The Art of Ansel Adams: A Photographic Genius

For many photography enthusiasts, Ansel Adams is the epitome of a photographic genius. His work continues to inspire and influence photographers to this day, and his legacy extends far beyond his iconic landscapes. In this article, we will delve into the life and work of Ansel Adams, exploring what makes him one of the most celebrated photographers in history.

A Personal Note on Ansel Adams

For me, Ansel Adams represents a lot more than just a photographic style or technique. He is an icon who has inspired my own journey as a photographer. I had the privilege of studying with Michael Billard, a former student of Ansel's, and learning from him about the technical aspects of black and white photography, including darkroom printing. This experience not only deepened my understanding of Adams' work but also gave me a deeper appreciation for his artistry and vision.

Ansel Adams: A Firebrand of Photography

One of the most fascinating aspects of Ansel Adams is his incredible productivity. During his lifetime, he produced thousands of prints, showcasing his mastery of both composition and technical skill. His photographs are not just aesthetically pleasing but also meticulously crafted, demonstrating a level of control and precision that few photographers can match.

The Zone System: A Revolutionary Approach to Photography

Ansel Adams is perhaps best known for developing the zone system, a formalized approach to photography that allows artists to visualize their creative vision and execute it with precision. This method revolutionized photography by providing a new language and set of tools that photographers could use to capture images that were both technically proficient and artistically expressive.

The Evolution of Landscape Photography

Ansel Adams is often credited with defining the aesthetic of landscape photography as we know it today. His photographs are characterized by their grand scale, meticulous attention to detail, and a deep sense of reverence for the natural world. However, it's interesting to note that his work has not always been in vogue. In recent years, modern photographers such as Hiroshi Sugimoto and Michael Kenna have taken the art form in new and innovative directions, pushing the boundaries of what landscape photography can be.

Influence on Photographers

Ansel Adams' influence on photographers cannot be overstated. His work has inspired generations of artists, from traditional photographers to contemporary artists who continue to experiment with the medium. His legacy extends beyond his own photographs, offering a benchmark for what it means to approach photography as an art form.

Education and Outreach

One of the most remarkable aspects of Ansel Adams' career is his commitment to education and outreach. Throughout his life, he was dedicated to sharing his knowledge and expertise with others, through workshops, lectures, and writing. His willingness to share his craft has inspired countless photographers, who have gone on to make their own mark on the art world.

