im a jr in high school in photo 1 class and need to do an essay on Ansel Adams. NEED THESIS.dont know what to talk about. Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 鈥?April 22, 1984) was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West.
Adams also wrote many books about photography, including his trilogy of technical manuals (The Camera, The Negative and The Print); co-founded Group f/64 with other masters like Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, and Imogen Cunningham; and created, with Fred Archer, the zone system. The zone system is a technique for photographers to translate the light they see into specific densities on negatives and paper, thus giving them better control over finished photographs. Adams also pioneered the idea of visualization (which he often called 'previsualization', though he later acknowledged that term to be a redundancy) of the finished print based upon the measured light values in the scene being photographed.
Life
Youth
Close-up of leaves In Glacier National Park (1942)Adams was born in San Francisco, California, to distinctly upper-class parents Charles and Olive Adams. When he was four years old, he was tossed face-first into a garden wall in an aftershock from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, breaking his nose. His broken nose was never corrected and appeared crooked for his entire life.[1]
Adams' father decided to pull Ansel out of school in 1915, at the age of 12. He was to be educated by private tutors and, with this, his father also arranged for him to take piano lessons and to learn Greek. From years of music his original passion was to become a concert pianist, but Adams became interested in photography after seeing Paul Strand's negatives. Adams long alternated between a career as a concert pianist and one as a photographer.
Ansel Adams first came to Yosemite National Park in 1916. While in Yosemite, he had frequent contact with the Best family, owners of Best's Studio. In 1928, Ansel Adams married Virginia Best in Best's Studio in Yosemite Valley. Virginia inherited the studio from her father on his death in 1935, and the Adams' continued to operate the studio until 1971. The studio, now known as the Ansel Adams Gallery, remains in the hands of the Adams family.
At age 17, Adams joined the Sierra Club, a group dedicated to preserving the natural world's wonders and resources. He remained a member throughout his lifetime and served as a director, as did his wife, Virginia. Adams was an avid mountaineer in his youth and participated in the club's annual "high trips", and was later responsible for several first ascents in the Sierra Nevada. It was at Half Dome in 1927 that he first found that he could make photographs that were, in his own words, "鈥n austere and blazing poetry of the real". Adams became an environmentalist, and his photographs are a record of what many of these national parks were like before human intervention and travel. His work promoted many of the goals of the Sierra Club and brought environmental issues to light.
Career
Farm workers at Manzanar War Relocation Center with Mt. Williamson in the background.In the 1930s, Adams created a limited-edition book of his own photography, leading him to believe in a world outside his own artistic nature. Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, was part of the Sierra Club's efforts to secure the designation of Sequoia and Kings Canyon as national parks. This book and his testimony before Congress played a vital role in the success of the effort, and Congress designated the area as a National Park in 1940.
In 1932, Adams had a show at the M. H. de Young Museum In the same year, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston and Adams created Group f/64, a step that is based on the love to "straight photography", or unaltered prints, in hate towards pictorialism.
During World War II Adams worked on creating epic photographic murals for the Department of the Interior. Adams was distressed by the Japanese American Internment that occurred after the Pearl Harbor attack. He requested permission to visit the Manzanar War Relocation Center in the Owens Valley, at the foot of Mount Williamson. The resulting photo-essay first appeared in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit, and later was published as Born Free and Equal: The Story of loyal Japanese-Americans.
In 1952 Adams was one of the founders of the magazine Aperture.
In March 1963, Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall accepted a commission from Clark Kerr, the President of the University of California, to produce a series of photographs of the University's campuses to commemorate its centennial celebration. The collection, titled "Fiat Lux" after the University's motto, was published in 1967 and now resides in the Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside.
Adams was the recipient of three Guggenheim fellowships during his career. He was elected in 1966 a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1980 Jimmy Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
The Tetons and the Snake River (1942) by Ansel AdamsAdams' photograph The Tetons and the Snake River has the distinction of being one of the 116 images recorded on the Voyager Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft. These images were selected to convey to a possible alien civilization information about humans, plants and animals, and geological features of the Earth.
Death
Ansel Adams died on April 22, 1984 from heart failure aggravated by cancer. When he died he left behind his wife, two children (Michael born August 1933, Anne born 1935) and five grandchildren.
Publishing rights for the Adams' photographs are handled by the trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.
