Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902, the only child of Charles and Olive Adams. He grew up in a house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and had a strong appreciation for beauty. By 1908 Adams was an enormously curious and gifted child, and began a precarious and largely unsuccessful journey through the rigid structure of thepublic school system. In 1914 Adams taught himself to play the piano and excelled at his serious study of music, however he despised the regimentation of a regular education, and was taken out of school. For that year, his father bought him a season pass to the Panama-Pacific Exposition, which he visited nearly every day, and began to receive private scholastic instruction from tutors. In 1916 Adams convinced his parents to take a family vacation in Yosemite National Park. It was here that he took his first picture at the age of 14 with a box Brownie camera given to him by his parents. Ansel immediately developed an enthusiastic interest in both photography and the. In 1931 he began writing a photography column for The Fortnightly. He could no longer keep up with orders for his prints or requests for him to exhibit.

In 1932, Adams with Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston, and other proponents of pure photography, founded Group f.64, and was part of the renowned Group f.64 exhibition at the M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco. In 1933 his son Michael was born and two years later his daughter Anne was born. Always striving to improve the field of photography he developed his Zone System technique of exposure and development control while teaching at the Art Center school in Los Angeles. For his accomplishments he was granted the Guggenheim Fellowship, so that he could continue his photography. In 1949 he becomes a consultant to the newly founded Polaroid Corporation. For many years he continued to photograph commercially, most extensively for Universities in California.

In 1959 he moderated a series of five films for television, once again demonstrating h On April 22 1984 Ansel Easton Adams died of heart failure aggravated by cancer. Major stories appeared on all primary television networks and on the front page of most newspapers nationwide. A commemorative exhibition and memorial celebration was held in Carmel. California Senators Alan Cranston and Pete Wilson sponsored successful legislation to create an Ansel Adams Wilderness Area of more than 100,000 acres between Yosemite National Park and the John Muir Wilderness Area. After his death he was unanimously elected as an honoree of the International Photography Hall of Fame. In 1985 Mount Ansel Adams, a 11,760-foot peak located at the head of the Lyell Fork of the Merced River on the southeast boundary of Yosemite