The Art of Ansel Adams: A Lasting Legacy

In conclusion, Ansel Adams' impact on photography is immeasurable. His photographs continue to inspire, educate, and challenge us to new heights. As we explore his work in greater depth, it's clear that he represents a masterclass in the art of photography – one that continues to influence photographers today. Whether you're a seasoned artist or just starting out, Ansel Adams' legacy is sure to leave a lasting impression on your own creative journey.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwas also part of that movement uh of the early 20th century and anel's career really took off in the mid 20s early 30s uh and like strand uh he was part of this kind of new wave of Photography that was coming along that was divorcing itself from pictorialism um if you consider the pictorialist mindset of where a lot of these pictorialist photographers were which kind of culminated in the stien stet school photography with the camera clubs uh it was a group of photographers that you know their sole purpose was to try to get photography accepted as an art form and so by doing this and this goes as far back as Julia Margaret Cameron they were borrowing uh techniques of painting and Fine Art uh incorporating that into photography uh everything from composition to the actual printing techniques uh to try to make this happen uh what happens is anel comes along and he started this group called the f64 group and they were really a divorce from that and their whole um methodology in fact they had a Manifesto that called for quote unquote pure photography so what they were trying to do was basically let photography be photography let the techniques come from within that um their Manifesto was a little bit hypocritical in some ways because they did do a lot of manipulation techniques but I think the point is is that a lot of these Southern California School of photographers it was just a new way of looking at things and they were really into photography just being photography and so there's really a lot you can say about anel um what's interesting and I kind of want to start this with a disclaimer um you know he represented the Southern California School of photographers uh he came along at a time developed an entire phot photography career which really I mean just exploded and he's a household name if you consider probably two people anyone could name even if you're not a photographer it's usually anel Adams and probably to a smaller extent Vivian mayor uh so he's a household name and he worked very hard to get there his work is is incredibly stunning um and this is the disclaimer I want to make and this is why I've kind of avoided doing a show on him for a long time um anel's work uh is meant to be seen and there's a famous quote that I think makes sense here by the famous architect M Vander row where he said God is in the details and I don't think there's a photographer in the history of photography that you could make the argument of that God is in the details more than anel Adams uh he was a master printer he was an amazing technician of what he could accomplish uh in the dark room and if you've ever had a chance to see these prints in person the prints that anel did um or if you ever get a chance to see them you'll know what I'm talking about uh they don't reproduce well um I have several books on Adams one that's just a monster and none of them ever have that same impact because the print has been reproduced and for some reason it takes some of those details out and it really flattens it a little bit uh when you look up anel's work online uh it just does not reproduce anytime you save a JPEG you start losing uh those small details being able to get intimate with the photograph and get close to it and see those it's a huge deal and I will say right now that in watching a video about ancel atoms that work is probably not going to reproduce and it's not going to have that same impact and effect that it has when you actually see it in person and you're presented with everything so anyway that being said it's just a small disclaimer um try to see anel's work in person he is U pretty much featured in every Museum in the world uh that has a photography collection and he does uh there are exhibitions of his work quite often anyway without further Ado I'm going to quit talking and let's go over and let's look at some work by anel Adams anel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902 growing up in a wealthy upper class family Adams first first trained as a musician starting piano and composition lessons at the age of 12 one of his composition teachers was American composer Henry cow as he became increasingly serious about his musical studies Adams was pursuing a career as a Pianist in his early 20s as Adam States in his autobiography his love for photography began during the family trips to yusim National Park his first camera was a Kodak Brownie box camera that his father gave him during one of these trips Adams became more interested spending time working for a photo finisher in San Francisco and returning to Yus in the summer to capture more images he spent much of his time reading photography magazines and becoming involved with local camera clubs by the age of 19 Adam's first formal photographs were published and the following year he began selling prints in his girlfriend Virginia's family Gallery called best studio in yosimite Valley the studio was inherited by Virginia in 1935 and is still owned by the family today it is now known as the anel Adams gallery in the mid 1920s Adam started to experiment with pictorialist techniques of the time including etching brm oil process and soft focus Adams used a variety of cameras lenses and techniques to get different effects but eventually decided to reject pictorialism for a more modern highly controlled Precision of Imaging Technologies honing his craft in the dark room Adams was already proving to be a master of promotion and The Business of selling his images his first portfolio peleon Prince of the high sier sold well earning almost $4,000 over $50,000 in today's economy patrons were commissioning anel for photographs soon after he and Virginia soon got married which marked the beginning of anel's commitment to photography and ended the pursuit of a music career also worth noting is that this time his dark room was still in his parents' basement with very little space and barely adequate equipment the 1930s proved to be a very productive and intense part of Adam's career he began shooting new locations and while in New Mexico he befriended many of the notable artists from Saget's in circle including George O'Keefe John Maron and Paul strand strand was an enormous influence on Adams and pushed him to advance his work to an even more intense level in 1931 Adams got his first solo Museum show at the Smithsonian institution the show proved highly successful and reviews from The Washington Post were Stellar the following year Adams was part of a group show at the D Young Museum in San Francisco also in the show were works by imagin Cunningham and Edward Weston the three photographers decided to form group f64 group f-64 was extremely significant to the advancement of Photography it proved a modern alternative to the stti and stiglets Camera clubs and opened up attention to a new Southern California School of photographers group f-64 promoted quote pure and straight photography over the popular pictorialism of the time in contrast to the pictorialist view of borrowing techniques from paintings