Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams photographed the American West with a precision that made him the most recognisable photographer in the country, and spent as much of his life lobbying for wilderness as making pictures. He was a hyperactive child expelled from several schools, trained seriously as a concert pianist, and only chose photography over music in his mid-twenties after years in Yosemite. With Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham he founded Group f/64 in 1932, arguing for sharp focus, deep depth of field and contact printing against the soft Pictorialism still dominant - the same fight Stieglitz had already changed sides in. He developed the Zone System with Fred Archer, a method for previsualising the final print and exposing and developing to reach it, which is still taught. Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico was made in 1941 in a few seconds by his own account, with no meter reading, using the known luminance of the moon. He was a director of the Sierra Club for thirty-seven years, and his portfolios were used directly in the campaigns that created Kings Canyon National Park and expanded others. He co-founded Aperture with Dorothea Lange, Minor White and others in 1952, taught constantly, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. He photographed the Manzanar internment camp in 1943, work that sits uneasily beside Lange s from the same subject because his is markedly less critical. His negatives are held by the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. He wrote a series of technical manuals - The Camera, The Negative, The Print - that are still in print and still used.

• Lived: 1902 CE – 1984 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist