The Legacy of Ansel Adams
Image: Ansel Adams The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming 1942 - This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the National Archives Identifier (NAID) 519904., Public Domain
There will never be another photographer like Ansel Adams ever again. He pioneered a photography style while also setting artistic and technical standards that are still taught in schools today. Every photographer who’s obsessed with capturing landscapes on film wants to emulate Adams’ work. His entire body of work is perhaps the strongest argument for the superiority of film over the digital format.
Give Adams any natural landscape and he would inevitably come up with something magical. The way he captures the effects of weather on terrain creates a yearning for a time and place that will never exist again. Even as he preferred to do away with the distraction of colour, there is no American landscape photographer who was more dynamic, diverse, and creative. Had he lived to see Instagram’s vibrant photography scene, Adams would doubtless dominate as one of the app’s top photography profiles.
All of Adams’ contributions to the world of photography can be traced back to Yosemite National Park. Encyclopaedia Britannica claims that this is where he spent much of his early life, with many arguing that his best photographs of the wild all stem from him trying to recapture that idyllic time in his life. At age 14, on a family vacation to Yosemite, he was given a Kodak Brownie camera, a simple and inexpensive device intended for popularising low-cost photography. The story goes that he accidentally tumbled off a tree stump while holding his camera, causing it to snap an upside-down picture of the Half Dome Monolith. Adams regarded this as one of his favourite pictures. The picture started an obsession that culminated in 1927 when he finally succeeded in composing Monolith, the Face of Half Dome – widely regarded as the single greatest piece of American landscape photography in the last century.
Image: Ansel Adams. Yellowstone Falls, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 1941. This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the National Archives Identifier (NAID) 519993, Public Domain
What’s unusual about Ansel Adams’ career is the fact that for most of his early life, he considered himself to be a pianist first. He only looked at photography as a fun hobby. He was an accomplished musician who played piano for the Milani Trio, alongside a violinist and a modern dancer. He even spent a winter in San Francisco teaching music lessons. It wasn’t until 1926 when his friend and mentor Albert Bender told him to produce large-format black-and-white photos to sell did Adams actually take photography seriously.
Apart from being one of the greatest photographers of all time, Adams is a great example of how a hobby can turn into a life-changing career. Today, taking pictures for a living is much easier thanks to widely available technology. Modern phones are outfitted with state-of-the-art cameras that can imitate the capabilities of film and DSLRs, and this technology is now in the hands of billions of people all over the world. In fact, Lottoland cites that more than 60% of all social media content are photos. Nowadays, you don’t need to be as revolutionary as Adams to get paid for your photography work. You just have to be better than the next social media profile on people’s feeds. Whether or not this is actually good for the world of photography is another argument for another time.
If you consider photography be somewhere between a hobby and an obsession, take a cue from Ansel Adams. Capture what’s closest to your heart and maybe someday you can turn your weekend hobby into a profession.
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