ANSEL ADAMS

Posthumous

Unparalleled landscape photographer and environmentalist, Ansel Adams redefined artistic photography and the western landscape at the same moment. His dramatic black and white photographs of Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada and Southwest are credited as helping to make photography appreciated as an art form and drew people to the need to preserve these beautiful, open and wild places.

His innovations in developing film and prints changed how people envision then produce photographic images. The Zone System, conceived by Adams, divides light into ten zones or tones from total black (Zone 0) to pure white (zone ten). Of his famous Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, made in one outing with the use of his final plate and printed in 1927, Adams said, "I had been able to realize a desired image: not the way the subject appeared in reality but how it felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print."

He initiated or was behind the formation of many new collections of photographers and created A More Beautiful America which served to benefit the improvement of the environment. He often supported and lent his photographic skills to efforts to preserve wild places.