In 1916, Carleton Watkins died. About half a century before, this American took the pictures that convinced Abraham Lincoln to turn the dream of explorer and eremite Galen Clark into reality: making the Yosemite Valley a protected area. About thirty images of vertiginous ravines, ostentatious waterfalls, giant trees and sumptuous mountains crossed the United States to inspire the innovative legislation that would lead in a few short years to the establishment of national parks, the seminal decrees in the struggle for the preservation of the wild. Amazingly, all of this took place during the Civil War and went against the basic principles of Manifest Destiny (which made the inhabitants of the young nation feel that the western lands were theirs to take full advantage of).
In 1916, a young boy, 14 years old, went on a family trip to visit Yosemite for the first time, during which he received his first camera. He used it immediately. This teenager was a piano prodigy who grew up, on the outskirts of San Francisco, surrounded by amazing views of the as-of-then not urbanized Golden Gate strait, watching the starry skies with telescopes and reading the work of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, developing with those experiences a rare sensibility to appreciate and care for Nature. And so, when he reached Yosemite he fell in love with the "glorious splendor" of endless wonders bathed in light. It was the beginning of the career for one of the most respected and celebrated landscape photographers ever, Ansel Adams.
With the same discipline he dedicated to the piano, Ansel immediately started investing in material and training. He went back to the glacial valley one time after another to enjoy its beauty and take images, climbing whatever was necessary, battling against the most strenuous elements. He went on to be an expert in his field due to the extreme attention he paid to experimentation with clarity, tonal balance, depth, filters and lenses, focus and exposure time. He wouldn't leave anything to luck in his images, certainly not after taking "Monolith, The Face of Half Dome" (1927), the first where he decided and visualized in his mind exactly what he wanted before pressing the trigger.
The American published his first pictures when he was 19 years old, in 1927 released his first portfolio, "Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras", and three years later his first book, "Taos Pueblo", with Mary Hunter Austin. In 1931 he had a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian and in 1936 the esteemed Alfred Stieglitz invited him to his gallery, where his works were an overall success.
In 1916, a young boy, 14 years old, went on a family trip to visit Yosemite for the first time, during which he received his first camera. He used it immediately. This teenager was a piano prodigy who grew up, on the outskirts of San Francisco, surrounded by amazing views of the as-of-then not urbanized Golden Gate strait, watching the starry skies with telescopes and reading the work of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, developing with those experiences a rare sensibility to appreciate and care for Nature. And so, when he reached Yosemite he fell in love with the "glorious splendor" of endless wonders bathed in light. It was the beginning of the career for one of the most respected and celebrated landscape photographers ever, Ansel Adams.
With the same discipline he dedicated to the piano, Ansel immediately started investing in material and training. He went back to the glacial valley one time after another to enjoy its beauty and take images, climbing whatever was necessary, battling against the most strenuous elements. He went on to be an expert in his field due to the extreme attention he paid to experimentation with clarity, tonal balance, depth, filters and lenses, focus and exposure time. He wouldn't leave anything to luck in his images, certainly not after taking "Monolith, The Face of Half Dome" (1927), the first where he decided and visualized in his mind exactly what he wanted before pressing the trigger.
The American published his first pictures when he was 19 years old, in 1927 released his first portfolio, "Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras", and three years later his first book, "Taos Pueblo", with Mary Hunter Austin. In 1931 he had a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian and in 1936 the esteemed Alfred Stieglitz invited him to his gallery, where his works were an overall success.
Besides working hard in the field, Adams also strove to find the right processing techniques for each image and personally printed thousands of copies for the numerous publications and exhibitions where he went on to participate, so as to make sure everything was perfect - "The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways." His first technical book was published in 1935.
Alongside his artistic maturation, conservation continually took a bigger role in his life due to the profanation for commercial interests he saw unfolding in Yosemite and, like Watkins, started using his work to help stop the ravaging: in 1939 he publishes "Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail" and it gets to the hands of president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was so impressed he pushed for the creation of the Kings Canyon
National Park not long after. This deep concern for Nature didn't decrease his disgust for injustice against his fellow men and during the Second World War he produces "Born Free and Equal", a book of pictures taken at the Manzanar internment center, where Americans with Japanese ancestry and origin where forced to go after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1941 he captures, measuring light only with his sight, "Moonrise, Hernandez,
New Mexico", to many his most outstanding image - it became so popular that Adams was "forced" to spend large amounts of the 1970s and 80s printing copies, finally being able to afford devoting himself solely to his art and to writing about environmental protection, particularly the Big Sur and Yosemite.
When confronted by the grandiosity of Yosemite, Ansel didn't aim for the permanence, solidity and majesty of the rocks, but instead he looked for evanescence, constant change, fragility, transience, something becoming something else, realizing those brief moments of transient light defined the mountains as much as their geological structure. And those pictures were taken with such a sophisticated technique that today we can still sense the temperature, humidity, time of the day, air quality, the sound of wind and water...
When confronted by the grandiosity of Yosemite, Ansel didn't aim for the permanence, solidity and majesty of the rocks, but instead he looked for evanescence, constant change, fragility, transience, something becoming something else, realizing those brief moments of transient light defined the mountains as much as their geological structure. And those pictures were taken with such a sophisticated technique that today we can still sense the temperature, humidity, time of the day, air quality, the sound of wind and water...
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