There is no other artist who is more closely identified with the beauty and grandeur of Yosemite National Park than the American photographer, Ansel Adams. While he was the first person to photograph every national park in the United States, it was his images of Yosemite National Park, which earned him his greatest recognition, and it is those starkly contrasting black and white images of natural beauty devoid of man or his influences, with which he is the most identified.
What set his images apart from other landscape photographs, and those who had come before him in Yosemite National Park, and tried to capture the scale and grandeur of places like El Capitan, Half-Dome, Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point, Yosemite Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, Inspiration Point (Tunnel View), or the Giant Sequoia Redwood trees, rivers, or wildlife, was not color (available during all of his sixty year career), but his black and white signature crispness, depth, and clarity, accentuated by his stark contrasting effects. He achieved this by precisely calculating the perfect exposure requirements. He also benefited by hauling in cumbersome equipment such as the Korona view camera which used expensive 8x10” film, and often employing a technique to increase tonal contrasts by using a dark red filter. His equipment’s dimensions provided their own challenges, but the inconvenience of the large format film and exposures provided increased resolution. Lugging heavy and large equipment through the Yosemite National Park, negotiating its mountains and rivers, and Giant Sequoia Redwood trees to get the shots was indicative of his commitment to not only capturing the beauty of Yosemite National Park, and Yosemite Valley, but it was also representative of his crusade to educate the world of the majesty of the place and bolster support to preserve not only Yosemite National Park, but all of our national natural treasures.
Ansel Adams, like friend and fellow crusader John Muir of Muir Woods (link: )namesake, was incensed by the development and destruction, and desecration of natural spaces and was an enthusiastic participant in John Muir’s Sierra Club. Ansel Adams designed a book in 1938 in support of one of their causes, entitled, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail. It was his testimony in front of Congress after the book’s release, which gave the Sierra Club the necessary exposure and sway to have Congress bestow national park status on Kings Canyon and Sequoia in 1940.
His photographs continue to offer pleasure and spread his message of conservation twenty-five years since his death in 1984. And today, new advances in digital imaging and advanced printing techniques have materialized to offer even higher quality works by the artist. Matthew Adams, Ansel’s grandson who oversees the family’s interests in Ansel Adam’s work, never had the ability to reproduce the images with the deep blacks that were necessary to effectively capture his grandfather’s work until recently. Archival Replicas can now be produced using technology that only the Smithsonian Institution, the Getty Museum, and the Ansel Adams Gallery employ. Matthew Adams is confident that the range of tone inherent in the new techniques, are producing the best reproductions ever seen in the artist’s work. Working with the University of Arizona where Ansel Adam’s Yosemite National Park photographs, along with his other works, are archived, an initial run of seven images have been selected for reproduction, including photographs made in Yosemite National Park and additional images will be selected each year. Yosemite National Park images can be seen in Yosemite Valley and also can be viewed online: http://www.anseladams.com.
