Custom Framed Photos and Art Prints by Ansel Adams
At Framed-Arts.com, we offer a wide selection of custom framed photos and art prints from photographer Ansel Adams, including his seminal work, The Tetons and the Snake River. The Ansel Adams photos and prints we have available can be browsed from our custom search page, while this page contains facts about Ansel Adams and his photography. Read on to find out information about the renowned photographer’s life and work.

Facts About Ansel Adams - Biography
Born in San Francisco in 1902, Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West. His studio, which is still owned by the Adams family, is now the "Ansel Adams Gallery."

Adams was a hyperactive child and prone to frequent sickness. An exceedingly curious child, he developed an interest in the natural world at any early age, collecting bugs and exploring the beach near his home. His parents raised him to follow the ideals of Ralph Waldo Emerson--to live a modest, moral life guided by his social responsibility to man and nature. In addition to his interest in nature, he also discovered a passion for music as a young man, and for many years believed his future career lay in music.

In 1916, Adams visited Yosemite National Park for the first time with his family. The famous valley was the first natural area in the United States to be protected by a Congressional act, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Adams later wrote of his first view of the valley which so inspired him: "The splendor of Yosemite burst upon us and it was glorious...One wonder after another descended upon us...There was light everywhere...A new era began for me."

During the trip, his father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Brownie, and he took his first photographs of the Park. His love for photography quickly bloomed. Working part-time for a San Francisco photo finisher,  he learned basic darkroom technique. In his spare time, he devoured photography magazines, attended camera club meetings, and went to photography and art exhibits. With his Uncle Frank he explored the High Sierra, in summer and winter, developing the stamina and skill needed to photograph at high altitude and under difficult weather conditions.

At age 17, Adams joined the Sierra Club, a group dedicated to preserving the natural world's wonders and resources. He served as custodian of the organization’s headquarters at Yosemite for four years. He remained a member throughout his lifetime and later served as a director, as did his wife. Adams participated in the club's annual "high trips," and accomplished several first ascents in the Sierra Nevada. During 1919, he contracted the lethal influenza which ravaged the world, but recovered after several months and resumed his active outdoor life.

During his twenties, Adams and Cedric Wright, his closest friend, shared a philosophical outlook that came from Edward Carpenter’s Toward Democracy, a literary work that espoused the pursuit of beauty in life and art. Adams carried a pocket edition of the piece while at Yosemite, and soon based his personal philosophy on Carpenter’s work: "I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate." He decided that the purpose of his art, whether photography or music, was to reveal that beauty to others and to inspire them to pursue it themselves.

Ansel Adams’ first photographs were published in 1921, and Best’s Studio began selling his Yosemite prints the following year. His early photos showed careful composition and sensitivity to tonal balance. At this point, however, Adams was still planning a career in music. It took seven more years for Adams to finally recognize that at best he might become a concert pianist of limited range, an accompanist, or a piano teacher.

Throughout the 1920s, Adams experimented with soft focus, etching, bromoil, and other techniques of the pictorial photographers, who strove to emulate Impressionism and tried to put photography on an equal artistic plane with painting. Still, Adams eschewed hand-coloring, which was popular at the time. He opted instead to use a variety of lenses to get different effects. Ultimately, he rejected pictorialism for a more realistic approach that relied on sharp focus, heightened contrast, precise exposure, and darkroom craftsmanship.

Ansel Adams - Photography Career
In 1927, Adams contracted for his first portfolio in his new realist style. With the sponsorship and promotion of Albert Bender, an arts-connected businessman, Adams’s first portfolio was a success. Soon he received commercial assignments to photograph the wealthy patrons who had bought his portfolio.

Whenever he visited Yosemite, he had frequent contact with the Best family, owners of Best's Studio. In 1928, Adams married Virginia Best in Yosemite Valley. Virginia eventually inherited the studio from her artist father on his death in 1935, and continued to operate the studio until 1971. Now known as the Ansel Adams Gallery, the studio remains in the possession of the Adams family.

Adams’ second portfolio was published with text by writer Mary Austin at Taos Pueblo in 1930. In New Mexico, he was introduced to notables from Alfred Stieglitz’s circle, including wife Georgia O’Keeffe, artist John Marin, and photographer Paul Strand. Strand in particular shared technical secrets with Adams, and finally convinced Adams to pursue photography whole-heartedly. One of Strand’s suggestions that Adams immediately adopted was to use glossy paper rather than matte in order to intensify tonal values.

With the help of a friend in Washington, Adams put on his first solo museum exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 1931, featuring 60 prints taken in the High Sierra. He received positive reviews,  but still felt as if he was not yet up to the standards of Strand. He decided to broaden his subject matter to include still life and close-up photos, and to achieve higher quality by "visualizing" each image before taking it.

In 1933, following Stieglitz’s example, Adams opened his own art and photography gallery in San Francisco. Also during 1933, his first child Michael was born, followed by Anne two years later. At this point, Adams began to publish essays in photography magazines, and wrote his first instructional book in 1935, Making a Photograph. During the summers, he continued to participate in Sierra Club outings as a paid photographer for the group, and the rest of the year a core group of the Club members socialized regularly in San Francisco.

Contributions and influence
Adams was not the first American artist to celebrate Yosemite and the Western wilderness. But his black-and-white photographs of the West became the foremost record of what many of the National Parks were like before tourism, even as his persistent advocacy helped expand the National Park system. He used his artistic work to promote many of the goals of the Sierra Club and of the nascent environmental movement, yet always insisted that, as far as his photographs were concerned, "beauty comes first." Realistic about development and the consequent loss of habitat, Adams advocated for balanced growth throughout his lifetime, and was pained by the ravages of "progress."  His stirring images are still popular in calendars, posters, and books.

With Fred Archer, Adams pioneered the zone system, a technique for translating perceived light into specific densities on negatives and on paper, thereby giving photographers better control over their finished work. Adams also advocated the idea of visualization whereby the final image is "seen" in the mind’s eye before taking the photo, with the goal of achieving all of the aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual, and mechanical effects desired. Through his publications and workshops, he taught these and other techniques to thousands of amateur photographers. His many books about photography, including the Morgan & Morgan Basic Photo Series (The Camera, The Negative, The Print, Natural Light Photography, and Artificial Light Photography) remain classics in the field.

Adams's photograph The Tetons and the Snake River is one of the 116 images recorded on the Voyager Golden Record for the Voyager spacecraft’s journey into deep space. These images were selected to convey information about humans, plants, animals, and geological features of the Earth to possible alien civilizations. These photographs eloquently mirror Adams’ favorite saying, a Gaelic mantra, which states, "I know that I am one with beauty and that my comrades are one. Let our souls be mountains, Let our spirits be stars, Let our hearts be worlds."

On April 22,1984, Ansel Adams died from cancer-related heart failure, leaving behind his wife, two children and five grandchildren. Publishing rights for Ansel Adams' photographs are handled by the trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Mount Ansel Adams, an 11,760 ft peak in the Sierra Nevada range, was named for him in 1985. The full archive of Adams' work is located at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Adams’ legacy includes helping to elevate photography to an art comparable with painting and music, and equally capable of expressing emotion and beauty. As he reminded his students, "It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium."

Custom Framed Photos, Art Prints, and Ansel Adams Biography
We hope these facts about Ansel Adams and his photography have provided insight into his extensive body of work. You can browse our selection of custom framed Ansel Adams photos and prints by visiting our custom search page. Happy print shopping, and be sure to contact us with any questions.