Few American artists have reached a wider audience, or enjoyed more widespread popularity in their own lifetime, than Ansel Adams. None has had a more profound impact on how Americans grasp the majesty of their continent, or done more to transform how people think and feel about the meaning of the natural world.
Born in San Francisco in 1902 following the closing of the American frontier, he first encountered the beauty of Yosemite Valley when he was just fourteen. "From that day," he later wrote, "my life has been colored and modulated by the great earth-gesture of the Sierra."
A visionary photographer, a pioneer in photographic technique and a crusader for the environment, Adams would take part in an extraordinary revolution: in photography, and in ways of seeing what he called "the continuous beauty of the things that are." His greatest photographs would seek to capture "the instant of revelation-of timelessness: amidst the evanescence of the natural world. Along the way, they would document the end of the infinite on the American continent, and its precarious passage into human hands.
Ansel Adams is the intimate portrait of a great artist and ardent environmentalist-for whom life and art, photography and wilderness, creativity and communication, love and expression, were inextricably connected. |
