commercial photographer, he found a solution that
would allow him to support his family and at the
same time enable him to pursue the development of
his own artistic photographic work.
Although first offered only occasional photo-
graphic jobs by private persons and California
area companies, Adams gained gradually a repu-
tation and was soon offered jobs across the count-
ry by major companies such as the American
Telegraph and Telephone Company,Lifemagazine,
the American Trust Company, and Eastman Kodak
(later in his career).
Adams’s first individual exhibition was held in
1931 at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
D.C., and a year later, his work was exhibited at
the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Fran-
cisco. In that same year, 1932, he founded the
Group f/64 together with Willard Van Dyke, Ed-
ward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Sonia Nos-
kowiak, John Paul Edwards, and Henry Swift.
The name f/64 refers to the smallest aperture of
the camera lens, a setting that produces the largest
field depth and consequently sharply focused and
finely detailed images.
The group promoted straight, pure modernistic
photography, in contrast to the prevalent sentimen-
tal turn-of-the-century pictorialist style. Soft-focus
and emotionalism was replaced by emphasis on
crystalline sharp form and texture. Frequently, the
photographic subjects were chosen deliberately sim-
ple, often seen in close-up and creating sometimes
abstract designs, as for example inBurnt Stump and
New Grass, 1935; Rose and Driftwood, 1932, Frozen
Lake and Cliffs, Surf Sequence(a sequence of five
images), 1932; or Wood Flame, Tree Detail.The
prints were produced on glossy gelatin silver papers
mounted on white board. Filters and only basic
printing techniques, such as burning and dodging,
were considered acceptable. In fact, Adams used
filters often in order to accentuate the structure of
clouds against the sky, or in general to darken a blue
sky to appear almost completely black on the prints,
as for instance inMonolith, the Face of Half Domeor
High Country Crags and Moon, Sunrise,c. 1935.
Despite the clear rules of the Group f/64,
Adams did not eschew a certain degree of experi-
mentation, and used a variety of miniature and
large-format cameras. After meeting Alfred Stie-
glitz in 1933, he opened the Ansel Adams Gallery
in San Francisco. He published several articles in
Camera Craftin 1934 and a year later, his first
book,Making a Photograph,whichwasreceived
with enthusiasm and assured him a worldwide
reputation as a photographer. In many of his
publications, Adams promoted the approach of
the Group f/64 with passion. The most convin-
cing, tangible, and by the broad public best under-
stood and admired arguments in favor of this
approach, however, were undoubtedly Adams’s
photographic studies of the west coast. They
stand as testimony for the power and beauty of
straight photography. The sharp images of majes-
tic mountainous landscapes, untouched by man-
kind, convey a sense of awe and instill respect and
a desire for conservation of nature, an aspect that
was most important to Adams throughout his life.
Famous examples are Adams’s Tenya Lake,
Mount Conness, c. 1946; Winter Sunrise, 1944;or
Moon and Half Dome, 1960. Adams developed a
strong intuition for the exact moment in time
where the constellation of sun and clouds, shadow
and light would combine to the desired dramatic
interplay between strongly textured and planer,
flatter elements of the image. Anticipation plays
a decisive role in capturing the right moment:
‘‘Anticipation is one of the most perplexing cap-
abilities of the mind: projection into future time.
Impressive with a single moving object, it is over-
whelming when several such objects are considered
together and in relation to the environment’’
(Adams 1985, 78). Examples showing the effect of
successfully capturing the right moment are
Adams’sClearing Winter Storm(1944), orMount
Williamson(1944). However, the best example is his
most well-known photograph,Moonrise, Hernan-
dez, New Mexico, 1941, where, as is often the case,
capturing the right moment was a matter of seconds:
After the first exposure I quickly reversed the 810 film
holder to make a duplicate negative, for I instinctively
knew I had visualized one of those very important
images that seem prone to accident or physical defect,
but as I pulled out the slide the sunlight left the crosses
and the magical moment was gone forever.
(Ansel Adams, 273)
By 1936, Adams had earned such a reputation
and impressed Stieglitz so much that an important
one-man exhibition of his work was held at An
American Place, New York. Adams moved into
the Yosemite Valley, taking trips through the
Southwest with Edward Weston, Georgia O’Ke-
effe, and David McAlpin. The resulting photo-
graphs were published in 1938 inSierra Nevada:
The John Muir Trail.He met Nancy and Beaumont
Newhall in New York in 1939, where in the follow-
ing year, he assisted, together with McAlpin, in the
creation of the Department of Photography at the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
In an effort to control the photographic process
and to be able to record the visual impressions of aADAMS, ANSEL