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Ansel Adams: The Role of the Artist in the Environmental Movement

March 1980 / by ROBERT TURNAGE
Reprinted courtesy of the Wilderness Society from The Living Wilderness

In the history of American conservation, few have worked as long and as effectively to preserve wilderness and to articulate the ansel_adams_high_sierra_large

“wilderness idea” as Ansel Adams. Entering his seventh decade of active involvement, he remains as much a crusader.
Wilderness has always been for Adams “a mystique: a valid, intangible, non-materialistic experience.” Through his photographs
he has touched countless people with a sense of that mystique and a realization of the importance of preserving the last
remaining wilderness lands. This inspirational legacy of Adams ‘ art constitutes his major signiJcance as an environmentalist.
In addition, he has been an important activist in the work of several conservation groups and has personally lobbied
congressmen, cabinet oKcers and Presidents on behalf of wilderness values.

Ansel Adams was born on February 20, 1902, in San Francisco and grew up in the dunes area by the Golden Gate . In those
days the PaciJc surf and fog were a much more evident inTuence than the surrounding city. Ansel’s earliest memory is of lying
in his carriage watching low fog move across the sky.

Because the lad found diKculty Jtting in at school, his parents decided to have him tutored at home. The lack of siblings and
schoolmates may well have helped turn him early to an interest in nature. As a youngster, he has recalled, he was always “more
responsive to wild environments than to urban…the surf and dunes, the storms and fogs of the Golden Gate, the thickets of
Lobos Creek and the grim headlands of Land’s End. As a small child I had played in the crisp winter snow at Carson City, and Ansel Adams Photographing in the
seen the stately oaks at Atherton on the hot, brittle Jelds rising towards the San Mateo Hills and beyond to the madrone-lush High Sierra by Ron Partridge
folds of the Santa Cruz Mountains. A few months among the beaches and rain forests of Puget Sound had made indelible the
scents of sea and spruce, tar and sawdust. Such early images are often as clear and compelling in memory as the actual vistas of today.”

At 12 he began to play the piano. His talent quickly became apparent, and it was decided that he should take lessons. Thus began years of musical training that
would later carry over into the precise craft and interpretive subtlety of the photographer.

Ansel’s father, Charles H. Adams, a businessman who in his own youth had been discouraged from pursuing a passionate love of nature and science, was
determined that his son would be free to follow his own interests, wherever they might lead. So in 1915 he bought Ansel a year’s pass to the Panama-PaciJc
Exposition. Almost every day that year the 13-year-old wandered through the fair, experiencing whichever of the myriad exhibits attracted his fancy. He also began
to take pictures of the fair and of the Golden Gate area with a Brownie box camera. He would then painstakingly assemble them in albums which he later described
as “photo-diaries.”

The following spring came a more momentous experience—a Jrst visit to Yosemite National Park . “A month before the great event I was given Hutchings’ In the
Heart of the Sierra , and pored over it, building fantasies of Indians and bears, of huge waterfalls and precipices…of remoteness and magic. The known qualities of
the sea merged with the unknown qualities of rivers and waterfalls, the redwoods of Santa Cruz with the Sequoia-gods of Wawona. The days became prisons of
impatience and restlessness. Finally, the train at Oakland ! All day long we rode, over the Coast Range …down across the heat-shimmering San Joaquin Valley , up
through the even hotter foothills to the threshold of Yosemite . I can still feel the furnace blasts of air buffeting through the coaches, and hear the pounding, roaring
exhaust of the locomotive reechoing from the steep walls of the Merced Canyon . Then arrival at El Portal, and a night spent in an oven of a hotel, with the roar of
the river beating through the sleepless hours until dawn. And Jnally, in the bright morning, the grand, dusty, jolting ride in an open motor bus up the deepening,
greening gorge to Yosemite .

“That Jrst impression of the valley—white water, azaleas, cool Jr caverns, tall pines and stolid oaks, cliffs rising to undreamed-of heights, the poignant sounds and
smells of the Sierra…was a culmination of experience so intense as to be almost painful. From that day in 1916 my life has been colored and modulated by the
great earth gesture of the Sierra.”

With his Brownie camera he eagerly set out to explore the new-found beauty of the valley. Returning to San Francisco with a consuming desire to learn photography,
he went to work for a photo-Jnisher. The following year he was again photographing Yosemite and, indeed, he has photographed Yosemite every year since. In
1918 he had his Jrst intoxicating trip into the high country of the Sierra under the trail-wise guidance of Francis Holman, an ornithologist. From this trip, much to the
horror of his mother, he came back with a wispy beard. Obligingly he shaved it off, but in later years his big black beard would become a trademark.

The next summer Ansel got a job as custodian of the Sierra Club’s Le Conte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite Valley . Despite myriad duties he found ample time for
photography and early morning runs up to Glacier Point. These early years also afforded him an opportunity to meet some of the great conservationists of the day,
among them Joseph N. LeConte, William E. Colby and Stephen T. Mather, Jrst director of the National Park Service. Ansel continued working summers at the Le
Conte Lodge until 1924. In 1925 and 1926 he accompanied the Le Conte family on long journeys into the Kings River Sierra. Through the 1920s he made many
climbs in the Sierra high country, including several Jrst ascents. “Francis Holman and I would ‘scramble,’” he recalled in an interview in Backpacker . “We used
window sash cord, an eighth of an inch thick and very strong. Of course, if one of us fell, it would have cut us in two…In a sense, it’s a miracle I’m alive because we
did have some hazardous experiences and didn’t know anything about climbing technique.”

Through these early high-country experiences, Ansel became aware of aesthetic qualities in the wilderness that he had not anticipated. “I was climbing the long
ridge west of Mt. Clark…I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching push up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light ….I saw more clearly than
I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small Totsam of the forest, the motion of the high
clouds streaming above the peaks. There area no words to convey the moods of those moments.”

By this time his photography was becoming increasingly important, exercising a claim on his time and energy that was competing with a beckoning career as a
concert pianist. One spring day in 1927 he perched precariously on a cliff with his camera and the unwieldy photographic glass plates of the day. He hoped to
capture an imposing perspective of the face of Half Dome, the snow-laden high country and a crystal-clear sky. Only two unexposed plates remained. With one he
made a conventional exposure. Suddenly, he realized that he wanted an image with more emotional impact. “I knew so little about photography then, it was a
miracle I got anything. But that was the Jrst time I realized how the print was going to look—what I now call visualization—and was actually thinking about the
emotional effect of the image…I began to visualize the black rock and deep sky. I really wanted to give it a monumental, dark quality. So I used the last plate I had
with a No. 29-F red Jlter…and got this exciting picture.”

A half-century later, “Monolith—the Face of Half Dome” remains one of Adams ‘ most compelling studies. It bears clear witness to that “pointed awareness of the
light” which he experienced on the ridge of Mt. Clark .
Last Updated on December 31, 2020
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