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Ansel Adams Research Paper

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Jon Hedgepeth
Leslie Burns
ARV115
December 7, 2014
The Life and Work of Ansel Adams Ansel Adams, an American photographer, was born in San Francisco, California on February 20, 1902 to Olive Bray and Charles Hitchcock Adams and was named after his uncle Ansel Easton. His family was of Irish descent and immigrated to New England in the early eighteenth century. Olive and Charles would later move to California and give birth to their only son. His grandfather ran a very successful lumber business which would eventually be left to Ansel’s father, Charles. Growing up seeing firsthand the effects of the lumber clear-cutting industry would later lead to his condemnation of the practice and open the door for a career in environmentalism. At the …show more content…

Spending much of his time alone, Ansel taught himself to play the piano and read music, one of his earliest passions. Later in life, he found his solace in nature, collecting bugs and visiting the sand dunes not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. At the age of fourteen, he would make his first trip to Yosemite where he would become transfixed with the serene landscapes and where his passion for photography would begin to bud. Armed with a camera bought by his parents, a Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie, he fell in love with photography. He spent much of the next years in the park, exploring high and low and taking a plethora of images. In 1919, Ansel made his first contact with the Sierra Club, an environmental protection and conservation movement, where he took work as a custodian. A collection of his images were printed in the Sierra Club Bulletin, and he would go on in the next few years to become official trip photographer, which involved month-long hikes with sometimes as many as two hundred people! Ansel’s love for the wilderness would lead him to getting involved in politics and eventually landing him on the Board of Directors for the Club, which he was member of for thirty-seven …show more content…

It starts at the midpoint of the image on the left-hand side and curves into the bottom right of the frame. At first, my impression was that it was simply mist from the raging river, but a closer glance reveals its elegance. Although we automatically associate rainbows with color, the black and white photograph does nothing to diminish its beauty!
The very direct back lighting casts hard shadows, but also illuminates every gallon of water coming off the falls. This illumination serves to draw me deeper into the photograph, I can almost hear its sheer power! The entire image appears to be frozen sharp, but I think that the incredible volume of water was too much to freeze and it feels as though the water never stops falling.
The trees in the shallowest part of the field are wrought with texture. Every shadow, every needle, every piece of bark is beautifully lit and emphasized. The contrast of the image is full scale. The whitecaps in the river and the falling water are amazingly white. The blacks of the shadows being cast by such direct sunlight are very dark. The rainbow and the part of the image behind the rainbow are gray, as well as much of the face of the mountain. This overall tonality provides a lovely balance to the

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