and other art forms the group f64 Manifesto encouraged photography to be pure of itself and not borrow from other mediums for the goal of acceptance Adams opened his own art gallery in San Francisco at the age of 31 he pushed his career hard as he started publishing essays and his first instructional books he also became very active in Wilderness preservation and published a book resulting in the designation of the seoa and King's Canyon National Park in 1940 a trip to New Mexico in 1941 yielded one of Adam's most famous images moonrise over Hernandez Adams claimed he wasn't prepared when he came across the scene he used the luminance of the Moon to manually determine the exposure the negative was still difficult to print but Adams craftsmanship prevailed and the image was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944 over a period of 40 years Adams made over 1,300 unique prints of the image which by the 1970s had totaled over $25 million in sales Adams sustained a nearly 60-year career as a fine art and Commercial photographer he became known as an author publishing his formal techniques and approaches to photography and printing he formed the photography department at the San Francisco art institute and in the 1950s was on a monthly retainer with Polaroid who was founded by his friend Edwin land in the 1970s he had a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was commissioned by President Jimmy Carter to make the first official presidential photograph for the White House Adam's accomplishments were unprecedent in the history of photography along with Fred Archer he pioneered the zone system which was a technique for transferring light into formal measured densities for negatives and printing processes this was a major formalized process approach to black and white dark room photography and is still used today Adams died in 1983 at the age of 82 leaving behind an enormous Legacy and is still a household name today okay so I want to look at some pictures by anel Adams and I'm going to start with this one which um is a picture of anel Adams but the two images above his head and this is where I want to start these are both uh two different prints of the famous moonrise over Hernandez uh piece that he was very well known for in his career now depending on at what stage of his career you asked him anel had some varing stories on this but more or less what the deal was is he was in New Mexico uh near Hernandez which is a little bit north of Santa Fe uh you know it's kind of sits between a couple national parks and a national forest and saw this scene and thought what a photograph pulled over to get the photograph could not find his light meter for whatever reason and uh was not able to you know apply the zone system to creating this negative so what he did do is apparently he used the moon and he exposed for that um understanding how to calculate the luminance of the Moon uh much like you would with the sunny 16 rule um he exposed for the moon now you can see with these two prints over his head here the one on the left uh is the straight negative and the one on the right is after a lot of experimentation and man population in the dark room and I like this because I think this illustrates the master Craftsman in the dark room that anel was and just how good he was um you can see that on the left hand side I know it's pretty small on the video but the um you know those clouds that sit right over the horizon uh there's some density issues there they're a little too bright um there's not enough contrast between the sky and the little village below I think when you do look at the Village that's in the foreground uh it doesn't stick out enough and it's just not the same picture it's not a great picture then after much manipulation much experimentation and figuring it out he he learned how to print from that negative which was not ideal and came up with the image that you see on the right hand side and I do have a bigger version of that that I'll show you and this is the final and you can see this is just a fabulous image and you know even though the zone system and a lot of what anel pioneered with Fred Archer and developing that uh you know the whole idea is to make your life easy in the dark room and learning how to manipulate the the the negative in order to um easily get a print without having to spend a lot of time um you know editing what it is that you're doing and I think this picture is absolutely beautiful I love the way that he was able to get the contrast in the little village that you see in the foreground well it's not really Village but this little series of houses here and the little crosses just going bright white and the amount of detail um I love the way that the sky above those mountains uh it looks like you know maybe a paintbrush or something and of course the Moon is a big part of this image too but you can see just you know how amazing anel was with this and I'm sure this picture was taken at some session where he was talking about working with this negative but you can clearly see that the the image you know the straight print um from that negative on the left- hand side was just you know nowhere near what the final was and this was one of his you know hottest selling images he literally made Millions off of this and I think he made over 1,300 prints of this throughout his career so pretty amazing um another famous image uh by anel is this one this is the Half Dome at yosee um this is a famous scene uh this particular half do has been photographed by other people as well and anel also had a story about this one um this was another one of his big selling prints and apparently and I remember reading about this in his autobiography which is quite good uh anel's a fun guy he's easy to read and uh loved life loved photography loved making prints um he was on a hiking Expedition with several friends as I recall and reading and uh basically he had two um sheets of film left in his 4x5 cam camera that they were hiking with uh he exposed the first one and then just for grins popped a red filter over the lens and took the second and you know you can see the impetus of beginning to control the negative in order to get an easier print to make comes out in this because of the high contrast and that's what a red filter does it takes blues and turns them dark uh and it creates a lot more contrast in the image and the half doome is a beautiful image um it's pretty much an icon of yusim national park in a lot of ways uh and you know it really just the America um landscape and Americana and what Ana was doing during his career particularly that early part I I think a lot of those elements are present here another image that I think really shows off uh the maturity and and possibilities of what one can do uh using the zone system is this and it's it's a fairly simple image it's just a couple trees in the foreground and all you see is the trunks here as they spread towards the back but the way the light works in here and the way way that Manel manipulates the light is what makes this a beautiful image the clarity the sharpness the contrast everything is just so perfect and this scene I you know it's hard to say what it looked like when anel saw it but the way he was able to manipulate into this it looks like just a subtle amount of light um anel did like to work with long exposures um small apertures to get just the maximum sharpness step the field um he liked to print large and another absolutely stunning image this has always been one of my favorites of anel um