Ansel Adams in the National Parks Photographs from America's Wild Places
- This book is the largest compilation of Adams' photographic oeuvre ever published. Included are Adams' most popular images – many of them icons of twentieth-century art – as well as a number of masterly but little-known photographs.
In a career that spanned six decades, Ansel Adams produced a remarkable body of work that is at once an artistic tour de force and a powerful tribute to his beloved American wilderness. Adams was given his first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie, in 1916, and made his first photographs during a family vacation in Yosemite National Park. Thus began a career and a lifetime devoted to making indelible images of America's wild places, its national parks, and its great mountain ranges.
This book is the largest compilation of Adams' photographic oeuvre ever published. Organized chronologically, it presents the full range of his finest work, from early efforts in the 1920s, to his projects in the national parks in the 1940s, up through his last important photographs of the 1960s. Included are Adams' most popular images – many of them icons of twentieth-century art – as well as a number of masterly but little-known photographs.
Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs offers an unprecedented survey of his development as an artist, of the themes and subjects that animate his work, and of the evolution of a style that is uniquely that of Ansel Adams – America's best-known and best-loved photographer.
***
Ansel Easton Adams (ur. 20 lutego 1902 w San Francisco, zm. 22 kwietnia 1984), amerykański fotograf, z wykształcenia pianista.
Zasłynął czarno-białymi fotografiami parków narodowych oraz jako autor wielu książek, takze podręczników o fotografii, w tym trylogii techniki fotograficznej (The Camera, The Negative i The Print). Wspólnie z innymi mistrzami fotografii, takimi jak Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham i innymi był współzałożycielem fotograficznego stowarzyszenia Group f/64. Pierwsze zdjęcia wykonał w Yosemite National Park w Kalifornii w 1916.
Ansel Adams jest autorem systemu strefowego, technika która pozwala fotografom na przełożenie światła widzianego na konkretne odcienie na negatywie i papierze, w ten sposób dając im większą kontrolę nad fotografią. Fotograf był również pionierem wizualizacji gotowej odbitki opartej na pomiarach światła podczas fotografowani, którą często nazywał 'prewizualizacją'.