American genius behind the shutter.

• Position: Museums Today - Ansel Adams

"The exhibition 'Ansel Adams' gives us the opportunity to explore the hidden EIE depths of an artist known for just a few iconic images. The wide range and high quality of pictures ... reveal a photographer with many dimensions, not just the well-known maker of dramatic landscapes," notes Paul Roth, curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Adams' photographic style, which fuses romanticism, poetic vision, technical precision, and environmental advocacy, has had an unparalleled influence on all landscape photography in its wake--and on how Americans see and think about their country's wilderness areas.

Born in 1902 to an upper class family in San Francisco, Adams was an unusually curious and precocious child. Trained by private tutors after the age of 12, he began preparing for a career as a concert pianist. At 14, he simultaneously discovered photography and Yosemite Valley National Park in California, using his first camera to record views during a family trip. After his 1928 marriage to Virginia Best, daughter of a Yosemite concessionaire, Adams devoted himself to photography.

His earliest landscapes reflected the prevailing soft-focus "pictorialism" common to art photography of the time. In 1930, he met New York photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand, who fused hard-edged modernist aesthetics with social concern in his pioneering work. Strand's commitment to photography as a medium for direct, realistic depiction influenced Adams greatly. By the time of his first solo museum exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 1931, Adams had found his mature style.

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In 1932, Adams joined fellow photographers Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard van Dyke, and John Paul Edwards, among others, to form Group f/64, a coalition of artists devoted to photographic realism. The modernist evolution of Adams' technique began a lifetime of dedication to craft. Adams became a restless and innovative experimentalist, developing many now-standard photographic practices and reinventing his approach at many stages in his career.

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Adams' sharply-focused wilderness views became immensely popular, and his fame spread beyond the art world. His books, Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography (1935) and Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (1938), expanded his audience from camera hobbyists to a broad public interested in America's western landscape. Adams'...