there's some others too where just kind of did these simple studies of foliage um elements of nature and were really able to manipulate the light in a way and the contrast in a way that really just made them sing and uh this certainly is one of those um another very famous image of his and this has always been a favorite of mine and this is Snake River in the Grand Tetons and if you've ever been up to Jackson Hole um you fly into the airport and then you have to drive into Jackson Hole and you kind of go through a lot of this uh it is some of the most breathtaking uh landscape and scenery that I've ever ever seen um Jackson Hall is one of the most beautiful places on the planet that I've ever been to um and Snake River is beautiful and I love this image um there's a lot of things that I think come together in this image and just you know the contrast is beautiful um the way you kind of have these storm clouds that are starting to blow through and the way that contrasts with these clouds with the snow Peaks the river in the foreground uh you know the the foliage and the trees that you know on the bottom left hand side of the picture um are burned into where they really go dark and so you really have a nice balance um of contrast in this image and it has a beautiful way of your your eye being led through the image um probably a lot of burning was obviously done in that foreground as were the clouds to really bring out that contrast and that detail and it's a beautiful image um and as I said if you've ever been to Jackson Hole uh is just absolutely stunning uh as far as scenery goes up there uh one of my favorite images that anel did you see a lot of reproductions of this image and as I kind of mentioned earlier Adams for a lot of reasons um you know when you consider photography to be this medium where he obviously made a lot of prints um his work really does not reproduce well and I've done the best I can in the video and I found the best scans of these that I could find um but these were actually uh taken from the Phil Philadelphia Museum of Art website and they're tough and it's hard to reproduce his work and capture that that Essence but um anyway you got to go see it in person uh I want to end with this image and uh this is Mayor Dixon who was a fellow artist he was a painter and uh he was part of that Southern California School of artists that was going on and uh spent time you know in the the the southwest of the United States um anel and the reason I'm ending on this is this is very UN anel in a lot of ways anel is mostly known for these beautiful landscapes that he that he shot uh anel did work as a commercial photographer and he also did some portraits um he worked a lot with medium format and some other formats as well and even did some color work um clearly Landscapes were his thing and he was so good at that um if you're familiar with anel's work you probably know what I'm talking about when I say that his portrait work was nowhere near as consistent uh some of them are just none of them are bad but they're just not on the level that his landscape work was but when he was on he was on and I think this this this image uh illustrates that um I think there's so much interest going on with the light in this composition um you know the the subject has such an interesting uh face the beard um with the plant and the for ground and then also the stick over on the side and this image is very American in a lot of ways and it really starts to bring in and I think anel would hate hearing me say this but it starts to bring in a lot of that painterly like quality and Americana into his work if you look at the you know painters like Andrew wyth and uh you know it's that kind of composition and that kind of um you know this kind of poignant portrait and what I love about that so much is one it's very un anel and two this one's extremely good the other thing that's interesting and I don't know if you're going to pick this up on the video or not not but there is a screen that this is being shot through so you do have this beautiful texture that happens over here and this was not an easy shot to get I think that screen texture was difficult um I think manipulating the light in a way I don't know what kind of work was done on the print side of this but I think it's a beautiful image and very um very exceptional for an Hansel Adams portrait image a lot of his images were more straight on and and anyway what I was saying about you know anel would hate this painting comparison that I'm doing is that you know in the history of photography really around the turn of the century um into the 20th century in the early 1900s you have this movement of pictorialism and you have you know the stti and steeg at school of of trying to get photography accepted as fine art and so they were borrowing or trying to emulate a lot of techniques found in other mediums now in f64 uh the group with uh Weston uh imin Cunningham and uh and anel Adams came around their Manifesto was was called for what they called quote unquote pure photography and so it was you know understanding how to just use the camera to be beautiful for photography sake and I understood what they were going for um you know it is a little bit you know hypocritical in some ways because you know anel actually did use red filters he used a ton of manipulation in the dark room so you know it wasn't exactly the quote unquote pure photography that he was talking about but I do understand what they were saying with that um they were learning how to let photography be photography and how to manipulate it as such and what to do with black and white photography how to produce a negative how to have control over that and how to start becoming an artist with photography and I think that is the most important thing that you can deduce from from group f-64 I think the other thing that makes it extremely significant you know I think you know any photographer in history they their work tends to reflect the environments that are around them and if you compare the New York school uh with the Southern California School uh you know New York is is a little bit darker it deals with Urban Landscapes it deals with City Life and a lot of people and you know the Southern California School was shooting you know other artists in a lot of Landscapes and kind of what they were exposed to too but it provides a really interesting balance that I believe propelled photography uh from A Fine Art side you know up to the 1930s in those days and you know as I mentioned earlier Paul strand was an enormous influence on anel Adams and I think that was really important too you see that in these higher contrast images certainly and apparently the two became friends and and strand just drove anel to work even harder he just thought the world of Strand and and you know was always trying to strive to that level that that he saw in his hero like that so anyway um that's the work of of uh avanel Adams I will link up if you look in the video U description um to some links uh we've got some stuff on Pinterest where I've collected a lot of these images if you want to explore further and I despite the fact that everything has been shrunk and presented to you in a video I've hope I've I've at least represented a lot of what I believe makes anel Adams uh such an amazing photographer and I want to bring a personal note into this one as well um anel to me means a lot of things and you know I think photography is a lot of things and when you consider that photography yes there is an artistic sense and