Ansel Adams photographer and artist
Until the 19th century most artwork was created in a two or three-dimensional media. In England, William Fox discovered a technique that allowed camera images to be captured on paper. This medium has evolved since Fox’s discovery in 1839 to a serious and viable form of art today. Photography allows the artist to capture what he sees. The image produced is reality to the artists eye, it can only be manipulated with light and angles.
The photograph is a very powerful medium. The French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed upon seeing an early photograph “from now on, painting is dead!” (Sayre, 2000). Many critics did not take photography seriously as a legitimate art form until the 20th century. With the
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The group concentrated on form and texture. The group translated scale and detail into organic, sometimes abstract design (Jacobs, 1995).
In 1935, Adams published his first book, Making a Photograph. Six years later, his Zone System was formulated. The Zone System introduced a way for the professional and amateur photographers to determine and control the exposure and development of prints for maximum visual acuity (Jacobs, 1995). The Zone System marked his first efforts at public education on photography.
Adams felt a sense of duty to share his knowledge of nature and photography. “…[Adams] was master teacher as well as a master photographer” (Schaefer, 1992). He wrote many books and taught students his art. Adams technical ability in the darkroom was magical. He set the standard for black and white printing. His discriminating taste and meticulously produced prints continue to amaze current generations twenty-five years after his death. Adams was an experimenter and a modernist with his camera.
Adams cherished the times he spent on vacation in Yosemite with his family. He spent part of his life teaching others how to capture the panoramic beauty of our national parks. In 1940 he taught his first of many workshops “The U.S. Camera Photographic Forum” in Yosemite with Edward Weston (Capa, 1986).
As Adams work came to the public eye, his skills and artistic visions were sought by many. Life magazine who gave photographers their
Eadward Muybridge and Cornelius Jabez Hughes, two photographers of the 19th century, introduced revolutionary ideas impacting the way photographs could be taken, categorized, and used. Muybridge, better known as the ‘father of the motion picture,’ studied landscape photos and invented a device that drastically improved their quality. In addition, he helped to pioneer work in the studies of motion and motion-picture projection. Hughes developed new technology related to photography and helped to guide many other amateur photographers into producing better forms of photography. The two had lasting impacts on the growth and importance of photography in the art, science, and everyday realms.
Being greatly influenced by his first trip to Sierra, Adams life was coloured by the stunning view of pine trees and white waters creating the desire for him to learn photography. Adams quickly became aware of aesthetic qualities in nature, such as light, the movement in clouds and wind revealed in the wilderness and used them to his advantages to convey these moods. Adams believed a photograph was an expression of ones view, not just of the subject, but life. Adams life was filled with the expression of nature, “in the mountains, rivers, and valleys of the West he saw poetry, he saw truth, he saw wisdom, he saw grace. To Ansel, the terrain was so gorgeously caught by his lens was not just earth and sky, but spirit and vision.” With such compassion for nature Adam could easily express and represent his current feelings and moods within a photograph. Adams photography progressed beyond emotional experience, Adams furthered photography as an art. By creating the zone system Adams gave each shade of grey a specific value, allowing for a proper exposure and development for each black and white photo. Along with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke, Adams created the group f/64, going against the pictorial style using a small aperture to capture photos with great detail and definition, formulating the revolutionary of straight photography. Allowing for
In the 1880’s, Eakins purchased his first camera during the summer. He had used photographs from the other sources as aids for his painting in the 1870’s, but the acquisition of his own camera inspired a period of intensive investigation of photography as a tool for making art. Eakins made scores of photographs as studies for a group of major paintings, among them Mending the Net, Swimming, and Cowboys in the Bad Lands. He also told students in his academy to take pictures to help them.
