Ansel Adams Influence On Photography

Ansel Adams was an American photographer who was also an environmentalist. He was known for his black and white photographs of landscapes. He became a famous photographer because he helped found the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art in 1940. His motivation occurred after his family took a trip to the Yosemite National Park, which is where he took photographs for the first time. Ansel Adams made a huge impact on photography because of his technological advances like the Zone System, environmental work, and beautiful black and white photographs. Ansel Adams is son of Charles Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. He was born in San Francisco in 1902. Charles Adams caringly and patiently encouraged and supported his son. Ansel

Before having an interest in photography, he was interested in piano. He became a serious and ambitious musician who was considered by qualified judges to be a highly gifted pianist. Sometime later, he became interested in photography after a vacation and the introduction to photography. In June, the family went on vacation to Yosemite where Adams used his first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie. The Yosemite scenary provided inspiration towards driving Adams to photography. After finishing his formal education, he continued with both music and photography. According to James Alinder, Adams taught the basics of photography and gaining further experience with photo related business like Frank Dittman’s photo-finishing business. He didn’t enjoy processing snapshots with little quality considered. He only learned what “an art photograph of the day should look like” from W.E. Dassonville who was an exhibiting pictorialist photographer and a manufacturer of printing paper. In 1919, Adams worked in Yosemite during the summer as the custodian of the Sierra Club’s Headquarters. Adams began to photograph Sierra with such a passion as the mountains became the main subjects for his camera. In 1920s, he started traveling

The Zone system was a photographic technique that controlled and related exposure and development which allowed the photographer to creatively envision an image and produce a photography that articulated that visualization. The technique basically divided the tonal scale into eleven zones from black to white. Total black is zone zero, middle gray is zone five, and solid white is zone ten . Adam’s printing values in his early images were first printed with sensitively soft tonal values, but then changed to darker and dramatic tones with more contrast. The Zone System is applied to the White House Ruin (figure 2) which is a photograph of the Canyon de Chelly that showed the old ruins snuggly built in the high cliff on the north side. With the Zone system completely developed, his only problem for this photograph was the filtration. The basic aesthetic techniques that he applied to his photography were a combination of visualization, equivalents and the zone system. Adams learned about ‘previsualization’ from Weston and the “value of seeing a subject in the mind’s eye as a photography in its entirety before exposure”. He tweaked previsualization into a new concept called visualization, which is the “ability to anticipate finished image before making the exposure.” He