we talk about that a lot in the show um but photography is not only art um in composition uh it is dealing with light so it it it it it has elements of chemistry involved it has elements of physics involved it has uh you know the whole craft of the dark room in making a print and all these things that come together and then there's an education side and then there's you know all the things that anel did and he really did fire on all cylinders uh he was one of the early photographers who was just more than willing to share what he did in workshops lectures uh writing for magazines publishing books uh and he and Fred Archer when they established the zone system really had a legitimate formalized method that really hadn't existed in photography up to that point and a way of doing things in a very precise way and being able to control and be able to understand and and and know what to expect in terms of results and I think that's really important to talk about um personally for me uh when I started learning how to develop film and do dark printing I was very fortunate and then I studied with a guy who lives here in Dallas named Michael Billard and I took Workshop it was a whole series of classes over a summer with Michael and Michael was a former student of anel and you know probably drove him nuts because I always had lots of questions about well what did anel say about you know uh cuz you know here we are learning dark room printing with black and white and uh you know you got a connection to the master there and Michael was very helpful to me and a lot of what he taught in going back and revisiting a lot of anel uh you know it was really second generation anel Adams but that's really where a lot of my formal grounding uh happened and it's amazing how wellth thought out uh all those Concepts were and really what a a genius anel Adams really was um a lot of how you approach a print um you know then there's certain aspects of anel that you know are almost Untouchable um the fact that he was a complete Juggernaut in terms of producing his work he was highly prolific and he made made thousands and thousands of prints during his lifetime uh and you know the print was just as big a component as the composition as the scene as the manipulation of light and everything else that went into it and anel was a genius on on that level what's interesting is I think that anel's impact on photographers uh has dulled a little bit in recent years and maybe this is just a perception on my behalf I'm not sure but it seems to me that you know anel's place and time and what's come since you know we we've seen photography particularly landscape photography go in a little bit of a different direction uh if you consider uh you know modern photographers like Hiroshi sugamoto uh Michael Kenna has had a huge influence and an impact in taking um the Aesthetics of what a landscape photograph is into a different direction and and anel's work is a little bit because of those uh photographers fallen out of fashion somewhat um and that's not to you know say anything negative about either one but I think that photographers are less influenced by Ansel now because you know his work represents a little bit more of an old school aesthetic sometimes uh you know it's it's just it's not as modern it's not as contemporary and anel had a 60-year career but I think it's really important to consider what he did for photography is an industry what he did photograph for photography is craft uh what he did for photography as a whole and for those reasons uh you know I'm very influenced by anel um and you know he he provides this you know High Benchmark of what you want to strive to do with photography and that control that you want to have over it and basically that whole concept of prev visualization and then letting that lead out into artistic expression and really what you're doing as a photographer as an artist so anyway all that to say that is anel and uh thank you guys for watching another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video laterwas also part of that movement uh of the early 20th century and anel's career really took off in the mid 20s early 30s uh and like strand uh he was part of this kind of new wave of Photography that was coming along that was divorcing itself from pictorialism um if you consider the pictorialist mindset of where a lot of these pictorialist photographers were which kind of culminated in the stien stet school photography with the camera clubs uh it was a group of photographers that you know their sole purpose was to try to get photography accepted as an art form and so by doing this and this goes as far back as Julia Margaret Cameron they were borrowing uh techniques of painting and Fine Art uh incorporating that into photography uh everything from composition to the actual printing techniques uh to try to make this happen uh what happens is anel comes along and he started this group called the f64 group and they were really a divorce from that and their whole um methodology in fact they had a Manifesto that called for quote unquote pure photography so what they were trying to do was basically let photography be photography let the techniques come from within that um their Manifesto was a little bit hypocritical in some ways because they did do a lot of manipulation techniques but I think the point is is that a lot of these Southern California School of photographers it was just a new way of looking at things and they were really into photography just being photography and so there's really a lot you can say about anel um what's interesting and I kind of want to start this with a disclaimer um you know he represented the Southern California School of photographers uh he came along at a time developed an entire phot photography career which really I mean just exploded and he's a household name if you consider probably two people anyone could name even if you're not a photographer it's usually anel Adams and probably to a smaller extent Vivian mayor uh so he's a household name and he worked very hard to get there his work is is incredibly stunning um and this is the disclaimer I want to make and this is why I've kind of avoided doing a show on him for a long time um anel's work uh is meant to be seen and there's a famous quote that I think makes sense here by the famous architect M Vander row where he said God is in the details and I don't think there's a photographer in the history of photography that you could make the argument of that God is in the details more than anel Adams uh he was a master printer he was an amazing technician of what he could accomplish uh in the dark room and if you've ever had a chance to see these prints in person the prints that anel did um or if you ever get a chance to see them you'll know what I'm talking about uh they don't reproduce well um I have several books on Adams one that's just a monster and none of them ever have that same impact because the print has been reproduced and for some reason it takes some of those details out and it really flattens it a little bit uh when you look up anel's work online uh it just does not reproduce anytime you save a JPEG you start losing uh those small details being able to get intimate with the photograph and get close to it and see those it's a huge deal and I will say right now that in watching a video about ancel atoms that work is probably not going to reproduce and it's not going to have that same impact and effect that it has when you actually see it in person and you're presented with everything so