The Minarets Wilderness in the Inyo National Forest was renamed the Ansel Adams Wilderness in 1984 in his honor. Mount Ansel Adams, an 11,760 ft. peak in undiminished enthusiasm since his death, is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even unparalleled in our country's response to a visual artist".
Works
Evening, McDonald Lake, Glacier National Park (1942) by Ansel Adams
Adams Church, Taos, Pueblo (1942) by Ansel Adams
Notable photographs
Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, 1927.
Rose and Driftwood, 1932.
Clearing Winter Storm, 1940.
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.
Ice on Ellery Lake, Sierra Nevada, 1941.
Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox at Canyon de Chelly
Aspens, New Mexico, 1958.
Photographic books
Ansel Adams: The Spirit of Wild Places, 2005. ISBN 1-59764-069-7
Born Free and Equal, 2002. ISBN 1-893343-05-7
America's Wilderness, 1997. ISBN 1-56138-744-4
California, 1997. ISBN 0-8212-2369-0
Yosemite, 1995. ISBN 0-8212-2196-5
The National Park Photographs, 1995. ISBN 0-89660-056-4
Photographs of the Southwest, 1994. ISBN 0-8212-0699-0
Ansel Adams: In Color, 1993. ISBN 0-8212-1980-4
Our Current National Parks, 1992.
Ansel Adams: Classic Images, 1986. ISBN 0-8212-1629-5
Polaroid Land Photography, 1978. ISBN 0-8212-0729-6
These We Inherit: The Parklands of America, with Nancy Newhall, 1962.
This is the American Earth, with Nancy Newhall, 1960. ISBN 0-8212-2182-5
Born Free and Equal, 1944. ISBN 1-893343-05-7
Technical books
The Camera, 1995. ISBN 0-8212-2184-1
The Negative, 1995. ISBN 0-8212-2186-8
The Print, 1995. ISBN 0-8212-2187-6
Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs ISBN 0-8212-1750-X I don't know how this might translate into a thesis but let me relate an Ansel Adams story about art. Adams was scaling one of those impossibly steep mountains out west and after a hard day's climb realized that he had reached where he'd hoped to shoot just to realize that he had two exposures with him (Now, I don't know what kind of "plates" he used; obviously not some Kodak one-time use like me) But Adams knew that he was going to take one exposure with a B&W filter and the other with a red filter. He later recalled that he knew what the red filtered photograph was going to look like and it was when his photographs went from travel brochure material to art. I've acted for over 20 years, and I equate this with the time that I had tried a monologue one way thentried it another way and then tried it another way. But on opening night, I had only one shot at it and had to get it right. I calculated that with a certain pacing, with a crack in my voice at one spot, with a pause here, I could create the effect I was looking for and that night I went from a mere student of acting to a professional who had accumulated a certain depth of knowledge and could pull certain "tricks" from a bag to exact a desired effect out of a group of people Discuss how Ansel Adams created art with his use of contrast while photographing america. The striking differences between the light darks and midtones is what (i think) makes his photographs beautiful. It is quite amazing since his subjects are from the same areas that tourist now flourish, yet tourist snapshots are no where close to the art that Adams created. You could outline the common, present day misconception that post processing (i.e., the use of photoshop) somehow cheapens the art of photography. Do this by talking about the countless hours, spent by Ansel Adams 80 years ago, in the darkroom manipulating his images so that the end product was what he wanted people to see. I just find it hilarious how people argue back and forth about the use of photoshop when Ansel did it in the 20's way before the personal computer was even thought of. My point is, there are plenty of papers and essays pointing out how revolutionary Ansel Adams was in the art of photography. This concept is not new to anyone who calls themselves a photographer. Something more interesting would be to point out parallels and contrasts with modern digital photograhy and the same idea only less the microchips and specially coated low dispersion optical glass. Art is subjective, and the job of any artist is to make their work appealing to whoever looks at it, despite the tools used. This anecdote comes from a friend of mine who once took a workshop in the field - Yosemite, I think - with Ansel.
My friend has his view camera set up to shoot a pond. But the wind kept kicking up, causing ripples, and he wanted it to be perfectly calm and still. He waited and waited.
Finally Ansel walked over, looked at the shot, held his hands up in the air and yelled "Cease!"
The wind calmed down immediately. My friend took his shot.
Ansel smiled and slowly walked away. |
