Ansel Easton Adams was born in San Francisco on Feb. 20, 1902. He took an early interest in music and became a self-taught pianist. In 1916 Adams took a trip to California's Yosemite National Park and made his first pictures with a Kodak Brownie camera. From that time on, the park, nature, and the High Sierras were among his major interests. He studied photo processing for a short time in San Francisco and returned to Yosemite every year to explore and to photograph. In 1920 Adams decided to become a professional musician, giving concerts and piano lessons until 1927, when the publication of his first portfolio of pictures earned him wide critical acclaim. In Yosemite Park in 1928, he married Virginia Best, whom he had met while hiking with the Sierra Club.
In 1930, at the urging of admirers of his work, Adams decided to become a professional photographer. He studied diligently and became as proficient in photography as he was in music. In 1932 he was accomplished enough in the medium to be given a one-man show at San Francisco's M. H. de Young Museum. That same year he joined Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and others in forming the short-lived Group f/64 (the name signifying the aperture setting on the camera lens that produces the most sharply defined image), an association of West Coast photographers who, in reaction to the conventional soft-focus, pictorialist style of the day, espoused clarity of definition and purity of form in photography.
Over the course of his 50-year career, Adams's favorite photographic subjects continued to be the wilds of his native West, and his eloquent photographs of western scenes won him wide recognition as a poet-photographer of nature. His involvement with the Sierra Club (serving as its director from 1934 to 1971) and its efforts at environmental protection gave his art a social function of profound effect. As both a practitioner and teacher of photography, Adams played a central role in the acceptance of the medium as a fine art. He began to teach in the 1930s, founding the photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1946 and teaching his renowned Ansel Adams Workshop in Yosemite every summer from 1946 until 1981, when he transferred it to the Monterey Peninsula in California. In 1935 he published Making a Photograph, the first of his many manuals on technique. By 1939 he had devised the Zone System, a method of exposure and development that allows a photographer to control the tones of black-and-white prints.
In 1936 the well-known photographer Alfred Stieglitz arranged a one-man show for Adams at his New York City gallery, An American Place. Adams and the curator and historian Beaumont Newhall helped establish, in 1940, the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 1967 Adams founded the San Francisco-based Friends of Photography, one of the country's leading organizations for the appreciation and promotion of the art of photography. He received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1946, 1948, and 1958 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. Adams died in Monterey, Calif., on April 22, 1984. In 1981 a print of his Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico sold at auction for $71,500, at that time the highest price ever commanded for a photograph. His archives of 20,000 negatives and over 2,000 master prints are housed at the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, which he helped found in 1975.
