One of the most influential individuals in the history of photography was Ansel Adams. Adams was responsible for not only some of the world’s most beautiful landscape photography, but also theories that changed the face of photography.
Ansel Adams was a photographer at heart from the time he was very young. He was born in 1902 and dropped out of school at just 12 years old. He saw photographs from Paul Strand that influenced him to take up photography. And from there, he changed the world
He was a very big lover of nature, as can be seen in many of his pictures. He is most famous for beautiful, striking black and white scenes of Yosemite Valley, but has done many others that are famous as well. He even has a series of photo documentary pictures of the Japanese-American interns during WWII in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.
Adams brought two very important concepts to the field of photography, both involving the play of light in a photo and how a photographer can use that to his own advantage. The first of these concepts was called the zone system. The zone system is a method of controlling the light to the negative space in a photograph to manipulate the look of a finished image.
The other concept is called the theory of visualization. It is measuring a scene’s light and judging it to imagine exactly what the finished photo will look like.
During his lifetime, Adams won a variety of awards and forms of recognition for his ground-breaking photography work, and even received a couple of honors post mortem. In 1966, he was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1980, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
After his death in 1984, due to cancer, Minarets Wilderness was renamed Ansel Adams Wilderness in his honor and in 1985, a peak in the Sierra Nevada mountain range was named after him.
Ansel Adams was a revolutionary figure in the world of photography, both with the methods he introduced and the beautiful photographs he captured.