Ansel Adams is famous for his landscape pictures, which he used to further environmental activism in the United States, and which helped to legitimize photographic realism as legitimate art. The impact of Adams’ photography on American culture, and the way it has come to be seen as a representation of America itself, has made Ansel Adams a household name and earned him honors and awards. During WWII, his photos became a symbol of what America was fighting for. In 1977, two of Adams’ photographs were sent into outer space as a time capsule/message to extraterrestrials on the Voyager Interstellar Mission. The Voyager Golden Record is a representation of life on earth, and the inclusion of Adams’ landscape, Snake River and Grand Tetons, is a testament to the power and beauty of Adams’ photos.
Adams captured his love of nature in his photos, and used them to further his environmentalist causes. Adams was a member of the Sierra Club, which the “father of the American national parks” John Muir founded (Giblet 44). Adams is considered by some to put into pictures what Muir communicated with words, that is, reverence for nature. Rod Giblet argues that Adams helped to define the environmentalist movement “as sancuarist, as conserving special, sublime places of recreation and visual consumption, rather than as caring for all places of life and work with sacrality” (44). While this might not necessarily be a good thing in everyone’s eyes, it can be argued that the sublime way in which nature was depicted in Adams’ photos was an effective way of bringing nature to the forefront of national consciousness and getting people to care about the environment at all.
In 1938 Adams published a book of photographs entitled Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail in order to convince the government to establish what later became Kings Canyon National Park in California. President Franklin D. Roosevelt enjoyed the book so much that he kept it for himself, and Adams had to resend another copy to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. The book had the impact he intended, and the park was established in 1940.
Ansel Adams followed the tradition of nature photographers like Carleton Watkins, whose photos contributed to the first instance of the U.S. federal government setting aside land for preservation purposes. The styles and Adams and Watkins are different though, because before Adams’ time, photography was not considered art. Photographers manipulated their photos to make them look more like paintings, a practice which Adams rejected. Adams formed Group f/64 with similar-minded photographers in order to advocate for “straight” photography. His efforts and the success of his work proved to be effective in changing professional and public opinion concerning straight photography as an art form.
Ansel Adams is a major figure in the history of photography; he helped give legitimacy to the form and demonstrated its power to enact change and engage a national audience. Adams’ landscapes are his most enduring legacy, rather than a single photo. I will leave you with another one more of his most famous photographs, Moon and Half Dome:
References:
“Ansel Adams: The Role of the Artist in the Environmental Movement.” N. p., n.d. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. http://www.anseladams.com/ansel-adams-the-role-of-the-artist-in-the-environmental-movement/
Giblett, Rod. “Wilderness to Wasteland in the Photography of the American West.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23.1 (2009): 43–52. EBSCOhost. Web. 3 Apr. 2014.
"Voyager- The Interstellar Mission." NASA. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html
Photos:
Snake River and Grand Tetons: http://www.archives.gov/press/press-kits/picturing-the-century-photos/images/tetons-snake-river.jpg
Sierra Nevada Book: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41026qvAXrL._SX258_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Moon and Half Dome: http://shop.anseladams.com/v/vspfiles/photos/5010117-U-2.jpg
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