anyway that being said it's just a small disclaimer um try to see anel's work in person he is U pretty much featured in every Museum in the world uh that has a photography collection and he does uh there are exhibitions of his work quite often anyway without further Ado I'm going to quit talking and let's go over and let's look at some work by anel Adams anel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902 growing up in a wealthy upper class family Adams first first trained as a musician starting piano and composition lessons at the age of 12 one of his composition teachers was American composer Henry cow as he became increasingly serious about his musical studies Adams was pursuing a career as a Pianist in his early 20s as Adam States in his autobiography his love for photography began during the family trips to yusim National Park his first camera was a Kodak Brownie box camera that his father gave him during one of these trips Adams became more interested spending time working for a photo finisher in San Francisco and returning to Yus in the summer to capture more images he spent much of his time reading photography magazines and becoming involved with local camera clubs by the age of 19 Adam's first formal photographs were published and the following year he began selling prints in his girlfriend Virginia's family Gallery called best studio in yosimite Valley the studio was inherited by Virginia in 1935 and is still owned by the family today it is now known as the anel Adams gallery in the mid 1920s Adam started to experiment with pictorialist techniques of the time including etching brm oil process and soft focus Adams used a variety of cameras lenses and techniques to get different effects but eventually decided to reject pictorialism for a more modern highly controlled Precision of Imaging Technologies honing his craft in the dark room Adams was already proving to be a master of promotion and The Business of selling his images his first portfolio peleon Prince of the high sier sold well earning almost $4,000 over $50,000 in today's economy patrons were commissioning anel for photographs soon after he and Virginia soon got married which marked the beginning of anel's commitment to photography and ended the pursuit of a music career also worth noting is that this time his dark room was still in his parents' basement with very little space and barely adequate equipment the 1930s proved to be a very productive and intense part of Adam's career he began shooting new locations and while in New Mexico he befriended many of the notable artists from Saget's in circle including George O'Keefe John Maron and Paul strand strand was an enormous influence on Adams and pushed him to advance his work to an even more intense level in 1931 Adams got his first solo Museum show at the Smithsonian institution the show proved highly successful and reviews from The Washington Post were Stellar the following year Adams was part of a group show at the D Young Museum in San Francisco also in the show were works by imagin Cunningham and Edward Weston the three photographers decided to form group f64 group f-64 was extremely significant to the advancement of Photography it proved a modern alternative to the stti and stiglets Camera clubs and opened up attention to a new Southern California School of photographers group f-64 promoted quote pure and straight photography over the popular pictorialism of the time in contrast to the pictorialist view of borrowing techniques from paintings and other art forms the group f64 Manifesto encouraged photography to be pure of itself and not borrow from other mediums for the goal of acceptance Adams opened his own art gallery in San Francisco at the age of 31 he pushed his career hard as he started publishing essays and his first instructional books he also became very active in Wilderness preservation and published a book resulting in the designation of the seoa and King's Canyon National Park in 1940 a trip to New Mexico in 1941 yielded one of Adam's most famous images moonrise over Hernandez Adams claimed he wasn't prepared when he came across the scene he used the luminance of the Moon to manually determine the exposure the negative was still difficult to print but Adams craftsmanship prevailed and the image was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944 over a period of 40 years Adams made over 1,300 unique prints of the image which by the 1970s had totaled over $25 million in sales Adams sustained a nearly 60-year career as a fine art and Commercial photographer he became known as an author publishing his formal techniques and approaches to photography and printing he formed the photography department at the San Francisco art institute and in the 1950s was on a monthly retainer with Polaroid who was founded by his friend Edwin land in the 1970s he had a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was commissioned by President Jimmy Carter to make the first official presidential photograph for the White House Adam's accomplishments were unprecedent in the history of photography along with Fred Archer he pioneered the zone system which was a technique for transferring light into formal measured densities for negatives and printing processes this was a major formalized process approach to black and white dark room photography and is still used today Adams died in 1983 at the age of 82 leaving behind an enormous Legacy and is still a household name today okay so I want to look at some pictures by anel Adams and I'm going to start with this one which um is a picture of anel Adams but the two images above his head and this is where I want to start these are both uh two different prints of the famous moonrise over Hernandez uh piece that he was very well known for in his career now depending on at what stage of his career you asked him anel had some varing stories on this but more or less what the deal was is he was in New Mexico uh near Hernandez which is a little bit north of Santa Fe uh you know it's kind of sits between a couple national parks and a national forest and saw this scene and thought what a photograph pulled over to get the photograph could not find his light meter for whatever reason and uh was not able to you know apply the zone system to creating this negative so what he did do is apparently he used the moon and he exposed for that um understanding how to calculate the luminance of the Moon uh much like you would with the sunny 16 rule um he exposed for the moon now you can see with these two prints over his head here the one on the left uh is the straight negative and the one on the right is after a lot of experimentation and man population in the dark room and I like this because I think this illustrates the master Craftsman in the dark room that anel was and just how good he was um you can see that on the left hand side I know it's pretty small on the video but the um you know those clouds that sit right over the horizon uh there's some density issues there they're a little too bright um there's not enough contrast between the sky and the little village below I think when you do look at the Village that's in the foreground uh it doesn't stick out enough and it's just not the same picture it's not a great picture then after much manipulation much experimentation and figuring it out he he learned how to print from that negative which was not ideal and came up with the image that you see on the right hand side and I do have a bigger version of that that I'll show you and this is the final and you can see this is just