exposing social and cultural issues, both domestic and international.\u00a0 Adams\u2019 pristine photographs of towering mountains rising about isolated lakes were seen to be sterile and even irrelevant when compared to the displaced farmers during the dust bowl that Dorothea Lange<\/a> was capturing.\u00a0 Ultimately, however, Adams\u2019 photographs became some of the most powerful arguments for conserving our country\u2019s natural wonders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ansel Adams the conservationist continued his activities in successfully lobbying congress to establish Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park.\u00a0 Much of his influence came from the book he published Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His growing fame landed Adams numerous commercial assignments.\u00a0 In fact, he was sought after by companies for the rest of his career.\u00a0 The National Park Service was one of his largest clients, but he was also sought after by Kodak, Fortune<\/em> magazine, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, AT&T, and the American Trust Company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to his incomparable aesthetic and expressive eye, Adams was a consummate technician.\u00a0 In 1939 to 1940, Adams in collaboration with Fred Archer perfected the zone system.\u00a0 With it he was able to previsualize the final image, determine the exposure and exactly how the negative would be developed. \u00a0One of its primary characteristics is that the zone system utilizes the full tonal range of the negatives from which the print was made.\u00a0 Adams published the technique in his book The Negative<\/em>.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>Transition<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Growing Recognition<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>The Zone System<\/h2>\n\n\n\n