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Ansel Adams' Yosemite

The Special Edition Prints

Contributors

By Ansel Adams

Foreword by Pete Souza

Formats and Prices

Price

$45.00

Price

$57.00 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Hardcover $45.00 $57.00 CAD
  2. ebook $29.99 $38.99 CAD

America’s greatest photographer on his greatest subject–featuring the Yosemite Special Edition Prints, a collectible collection of photographs selected by Ansel Adams during his lifetime, yet never before published in book form.

The photographs of Ansel Adams are among America’s finest artistic treasures, and form the basis of his tremendous legacy of environmental activism.

In the late 1950s, Adams selected eight photographs of Yosemite National Park to offer exclusively to park visitors as affordable souvenirs. He hoped that these images might inspire tourists to become activists by transmitting to them the same awe and respect for nature that Yosemite had instilled in him. Over the following decades, Adams added to this collection to create a stunning view of Yosemite in all its majesty.

These photographs, the Yosemite Special Edition Prints, form the core of this essential volume. Adams’ luminous images of Yosemite’s unique rock formations, waterfalls, meadows, trees, and nature details are among the most distinctive of his career. Today, with America’s public lands increasingly under threat, his creative vision remains as relevant and convincing as ever.

Introduced by bestselling photographer Pete Souza, with an essay by Adams’ darkroom assistant Alan Ross, Ansel Adams’ Yosemite is a powerful continuation of Adams’ artistic and environmental legacies, and a compelling statement during a precarious time for the American earth.

  • "Iconic and still breathtaking... Adams remains extravagantly popular."
    The New York Times, January 2019
  • "Gorgeous... [These] vistas reveal Adams' ability to capture the wildness in nature and the book tells of his environmental activism."
    Detroit Free Press
  • Adams' photographs "call attention to the passage of time and changing nature of the landscape, especially in the face of global warming... Adams' photographs spread his belief in the transformative power of national parks to a wide audience. The pioneer defined the genre and kickstarted environmental activism through art."
    Fortune

On Sale
Oct 29, 2019
Page Count
160 pages
Publisher
Ansel Adams
ISBN-13
9780316456128

Ansel Adams

About the Author

In a career that spanned six decades, Ansel Adams was at once America’s foremost landscape photographer and one of its most respected environmentalists.

In Ansel Adams at 100, John Szarkowski notes that Adams’s role in the history of photography goes beyond his achievements as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. As a leader in the study and appreciation of photography as an art, he played a major role in establishing the first department of photography in an art museum, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (the same department that Szarkowski led from 1962 to 1991). Moreover, as a tireless advocate for improving the reproduction of photographs in books, Adams “badgered and cajoled his printers and platemakers” till they had “achieved in ink an unprecedented degree of fidelity to the chemical print.”

Although he devoted a lifetime to the cause of wilderness preservation, “Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service, but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save,” Szarkowski writes, adding that “Ansel Adams’s great work was done under the stimulus of a profound and mystical experience of the natural world.” Szarkowski dates that experience to the early 1920s and a camping trip in the High Sierra. As Adams later recalled, “I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light…. I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks.”

Commenting on this moment of vision, Szarkowski writes, “One might guess that Adams spent the next quarter century trying to make a photograph that would give objective form to the sense of ineffable knowledge that on occasion, in his youth, inhabited him in the high mountains. Yosemite and the Sierra gave him not only his principal subject, but also the experience that provided the basis for a useful artistic idea: ‘The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor.’”

Learn more about this author