a fabulous image and you know even though the zone system and a lot of what anel pioneered with Fred Archer and developing that uh you know the whole idea is to make your life easy in the dark room and learning how to manipulate the the the negative in order to um easily get a print without having to spend a lot of time um you know editing what it is that you're doing and I think this picture is absolutely beautiful I love the way that he was able to get the contrast in the little village that you see in the foreground well it's not really Village but this little series of houses here and the little crosses just going bright white and the amount of detail um I love the way that the sky above those mountains uh it looks like you know maybe a paintbrush or something and of course the Moon is a big part of this image too but you can see just you know how amazing anel was with this and I'm sure this picture was taken at some session where he was talking about working with this negative but you can clearly see that the the image you know the straight print um from that negative on the left- hand side was just you know nowhere near what the final was and this was one of his you know hottest selling images he literally made Millions off of this and I think he made over 1,300 prints of this throughout his career so pretty amazing um another famous image uh by anel is this one this is the Half Dome at yosee um this is a famous scene uh this particular half do has been photographed by other people as well and anel also had a story about this one um this was another one of his big selling prints and apparently and I remember reading about this in his autobiography which is quite good uh anel's a fun guy he's easy to read and uh loved life loved photography loved making prints um he was on a hiking Expedition with several friends as I recall and reading and uh basically he had two um sheets of film left in his 4x5 cam camera that they were hiking with uh he exposed the first one and then just for grins popped a red filter over the lens and took the second and you know you can see the impetus of beginning to control the negative in order to get an easier print to make comes out in this because of the high contrast and that's what a red filter does it takes blues and turns them dark uh and it creates a lot more contrast in the image and the half doome is a beautiful image um it's pretty much an icon of yusim national park in a lot of ways uh and you know it really just the America um landscape and Americana and what Ana was doing during his career particularly that early part I I think a lot of those elements are present here another image that I think really shows off uh the maturity and and possibilities of what one can do uh using the zone system is this and it's it's a fairly simple image it's just a couple trees in the foreground and all you see is the trunks here as they spread towards the back but the way the light works in here and the way way that Manel manipulates the light is what makes this a beautiful image the clarity the sharpness the contrast everything is just so perfect and this scene I you know it's hard to say what it looked like when anel saw it but the way he was able to manipulate into this it looks like just a subtle amount of light um anel did like to work with long exposures um small apertures to get just the maximum sharpness step the field um he liked to print large and another absolutely stunning image this has always been one of my favorites of anel um there's some others too where just kind of did these simple studies of foliage um elements of nature and were really able to manipulate the light in a way and the contrast in a way that really just made them sing and uh this certainly is one of those um another very famous image of his and this has always been a favorite of mine and this is Snake River in the Grand Tetons and if you've ever been up to Jackson Hole um you fly into the airport and then you have to drive into Jackson Hole and you kind of go through a lot of this uh it is some of the most breathtaking uh landscape and scenery that I've ever ever seen um Jackson Hall is one of the most beautiful places on the planet that I've ever been to um and Snake River is beautiful and I love this image um there's a lot of things that I think come together in this image and just you know the contrast is beautiful um the way you kind of have these storm clouds that are starting to blow through and the way that contrasts with these clouds with the snow Peaks the river in the foreground uh you know the the foliage and the trees that you know on the bottom left hand side of the picture um are burned into where they really go dark and so you really have a nice balance um of contrast in this image and it has a beautiful way of your your eye being led through the image um probably a lot of burning was obviously done in that foreground as were the clouds to really bring out that contrast and that detail and it's a beautiful image um and as I said if you've ever been to Jackson Hole uh is just absolutely stunning uh as far as scenery goes up there uh one of my favorite images that anel did you see a lot of reproductions of this image and as I kind of mentioned earlier Adams for a lot of reasons um you know when you consider photography to be this medium where he obviously made a lot of prints um his work really does not reproduce well and I've done the best I can in the video and I found the best scans of these that I could find um but these were actually uh taken from the Phil Philadelphia Museum of Art website and they're tough and it's hard to reproduce his work and capture that that Essence but um anyway you got to go see it in person uh I want to end with this image and uh this is Mayor Dixon who was a fellow artist he was a painter and uh he was part of that Southern California School of artists that was going on and uh spent time you know in the the the southwest of the United States um anel and the reason I'm ending on this is this is very UN anel in a lot of ways anel is mostly known for these beautiful landscapes that he that he shot uh anel did work as a commercial photographer and he also did some portraits um he worked a lot with medium format and some other formats as well and even did some color work um clearly Landscapes were his thing and he was so good at that um if you're familiar with anel's work you probably know what I'm talking about when I say that his portrait work was nowhere near as consistent uh some of them are just none of them are bad but they're just not on the level that his landscape work was but when he was on he was on and I think this this this image uh illustrates that um I think there's so much interest going on with the light in this composition um you know the the subject has such an interesting uh face the beard um with the plant and the for ground and then also the stick over on the side and this image is very American in a lot of ways and it really starts to bring in and I think anel would hate hearing me say this but it starts to bring in a lot of that painterly like quality and Americana into his work if you look at the you know painters like Andrew wyth and uh you know it's that kind of composition and that kind of um you know this kind of poignant portrait and what I love about that so much is one it's very un anel and two this one's extremely good the other thing that's interesting and I don't know if you're going to pick this up on the video or not not but there is a screen that this is being shot through so you do have this