Overview
Working with a cumbersome 8 x 10 field camera, Ansel Adams (1902-1984) created some of the most dramatic and influential photographs ever made of the American West. His majestic landscapes and evocative still lifes conveyed a vision of an idealized America that helped inspire the wilderness conservation movement. Yet despite these accomplishments, Adams has been the least studied of our most important photographers. Now Jonathan Spaulding provides the first full biography of the artist and a critical analysis of his life's work. Refuting the myth of a solitary and carefree wilderness explorer, Spaulding portrays a man grappling with the question of how art and nature intersect in the modern world. He addresses the contradictions the photographer faced as both artist and activist: his struggle to balance art and commercialism; his desire to create art, yet enjoy bourgeois comforts; his simultaneous support for economic development, tourism, and wilderness preservation. Spaulding places Adams's work in the context of modernism and the other major developments in twentieth-century art and ideas. He examines his debt to the pioneering art photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, and his response to later artists. He traces Adams's growth as an environmental activist and discusses his use of photography to further the cause of conservation. Questions regarding the meaning and place of wilderness in modern culture remain with us today. By analyzing these issues through Adams's life and work, this book is a telling portrait of one of the century's greatest photographers and a reflection of our changing attitudes about the natural world.Author Biography: JonathanSpaulding is an indepent scholar who received a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles. He lives and writes in Pasadena, California.
Working with a cumbersome 8x10 field camera, Ansel Adams (1902-1984) created some of the most dramatic and influential photographs ever made of the American West. His work conveyed a vision of an idealized America that helped inspire the wilderness conservation movement. This first full biography of Adams provides a critical analysis of his life's work.
Editorials
Los Angeles Times
Spaulding, in this first major biography of Adams, aims to put the photographer in context: as a craftsman in a new field, a master of a maturing art, a pioneer in environmental activism. . .An impressive and thoughtful biography.Publishers Weekly -
Ansel Adams (1902-1984) created some of the most influential photographs ever made; he was one of this century's leading exponents of environmental values. Writer and scholar Spaulding casts a broad net in this fine biography; it is a well-rounded portrait of the man, an analysis of his work and an exploration of the development of photography as a fine art. As a youth, Adams had rigorous piano training that proved invaluable in his career, giving him intensely developed work habits and an insatiable quest for technical excellence. Spaulding follows Adams through his meeting with Alfred Steiglitz and his early shows, his collaboration with Mary Austin and Georgia O'Keeffe, his long friendship with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall (she collaborated with him on later books) and his deep involvement with the Sierra Club. A final, fitting tribute came a year after his death when a peak in Yosemite was officially named Mount Ansel Adams.Library Journal
It seems that every third family in America has an Ansel Adams (1902-84) poster on the wall, images that were difficult to make but easy to love. Adams' images portray a romanticized and unspoiled Western American landscape omitting track houses, immigrant laborers, open-pit mines, timber clear-cutting, and traffic jams created by recreational vehicles in our national parks. As a member of the purist f/64 group, he applied considerable technical knowledge to portray the beauty of simple, ordinary things, and he has had incalculable influence on the public's appreciation of such otherworldly concepts as our need for solitude, the sacredness of untouched wilderness, and the fragility of nature. This is not the first book examining Adams's life and the evolution of his aesthetics, but it does provide significant discussion of his family life, his conflicts with David Brower's increasingly aggressive Sierra Club, Adams's propaganda work for the wartime federal government, and his photography of the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar. Overall, independent scholar Spaulding has presented a highly readable account of Adams's life, including thorough notes and an excellent bibliography. -- Kathleen Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, BrooklynLibrary Journal
It seems that every third family in America has an Ansel Adams (1902-84) poster on the wall, images that were difficult to make but easy to love. Adams' images portray a romanticized and unspoiled Western American landscape omitting track houses, immigrant laborers, open-pit mines, timber clear-cutting, and traffic jams created by recreational vehicles in our national parks. As a member of the purist f/64 group, he applied considerable technical knowledge to portray the beauty of simple, ordinary things, and he has had incalculable influence on the public's appreciation of such otherworldly concepts as our need for solitude, the sacredness of untouched wilderness, and the fragility of nature. This is not the first book examining Adams's life and the evolution of his aesthetics, but it does provide significant discussion of his family life, his conflicts with David Brower's increasingly aggressive Sierra Club, Adams's propaganda work for the wartime federal government, and his photography of the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar. Overall, independent scholar Spaulding has presented a highly readable account of Adams's life, including thorough notes and an excellent bibliography. -- Kathleen Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, BrooklynEdgar-nominee Abrahams (The Fan) weaves a tight web of deception and intrigue involving the two couples, a sheriff whose wife was brutally murdered years ago, and a desperate ex-con who becomes Roger's pawn in his murderous game. A Perfect Crime is fast-paced, tense, even witty as it careens to its bloody conclusion. -- Karen Anderson, Arizona State University West Library, Phoenix
Edgar-nominee Abrahams (The Fan) weaves a tight web of deception and intrigue involving the two couples, a sheriff whose wife was brutally murdered years ago, and a desperate ex-con who becomes Roger's pawn in his murderous game. A Perfect Crime is fast-paced, tense, even witty as it careens to its bloody conclusion. -- Karen Anderson, Arizona State University West Library, Phoenix
Edgar-nominee Abrahams (The Fan) weaves a tight web of deception and intrigue involving the two couples, a sheriff whose wife was brutally murdered years ago, and a desperate ex-con who becomes Roger's pawn in his murderous game. A Perfect Crime is fast-paced, tense, even witty as it careens to its bloody conclusion. -- Karen Anderson, Arizona State University West Library, Phoenix
Edgar-nominee Abrahams (The Fan) weaves a tight web of deception and intrigue involving the two couples, a sheriff whose wife was brutally murdered years ago, and a desperate ex-con who becomes Roger's pawn in his murderous game. A Perfect Crime is fast-paced, tense, even witty as it careens to its bloody conclusion. -- Karen Anderson, Arizona State University West Library, Phoenix
Edgar-nominee Abrahams (The Fan) weaves a tight web of deception and intrigue involving the two couples, a sheriff whose wife was brutally murdered years ago, and a desperate ex-con who becomes Roger's pawn in his murderous game. A Perfect Crime is fast-paced, tense, even witty as it careens to its bloody conclusion. -- Karen Anderson, Arizona State University West Library, Phoenix
Edgar-nominee Abrahams (The Fan) weaves a tight web of deception and intrigue involving the two couples, a sheriff whose wife was brutally murdered years ago, and a desperate ex-con who becomes Roger's pawn in his murderous game. A Perfect Crime is fast-paced, tense, even witty as it careens to its bloody conclusion. -- Karen Anderson, Arizona State University West Library, Phoenix