Name This Famous Person Game

by Mike McLeod

Freda Blair of Montgomery, Ala., Donna Nigro of Queen of Hearts in Marietta, Ga., Darlene Bedwell of Great Falls, S.C., Robert Bernier of Beaverton, Ontario, Canada, and Anne Lancaster of Marietta, Ga. correctly identified this famous person as Ansel Adams.

Ansel Adams is known as one of the great photographers of all time. However, he almost took a different course in life when, at the age of 12, he taught himself how to read music and play the piano, aided by a photographic memory. He initially planned to be a concert pianist, but a family vacation to Yosemite National Park at 14 was a turning point toward his future career. There, his father gave him a Kodak Brownie Box camera.

Ansel Adams was born on Feb. 20, 1902 in San Francisco, Calif., to wealthy parents, Charles Hitchcock Adams and Olive Bray. Unfortunately, Charles Adams’ timber business, which he inherited from his father, was hard hit by the Panic of 1907 when the stock market fell about 50% and runs on banks caused many to collapse. The family fortune was almost totally lost, and Charles struggled unsuccessfully for the rest of his life to regain it.

Adams was a restless child at home and in school. He did not have friends, but he found consolation hiking along the Pacific coast near his home. His lack of attention and hyperactivity caused him to be expelled from several private schools, so his father and aunt tutored him. He returned to school later and was able to get a diploma for completing the eighth grade. That was it for formal schooling.

Adams struggled financially for most of his life. Early on, he worked as a caretaker for the Sierra Club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite. He would later serve as a member of the Sierra Club’s board of directors for 37 years.

Ansel Adams loved the great outdoors and did all he could to conserve its resources. He had always been a child of nature, but after his vacation experience in Yosemite with his family, he became an ardent student of the art of photography.

“Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space. I know of no sculpture, painting, or music that exceeds the compelling spiritual command of the soaring shape of the granite cliff and dome, of patina of light on rock and forest, and of the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters,” he once wrote. At the same time, Adams continued to pursue the piano and make money by teaching piano lessons. After selling some of his photos, he realized he could make a career of photography, but not as a less-than-stellar concert pianist.

“He decided, after seeing the photographs by Paul Strand, that ‘…the camera, not the piano, would shape [his] destiny.’ His mother and aunt both pleaded, ‘Do not give up the piano! The camera cannot express the human soul!’ To which Adams replied, ‘The camera cannot, but the photographer can.’” 1

Ansel Adams dedicated himself to photography. Summers he spent hiking the national parks and taking dramatic landscape photographs. He began selling portfolios of his work to an appreciative audience. At this time, Americans, for the most part, had never seen such vistas. In the early 1920s and ‘30s, there was no interstate highway system, so it required two months to drive across the entire U.S., often on dirt roads. Most Americans had never seen any of the magnificent rock formations and canyons of the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Zion, or the Tetons. (Although highway acts were passed by Congress in 1938 and 1944, substantial progress did not begin on an interstate highway system until after the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1954 was passed.)

To capture his stunning shots, Adams often hiked in carrying a tripod and a heavy, large-format camera because it yielded a high degree of resolution in photographs. A striking level of contrast and clarity in landscape photography has become an Ansel Adams trademark.

In the early days, he also used filters to change or adapt the contrast in a shot, as in “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome,” where the sky is made black with a dark red filter. Later, his perspective changed when he formed a photography group called “f/64” (so called for the tightest f-stop on a camera) with Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston, (best known for the photo, “Nautilus,” 1927). This group advocated “straight photography,” meaning no soft-focus, use of filters or camera tricks.

“Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.”

Tragedy struck in 1937 when Adams’ darkroom burned. More than 5,000 negatives were destroyed, including much of his early work.

In 1941, the Department of the Interior commissioned him to take photos in the National Parks for photomurals. World War II ended the commission early, but before it did, Adams provided the National Archives with, “…226 photographs… most of them signed and captioned by Adams. They were taken at the Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Kings Canyon, Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Carlsbad Caverns, Glacier, and Zion National Parks; Death Valley, Saguaro, and Canyon de Chelly National Monuments. Other pictures were taken at the Boulder Dam; Acoma Pueblo, NM; San Idelfonso, NM; Taos Pueblo, NM; Tuba City, AZ; Walpi, AZ; and Owens Valley, CA.” 2
(Remember, there was no interstate highway system at this time.)

During one of his trips to fulfill this commission, Adams took one of his most famous photos, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.” Afterwards, a question arose as to possession of the rights to the photo. He was allowed to take his own photos on his own time, but when was this one taken? Adams kept good records of his work days, but he did not have the date for the photo. The question of possession was finally resolved by astronomers using the position of the moon in the photograph, which dated it to Nov. 1. Fortunately, it was one of Ansel Adams’ days off.

“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”

This photo proved to be the financial turning point later in his life. Ansel Adams sold about 1,300 prints of “Moonrise,” according to an estimate by Mary Alinder, author of Ansel Adams: A Biography. It is also estimated that these prints have been sold for a total of $25+ million. Sotheby’s sold a 1948, 14 x 19-inch print for $609,600 in 2006. Over the years, prints of this famous photo have sold for: $34,375 (printed between 1973-77, sold in 2011); $362,500 (printed 1960-70, sold in 2011); $157,000 (1975-77); $360,000 (1948); $120,000 (1960s); $88,000 (1960s); $66,000 (1975); and. $157,000 (a mid-1970s).

“I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.”

This financial success did not arrive for him until later in life, about the 1970s. Before then, he supported his wife, Virginia Rose Best, and their two children, Michael and Anne, with commercial photography. He worked on assignment for Kodak, IBM, Life magazine, AT&T, Fortune magazine, Hills Bros. Coffee and many other businesses. He was also a portrait photographer.

Ansel Adams died on April 22, 1984 of a heart attack in California.

“My last word is that it all depends on what you visualize. If you don’t visualize a picture before you make it, you might as well use a purely automatic camera. They are marvelous devices for their purposes, but they cannot create for you, and that’s not photography to me.” 3

But as far as this life sketch is concerned, let this be Ansel Adams’ last words: “There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.”

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1 Black & White Magazine for Collector of Fine Photography, Oct. 2000, p. 76.
2 http://www.archives.gov/research/ansel-adams/
3 Ansel Adams, Master Photographers – The World’s Great Photographers on their Art and Technique, p. 9.