Ansel Adams

Collection of Virginia Best Adams

By descent to Michael and Jeanne Adams, 1980s

Acquired from the above, 2006

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ansel Adams at 100, August 2001 - January 2002, and traveling thereafter to:

The Art Institute of Chicago, February - June 2002

London, Hayward Gallery, July - September 2002

Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, October 2002 - January 2003

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February - April 2003

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, July - November 2003

John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams at 100 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2001), pl. 3 (this print)

Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston, 1985), p. 61

Andrea Gray Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs (Boston, 2007), p. 18

'At dawn I crept from my bag into the cold Sierra air at seventy-five hundred feet elevation.  A broad spur of granite touched the river nearby, and I decided to climb it, beckoned by the sunrise light on the sparse and rugged trees more than a thousand feet above me.  As I ascended, the vistas of the Merced Canyon opened and I soon saw the crags below Mount Clark shining in the early light, their spires dominating all I could see.  I returned to camp and found Uncle Frank busy with breakfast.  He gave me a knowing smile and said, "Pretty fine, my boy, isn't it?"'(An Autobiography, pp. 60-1).