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Ansel Adams

An Autobiography

Contributors

By Mary Street Alinder

By Ansel Adams

Formats and Prices

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$11.99

Price

$15.99 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. ebook (Digital original) $11.99 $15.99 CAD
  2. Trade Paperback $21.99 $28.99 CAD

Discover this “evocative celebration of the life, career, friendships, concerns, and vision” of Ansel Adams, America’s greatest photographer (New York Times)

“No lover of Ansel Adams’ photographs can afford to miss this book.” – Wallace Stegner

In this bestselling autobiography, completed shortly before his death in 1984, Ansel Adams looks back at his legendary six-decade career as a conservationist, teacher, musician, and, above all, photographer.
Illustrated with eight pages of Adams’ gorgeous black-and-white photographs, this book brings readers behind the images into the stories and circumstances of their creation. Written with characteristic warmth, vigor, and wit, this fascinating account brings to life the infectious enthusiasms, fervent battles, and bountiful friendships of a truly American original.

“A warm, discursive, and salty document.” – New Yorker

On Sale
Feb 21, 2017
Page Count
400 pages
ISBN-13
9780316437011

Mary Street Alinder

About the Author

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was the most honored American photographer of the twentieth century. Through the exhibition and publication of his, his writings, and his leadership in the Sierra Club, Adams was also a prescient and highly effective voice in the fight to preserve America's remaining wilderness. 

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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.’”

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