9781422271711

ANSEL ADAMS

PLATE 4 An Unnamed Peak Kings River Canyon National Park, California

mountains, and trees, and to discover the native people of its many and varied regions. Throughout his long career and even to present times, his work continues to exert a profound influence, his vision and empathy for the sublime American landscape unmistakably to the fore as the driving force behind his art. The power and energy of his work are astounding, and its sheer technical wizardry leaves the observer breathless with admiration. It is perhaps because Adams was, above all, a conservationist, and that his work was largely connected with America’s national parks, that his popularity is established for all time; his images are austerely beautiful, carefully composed, full of the most potent sense of atmosphere and symmetry. Whatever the subject—the vastness of a landscape or the smallest detail of a plant or human face—the images are powerful and immediate. No one can doubt that Ansel Adams’s work is uniquely his own, and it is debatable whether the power of his images has ever been surpassed. Ansel’s love of nature was, in all probability, a legacy from his father, Charles Hitchcock Adams, a keen proponent of the Emersonian ideal. (Ralph Waldo Emerson was a nineteenth-century transcendental philosopher who espoused the connection of humanity to a higher universal spirit.) The Adams family was from New England, having originally emigrated from Northern Ireland in the 1700s. They later settled in San Francisco,

where a thriving lumber business was founded. Charles had enjoyed all the benefits of a good education and was looking forward to majoring in science at the University of California at Berkeley. As a well-to-do young man with a secure future ahead of him, thanks to his father’s prosperous business, he had no reason to doubt that his life would continue to be successful and full of incident and that he would, in time, be able to pursue his greatest love, the study of science. This idyll was soon to be rudely shattered, though, when, two years into his science

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