11 Interesting Ansel Adams Facts That You Probably Didn't Know

The famous image of the face of half dome was a successful portfolio for Adams, and due to the half dome, he gained many commercial assignments after that.

Adams' art evolved as he became more established between 1929 and 1942 when he photographed life in the camps of World War II. He clicked the World War II images for a photo essay on injustice during wartime and clicked a phenomenal photograph just before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Adams believed that photography could express the same emotions that he felt via music. His first interest in photography sprang from his love of the natural world and a desire to capture part of that awe-inspiring experience on film.

Adams met and became friends with photographer Paul Strand during Bender's excursions to Taos, New Mexico. He worked with artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico.

Adams held a group display with Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston at the M. H. de Young Museum in 1932, and they soon founded Group, which favored 'clean or straight photography' above pictorialism.

Adams became the 'keeper' of the Sierra Club's Le Conte Memorial Lodge in the year 1919. The McDonald Lake is among his most famous projects.

If you loved the following facts and want to find out about more such amazing facts, then do check out our Albert Einstein facts and facts about Cuba to gain some more interesting information.

Ansel Adams Biography

Ansel Adams (February 20, 1902 - April 22, 1984) was the only child of Charles Adams or Charles Hitchcock Adams and Olive Bray, Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco at Fillmore District. His uncle, Ansel Easton, was the inspiration for his name.

Later in adulthood, Adams chastised his grandfather's enterprise for destroying many of the world's magnificent redwood trees.

Watching the smoke from the flames triggered by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was one of Adams' first recollections. Adams, who was four years old at the time, was unharmed during the first shaking but was thrown into a garden wall three hours later, shattering and scarring his nose.

Once he reached adulthood, a doctor advised that his nose be reset, but it remained crooked, and he had to breathe through his mouth for the remainder of his life.

Adams was a rambunctious youngster who was prone to illness and hypochondria.

He had little love for games or sports, but he grew up collecting bugs and exploring Lobos Creek to Baker Beach and the sea cliffs leading to Lands End, which he described as San Francisco's wildest and rockiest shoreline, a site littered with shipwrecks and teeming with landslides.

Adams and his family first visited Yosemite National Park in the year 1916.

During his visit, his father handed him his first camera, an Eastman Kodak Brownie box camera, and he snapped his first images with his customary zeal. The next year, armed with stronger cameras and a tripod, he returned to Yosemite National Park on his own.

He studied basic darkroom skills while working part-time for a San Francisco image finisher during the winters of 1917 and 1918.

He also developed his photographs and sold them at Best's Studio in Yosemite valley during his early days. His famous black and white photographs like of the valley of the Yosemite National Park have been reproduced by calendars, posters, and even recognized by presidents as they were crucial from the conservation perspective.

He clicked photographs of the wilderness of the many national parks and was a vigorous leader of the conservation movement (Ansel Adams photographs from different national parks are present on the walls of the United States Department of the Interior).

Ansel Adams was a voracious reader of photography magazines, regular at camera club meetings, and a frequent visitor of photography and art exhibitions. Ansel Adams met Harry Best in Yosemite and later married Best's daughter Virginia.

Ansel Adams' wife Virginia inherited the studio from her father when he died in 1936 and ran it till 1971.

The Adams family still owns the studio, which is now known as the Ansel Adams Gallery. Ansel Adams spent a big part of the 1970s printing negatives to meet the demand for his iconic works.

Ansel Adams joined the Sierra Club at the age of 17. It was a conservation organization devoted to safeguarding the world's wild areas, and he was appointed as the summer keeper of the Sierra Club visitor center.

In 1921, Adams Ansel's first photographs were published, and the following year, Best's Studio began selling his Yosemite prints. His early photographs displayed a keen sense of composition and tonal balance.

Ansel Adams wrote the 'Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail' in 1938, and the Sierra Nevada played an important role in declaring the Kings Canyon as a national park.

Ansel Adams established the first academic department for photography as a profession at the California School of Fine Arts. Ansel Adams died in 1984 but is still considered a national institution of fine art by photographers and environmentalists.

