Born in San Francisco, Ansel Adams was 14 when he made his first trip to the spectacular national park of Yosemite, California. The experience was of such intensity that it stayed with him for the rest of his life.Each summer Adams returned to Yosemite, and every trip involved exploration, climbing and photography. By 1920 he had formed an association with the Sierra Club, an organization established to promote interest in preserving the environment of the Sierra Nevada. In 1927 his first portfolio was published, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. The following year he began to work as an official photographer for the Sierra Club.
In 1930 Adams met Paul Strand, whose sharp-focus, naturalistic technique, known as "straight" photography, strongly influenced him. In 1932 Adams and several other California-based photographers, notably Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, founded Group f/64, dedicated to the perfect realization of photographic vision through technically flawless prints, as pioneered by Strand.
Adams opened a gallery in his own name in 1933, after meeting photographer Alfred Stieglitz. A one-man exhibition of his work was shown in 1936, and during the following two years Adams moved into the Yosemite Valley and made trips throughout the Southwest with Weston, Stieglitz's wife Georgia O'Keeffe, and David McAlpin. In 1940, Adams assisted in the foundation of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
In 1941, at the outbreak of World War Two, Adams began making photomurals for the Department of the Interior. The large scale of this work led him to develop a way of predetermining the exact tone of each part of the scene to be photographed - the so-called zone system. He also took moving photographs of interned Japanese-Americans, a photo essay which was exhibited at MOMA in 1944 under the title Born Free.
In 1948, Adams began five years of important work, photographing a variety of national park locations and monuments. In 1950 he went to Alaska, Hawaii and Maine, and issued a number of superb portfolios. In 1955 he moved back to Yosemite, where he began a photography workshop. His Portfolio 3: Yosemite Valley was published by the Sierra Club in 1960.
In 1966 Adams was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a retrospective exhibition of his work from 1923-1963 was shown at the de Young Museum. In the late 1970s Adams gave up active photography to devote himself to revising his Basic Photo-Books series on technique, and publishing books of his life's work.
