Ansel Adams

The Estate of the photographer to The Friends of Photography, Carmel, 1984

Acquired from the above, 2002

Ansel Adams, Natural-Light Photography (New York, 1952), frontispiece

Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light, Photographs 1923-1963 (San Francisco: M. H. de Young Memorial Museum and Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1963), dust jacket and p. 45

Liliane de Cock, ed., Ansel Adams (Hastings-on-Hudson, 1972), pl. 8

John Szarkowski, The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (Boston, 1977), p. 41

Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: Yosemite and the Range of Light (Boston, 1979), pl. 54

James Alinder, Ansel Adams: Photographs of the American West (Carmel: The Friends of Photography, 1980), unpaginated

Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (Boston, 1983), p. 2

James Alinder, Ansel Adams 1902-1984 (Carmel: The Friends of Photography, 1984), title page

Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston, 1985), p. 77

James Alinder and John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams: Classic Images (Boston, 1985), pl. 2

Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images 1916-1984 (Boston, 1988), p. 31

Karen E. Quinn and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Ansel Adams: The Early Years (Boston, 1991), pl. 6 and 7

John P. Schaefer, The Ansel Adams Guide Book 1: Basic Techniques of Photography (Boston, 1992), p. 153

Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: A Biography (New York, 1996), facing p. 106

John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams at 100 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2001), figure 10

Karen Haas and Rebecca Senf, Ansel Adams in the Lane Collection (Boston, 2005), pl. 5

Amy Scott, Art of An American Icon: Yosemite (Los Angeles, 2006), p 124

Andrea Gray Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs (Boston, 2007), p. 35

Barbara Buhler Lynes, Sandra S. Phillips, and Richard B. Woodward, Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities (Boston, 2008), fig. 2

Amy Scott, ed., Yosemite: Art of An American Icon (Berkeley, 2011), p. 124

Andrea Gray Stillman, Looking at Ansel Adams (Boston, 2012), p. 42

Mary Street Alinder, Group f.64 (New York, 2014), unpaginated

Peter Galassi, Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley: Celebrating the Park at 150 (Boston, 2014), p. 143

Rebecca Senf, Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams (New Haven, 2020), fig. 2.19

Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery, People’s Exhibition Hall, Ansel Adams: Photographer, February 1983; and traveling thereafter to: Beijing, National Museum of Art, March 1983; Tokyo, Odakyu Store Art Gallery, June 1983; Hong Kong Arts Centre, July – August 1983; San Diego, Museum of Photographic Arts, June – August 1984; Haifa, Museum of Modern Art, May – August 1987

San Francisco, Ansel Adams Center, Ansel Adams and the National Parks, June – September 1992

San Francisco, Ansel Adams Center, Ansel Adams, a Legacy: Masterworks from the Friends of Photography Collection, March – June, 1997, and traveling thereafter to: Chattanooga, Tennessee, Hunter Museum of Art, July – September, 1997; Louisville, Kentucky, J. B. Speed Museum, September – November 1998; Fort Wayne, Indiana, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, December 1998 – February 1999; Japan, Nihombashi, Mitsukoshi Department Store Gallery, March, 1999; Japan, Ehime Prefecture Museum, June – July 1999; Japan, Toyama Prefecture, Tonami City Museum, July – August 1999; Japan, Hokkaido, Kushiro Art Museum, September – October 1999; Japan, Kawasaki City Museum, October – December 1999; Cincinnati, Ohio, Cincinnati Art Museum, May – August 2000

Billings, Montana, Yellowstone Art Museum, Ansel Adams: a Legacy, October 2002 – January 2003 and traveling thereafter to: University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center, Ansel Adams: a Legacy, August 2005 – January 2006; Loretta and Ligonier, Pennsylvania, The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, March – November 2006; Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland Institute of Art, May – August 2007; Cartersville, Georgia, Booth Western Art Museum, September 2010 – March 2011; Tucson Museum of Art, October 2009 – February 2010; Missoula, Montana, Missoula Art Museum, October 2011 – April 2012; Helena, Montana, The Holter Museum of Art, January – April 2013; Charlottesville, Virginia, University of Virginia, The Fralin Museum of Art, June – October 2013

Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, has proved to be one of the most enduring images in Adams’s oeuvre.  In his Autobiography, Ansel Adams recalls in detail the circumstances leading up to making this photograph, and describes that event as a ‘personally historic moment in my career’ (p. 76).  In making this image, Adams considered not only how best to capture his subject with his camera, but, for the first time, anticipated how he wanted the finished print to look.  This pre-visualization led him to select a red filter, which he knew would render the sky a deep black, and to adjust the exposure accordingly.  Adams wrote that, with Monolith, he ‘had been able to realize a desired image: not the way the subject looked in reality, but how it felt to me’ (ibid.).  In Monolith, Adams crystallized his conception of visualization: the process by which a photographer determines specifically how the different tonal values of a scene in nature will be rendered in black-and-white on photographic paper.  Visualization became fundamental to his approach to photography for the rest of his career and was the basis for his teaching of the Zone System.