Ansel Adams Quotes

Ansel Adams is renowned for his photographs and his environmentalist approach towards the conservation of nature. He is well known for his fine art and black and white photography of different landscapes.

He was highly vocal about his ideas and thoughts and was equally quotable and inspiring with his words. He wrote on many subjects like photography, nature, art, politics, environment and his quotes are still very famous.

Here are Ansel Adams famous quotes on photography:

"Something is entrancing about the whole photographic setup, the camera, the lenses, the equipment. The precision and the quality is unbelievable." - Ansel Adams.

"You don't take a photograph, you make it." - Ansel Adams.

"Photography is a language." - Ansel Adams.

"I think sometimes with the negative you're more conscious of the design and organization than you are with the print because you don't have the subjects in positive form dominating you." - Ansel Adams.

"It is all intuitive. It has to come very quickly. That means you have to practice." - Ansel Adams.

"Ten people can go to the same scene and get ten different images, although they might have the camera in the same position." - Ansel Adams.

"You can't wait until something happens and then take a picture of it. It's happened so fast that you'll be late." - Ansel Adams.

"Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art." - Ansel Adams.

Here are Famous quotes of Ansel Adams on Nature:

"You don't improve nature. You reveal your impression of nature or nature's impact on you." - Ansel Adams.

"The clear realities of nature seen with the inner eye of the spirit reveal the ultimate echo of God." - Ansel Adams.

"Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment." - Ansel Adams.

"Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space." - Ansel Adams.

"I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful – an endless prospect of magic and wonder." - Ansel Adams.

"Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and wonder surrounding him." - Ansel Adams.

"No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied – it speaks in silence to the very core of your being." - Ansel Adams.

Here are some Ansel Adams famous quotes on the environment:

"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment." - Ansel Adams.

"Today, we must realize that nature is revealed in the simplest meadow, wood lot, marsh, stream, or tidepool, as well as in the remote grandeur of our parks and wilderness areas." - Ansel Adams.

"It is all very beautiful and magical here - a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake into you." - Ansel Adams.

Ansel Adams Education

Ansel's father, a prosperous businessman who owned a chemical plant and an insurance firm, sent him to both private and public schools. Adams struggled in school because he was timid and self-conscious about his nose. He only obtained an eighth-grade education, opting instead to study mostly via his hobbies.

Adams had been expelled from many private schools for being restless and inattentive, so his father decided to withdraw him from school when he was 12 years old. He was schooled for the following two years by private tutors, his aunt Mary, and his father.

He has always loved the outdoors ever since he was a child, spending many long walks and exploring his surroundings.

Adams had begun playing the piano at the age of 12. He was passionate about music and had decided to make a profession out of it and become a concert pianist, but later, his plan of becoming a concert pianist changed when he visited the Yosemite National Park.

Adams was also very much interested in photography.

His father required that he spend part of each day studying the exhibits as part of his education at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in 1915. Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School was where he ultimately continued and completed his official schooling, graduating from the eighth grade on June 8, 1917.

He kept his diploma on display in the guest bathroom of his house in his final years. It was around the same time that some of his work was published in limited edition collections.

These included the 'Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras' (1927) and 'Taos Pueblo' (1930), with text written by Mary Austin.

Ansel Adams gave up the piano and chose to become a full-time professional photographer. In 1932, he had his first major one-man display at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco.

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Most people recognize an Ansel Adams photograph when they see it because of his striking, black-and-white panoramas of the American west wilderness. The style of photography that he followed gave Adams individuality and recognition.

Adams felt passionate about promoting photography as a fine art form, and he was instrumental in the founding of the first museum photography section at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He'd determined at the age of 28 that he wanted to be a photographer.

However, there were limited professional options for photographers at the time.

Photographs were not commonly collected or shown at the time. As a result, Adams looked for commercial employment that would allow him to work as a photographer.

Pictorialism, which aimed to emulate paintings with soft focus, diffused light, and other methods, was popular in photography in the mid-1920s, and Adam also experimented with it.

In 1927, Adams began collaborating with Albert M. Bender, an insurance tycoon and arts supporter from San Francisco. Bender assisted Adams in the creation of his first portfolio in his new style, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, which contained his iconic photograph Monolith, the Face of Half Dome.

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