This group embodies the concepts of Ansel Adams, and this is what was so distinctive about his work. The realization of photographic vision through technically flawless prints was an approach that Ansel took in photography. But this did not stop experimentation that led him to the use of several large-formats and miniature cameras. to shed some light on the work of Adams, I should point out that he was deeply effected by the nature, especially by the Yosemite valley, and the four hundred mile long mountain range, called Sierra Nevada, where he kept coming back every summer, where he practiced climbing or just took long trips in which a great deal of photography was involved. During these summers, he developed an interest in conservation and was dedicated to record the splendid beauty of these valleys and mountain ranges. So the prominent factor in Ansel’s work was his love of nature, and the
For fun, Harry played golf regularly and he played it well. What he liked about golf was the challenge it had while in the game. By 1938, Harry stopped playing golf and began to pursue photography. At the time he had bought his very first camera, he didn’t know much about photography and taking pictures. Later on it would be the famous photographer, Ansel Adams, who would pave the way for Harry’s amazing photographs. It was when Ansel Adams came to Detroit for a workshop, all of his photographs and the passion they portrayed caught
The evolution of photography, from the very beginning to the modern technology we have today, is largely due to a few select specialists that took the matter into their own hands. Many discoveries were made about photography during the late 1800’s and into the 1900’s, but none greater than the discoveries of Ansel Adams. Ansel Adams made a huge impact on photography because of his technological advances, environmental work, and how he won the hearts of many with his beautiful works of art.
people. This was almost like a new way of photography, but it was another way to do fine art
Other photographers like Weston and Strand would often consult Adams for technical advice. He served as a photographic advisor to Polaroid and Hasselblad. He developed the famous and complex “zone system” of controlling exposure and development, allowing photographers to creatively visualize an image and create a photograph that matched their visualization. He published the most influential books ever written on the subject. Adams’s energy and capacity for work was astonishing. In his life, there were no such things as vacations, holidays, or Sundays. Adams described himself as a photographer, lecturer and writer. He would constantly travel the country in search of the natural beauty he admired and photographed. Adams felt a strong commitment to encourage photography as a fine art and played a vital role in the creation of the first museum department of photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New
Annotated Bibliography New technological advancements have allowed for an expansion in the art community, specifically photography. Art has been one of the fundamental aspects of human life since the prehistoric ages. It is a way to express oneself and share creativity with large groups of people. As humans have become more and more intelligent, new technologies have been invented. As technology continues to increase, the possibilities of art also escalate.
Edward Weston was seen as one of the leading pioneers of photography in the 20th century. His contribution to the world of photography is one that was able to bring new possibilities to the field. His style of photography was unique to him at the time and offered the art community very original works of art. This style of Weston’s was one of high resolution and clarity, though it did not come until midway in his career. Weston would soon collaborate with other artists that shared his tastes to form the f/64 group. Before becoming the world renowned photographer, Weston started as a humble and novice photographer (Edward Weston).
As early as mid-nineteenth century, astute observers were anticipating the consequences of the Graphic Revolution. Before the Civil War, a young Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in The Atlantic Monthly that the advent of photography would separate form from reality. He said the “image would become more important than the object itself, and would in fact make the object disposable.”3
Adams’s first camera was a Kodak Box Brownie, which he received as a gift from his parents in 1916. While on a family trip to Yosemite National Park, he made
Before photography was considered a medium of personal art, it was used for the sole purpose of portraiture. Carte de visites, daguerreotypes, and even tintypes were all used as a way to convey a person’s physical appearance into a print. As camera technology evolved, so to did the way photographers take portraits. It skipped from a stale faced man behind a backdrop to colorful and interesting photographs taken of people from all walks of life. Three of the innovators of modern portraiture are Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn and Diane Arbus. These photographers changed the public appearance or ordinary people and celebities while integrating their own original ideas.
William Turnage mentioned that Adam described himself as a “photographer, lecturer and writer” (Turnage). Adam had a great passion with nature and you could really see it through all his works. Capturing different wilderness
Until the 19th century most artwork was created in a two or three-dimensional media. In England, William Fox discovered a technique that allowed camera images to be captured on paper. This medium has evolved since Fox's discovery in 1839 to a serious and viable form of art today. Photography allows the artist to capture what he sees. The image produced is reality to the artists eye, it can only be manipulated with light and angles.