Ansel Adams
Born 1902 in San Francisco, California; died 1984 in Monterey, California
From Wikipedia:
Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed an exacting system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a deeply technical understanding of how tonal range is recorded and developed during exposure, negative development, and printing. The resulting clarity and depth of such images characterized his photography.
Adams was a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, and his photographic practice was deeply entwined with this advocacy. At age 12, he was given his first camera during his first visit to Yosemite National Park. He developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club. He was later contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks. For his work and his persistent advocacy, which helped expand the National Park system, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.
Adams was a key advisor in establishing the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an important landmark in securing photography's institutional legitimacy. He helped to stage that department's first photography exhibition, helped found the photography magazine Aperture, and co-founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.
From artnet.com
Ansel Adams was an iconic American photographer known for his awe-inspiring black-and-white photographs of the American West. Carefully composed and technically precise, the artist’s picturesque images of Yosemite National Park are some of the most iconic works in the history of the medium. “Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space,” he once mused. “I know of no sculpture, painting, or music that exceeds the compelling spiritual command of the soaring shape of granite cliff and dome, of patina of light on rock and forest, and of the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters.” Born on February 20, 1902 in San Francisco, CA, the artist trained as a concert pianist before turning to photography in 1930. Along with Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, Adams formed Group f/64 with the goal of elevating photography to a high art at a time when it was only considered a form of documentation. A committed environmentalist, he traveled throughout the country to capture the grandeur of natural sites. Adams died on April 22, 1984 in Monterey, CA at the age of 82. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others.
