Ansel Adams was that rare artist who cared deeply for man and Earth, for a reality beyond himself, expressing these feelings in his art and his actions. Throughout his long and prolific career, Ansel Adams created a body of work which has come to exemplify not only the purist approach to the medium, but to many people the definitive pictorial statement on the American western landscape.

He was also strongly associated with a visionary sense of the redemptive beauty of wilderness and the importance of its preservation. The prestige and popularity of his work has been enhanced by the extraordinary technical perfection of his photography and his insistence on absolute control of the photographic processes.

Ansel Adams was totally passionate about planet Earth. It was as if he was created directly from the California soil. He had been a sickly child, but upon his arrival in Yosemite at the age of 14, he grew healthy. He returned year after year. Taking to the trails of the High Sierra for weeks at a time, he thrived on the brilliant blue skies, pure mountain air and gleam of glacial-polished granite. Later in life he would venture to eastern America only to be slowly diminished in soul and spirit, regaining himself again as he entered the Rockies, for him the true beginning of the American West.

Through a long and rich life, he concentrated his picture making upon a few, most favored landscapes: Yosemite and its surround Sierra, California, the American southwest and Alaska. Ansel Adams is best known as the consummate artist who gave Yosemite full expression. To record their 1916 vacation, his parents gave the fourteen year old his first camera, a simple Kodak Box Brownie. The rapport between Adams, camera and Yosemite was immediate. He returned to Yosemite every summer, soon spending as much of the year there as in his hometown, San Francisco. Photography and Yosemite, always together and never apart, evolved from hobby to job to becoming the point upon which he centered.

Over many years of dedicated work, Adams learned as complete a technical mastery of the medium as possible, combining superb technique with a natural eye for composition and a soul devoted to beauty and the American landscape. At first, photographing objects -- a mountain, a waterfall -- his vision of Yosemite soon expanded to include the larger landscape, creating private worlds.

Confined at first to photographing his surround, San Francisco, Yosemite and the Sierra, Ansel began traveling and photographing a larger world in 1926. His first trips were to Carmel, then in 1927 to Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico, discovering places that he returned to again and again. He could only photograph what he came to fluently know. Rarely would he achieve a successful image on his first visit. Five trips to New Mexico by 1930 resulted in his first book, Taos Pueblo.

With the arrival of World War II, Adams went to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a photomuralist for the Department of the Interior. During this time he began to develop a codification of his approach to exposure, processing, and printing - the zone system. In effect, this system aimed at previsualization of the final print from a given set of conditions.

Much of our understanding of the beauty and importance of the American wilderness comes from the great images of Ansel Adams, many of his acknowledged icons were made in the 1940s. These grand landscapes, spiritual, yet in touch with the earth, include such masterpieces as, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942, Winter Sunrise, 1943, and Mount Williamson from Manzanar, California, 1945.

In each of his images Adams aimed to modulate the range of tones from rich black to whitest white in order to achieve perfect photographic clarity. He also developed a knowledge of the techniques of photographic reproduction to assure that the quality of any reproduced work might approach as closely as possible the standard of the original print.

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