beautiful texture that happens over here and this was not an easy shot to get I think that screen texture was difficult um I think manipulating the light in a way I don't know what kind of work was done on the print side of this but I think it's a beautiful image and very um very exceptional for an Hansel Adams portrait image a lot of his images were more straight on and and anyway what I was saying about you know anel would hate this painting comparison that I'm doing is that you know in the history of photography really around the turn of the century um into the 20th century in the early 1900s you have this movement of pictorialism and you have you know the stti and steeg at school of of trying to get photography accepted as fine art and so they were borrowing or trying to emulate a lot of techniques found in other mediums now in f64 uh the group with uh Weston uh imin Cunningham and uh and anel Adams came around their Manifesto was was called for what they called quote unquote pure photography and so it was you know understanding how to just use the camera to be beautiful for photography sake and I understood what they were going for um you know it is a little bit you know hypocritical in some ways because you know anel actually did use red filters he used a ton of manipulation in the dark room so you know it wasn't exactly the quote unquote pure photography that he was talking about but I do understand what they were saying with that um they were learning how to let photography be photography and how to manipulate it as such and what to do with black and white photography how to produce a negative how to have control over that and how to start becoming an artist with photography and I think that is the most important thing that you can deduce from from group f-64 I think the other thing that makes it extremely significant you know I think you know any photographer in history they their work tends to reflect the environments that are around them and if you compare the New York school uh with the Southern California School uh you know New York is is a little bit darker it deals with Urban Landscapes it deals with City Life and a lot of people and you know the Southern California School was shooting you know other artists in a lot of Landscapes and kind of what they were exposed to too but it provides a really interesting balance that I believe propelled photography uh from A Fine Art side you know up to the 1930s in those days and you know as I mentioned earlier Paul strand was an enormous influence on anel Adams and I think that was really important too you see that in these higher contrast images certainly and apparently the two became friends and and strand just drove anel to work even harder he just thought the world of Strand and and you know was always trying to strive to that level that that he saw in his hero like that so anyway um that's the work of of uh avanel Adams I will link up if you look in the video U description um to some links uh we've got some stuff on Pinterest where I've collected a lot of these images if you want to explore further and I despite the fact that everything has been shrunk and presented to you in a video I've hope I've I've at least represented a lot of what I believe makes anel Adams uh such an amazing photographer and I want to bring a personal note into this one as well um anel to me means a lot of things and you know I think photography is a lot of things and when you consider that photography yes there is an artistic sense and we talk about that a lot in the show um but photography is not only art um in composition uh it is dealing with light so it it it it it has elements of chemistry involved it has elements of physics involved it has uh you know the whole craft of the dark room in making a print and all these things that come together and then there's an education side and then there's you know all the things that anel did and he really did fire on all cylinders uh he was one of the early photographers who was just more than willing to share what he did in workshops lectures uh writing for magazines publishing books uh and he and Fred Archer when they established the zone system really had a legitimate formalized method that really hadn't existed in photography up to that point and a way of doing things in a very precise way and being able to control and be able to understand and and and know what to expect in terms of results and I think that's really important to talk about um personally for me uh when I started learning how to develop film and do dark printing I was very fortunate and then I studied with a guy who lives here in Dallas named Michael Billard and I took Workshop it was a whole series of classes over a summer with Michael and Michael was a former student of anel and you know probably drove him nuts because I always had lots of questions about well what did anel say about you know uh cuz you know here we are learning dark room printing with black and white and uh you know you got a connection to the master there and Michael was very helpful to me and a lot of what he taught in going back and revisiting a lot of anel uh you know it was really second generation anel Adams but that's really where a lot of my formal grounding uh happened and it's amazing how wellth thought out uh all those Concepts were and really what a a genius anel Adams really was um a lot of how you approach a print um you know then there's certain aspects of anel that you know are almost Untouchable um the fact that he was a complete Juggernaut in terms of producing his work he was highly prolific and he made made thousands and thousands of prints during his lifetime uh and you know the print was just as big a component as the composition as the scene as the manipulation of light and everything else that went into it and anel was a genius on on that level what's interesting is I think that anel's impact on photographers uh has dulled a little bit in recent years and maybe this is just a perception on my behalf I'm not sure but it seems to me that you know anel's place and time and what's come since you know we we've seen photography particularly landscape photography go in a little bit of a different direction uh if you consider uh you know modern photographers like Hiroshi sugamoto uh Michael Kenna has had a huge influence and an impact in taking um the Aesthetics of what a landscape photograph is into a different direction and and anel's work is a little bit because of those uh photographers fallen out of fashion somewhat um and that's not to you know say anything negative about either one but I think that photographers are less influenced by Ansel now because you know his work represents a little bit more of an old school aesthetic sometimes uh you know it's it's just it's not as modern it's not as contemporary and anel had a 60-year career but I think it's really important to consider what he did for photography is an industry what he did photograph for photography is craft uh what he did for photography as a whole and for those reasons uh you know I'm very influenced by anel um and you know he he provides this you know High Benchmark of what you want to strive to do with photography and that control that you want to have over it and basically that whole concept of prev visualization and then letting that lead out into artistic expression and really what you're doing as a photographer as an artist so anyway all that to say that is anel and uh thank you guys for watching another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video later\n"