Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams (San Francisco, California, February 20, 1902 - April 22, 1984) was an American photographer, known for developing the so-called zone system together with Fred Archer.< sup>[citation required]
He was known for his black-and-white photographs of Yosemite National Park in the United States (among other landscapes), and as the author of numerous books on photography, including his trilogy of technical instruction manuals (The camera, The negative and The print). He founded the photographic association Group f / 64 together with other masters, such as Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke and Imogen Cunningham, among others.[citation needed ]
His zone system is a demonstration of how the camera or its light meter (or light meter) measures the middle gray of 18% reflectance as the middle zone. The photographer must increase the exposure (or decrease it) depending on how many gray steps they want to set as the metering point. The light meter of any camera, even a digital camera, always "wants" to see the measured area as a medium gray.[citation needed]
I look forward to new processes and new developments. I think the electronic image will be the next big breakthrough. These systems will have inescapable structural features, and both artists and technicians must make a renewed effort to understand and control them.Ansel Adams
Life
Ansel Easton Adams was born on February 20, 1902, in San Francisco, California. When Adams was just four years old, he was present in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, where he suffered a ruptured nasal septum. The only child of Charles Hitchcock Adams and Olive Bray, he grew up in a Victorian (social and conservative) environment. Despite being intelligent, he was very shy, which, coupled with the dyslexia he suffered from, caused him certain problems when trying to fit in at school. Ansel Adams fought throughout his life to defend and protect nature. He studied piano for several years, which gave him discipline and structure. He got his start in photography using a Kodak #1 Box Brownie camera given to him by his parents.
He joined a club where he met his wife, Virginia Best, and they were married in 1928 and had two children. In 1927 Albert M. Bender appeared in his life, who helped him, giving him energy and security. In 1927 Adams met Edward Weston, with whom he developed a great friendship. Together, Adams, Strand, Cunningham, and Weston formed a group called "f/64" in 1932. This group promoted and evolved "straight photography." In 1930, Ansel Adams met the photographer Paul Strand. His images had a great impact on Adams, helping him to move away from the pictorialist style and towards the style of "straight photography" (direct or pure photography), where the clarity of the lens is the most important thing, and where photography has to undergo the least number of adjustments and retouching possible.
In the 1930s he developed the zone system. Adams was standing out more and more for his energy and enthusiasm. He first visited New York in 1933 and met Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer he had always admired. Stieglitz helped him do the first exhibition of her. In 1936 she helped organize the first photography section at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA). There she met Beaumont (historian of photography) and Nancy Newhall (writer-designer). She would later collaborate with Dorothea Lange for a piece of Life magazine.
On August 6, 1953, Adams wrote a letter to Stieglitz, telling him about his precarious financial situation. It was then that he started doing commercial photography. It was not something he loved, since he believed that it did not let him exploit his creativity, although it provided him with enough money to live. He has worked for brands such as IBM, AT&T, National Park Service and Kodak, and for magazines such as Life and Fortune , as well as being a consulting photographer for Polaroid and Hasselblad.. This work not only served Adams for the aforementioned financial support, but also made his photographs an icon of North American natural beauties recognized in all parts of the world.
Weston and Strand began asking him for technical advice. Adams developed the famous "zone system", a measurement and development method used to divide the light gradation of a scene into 11 different zones, from white to black. This allowed him to visualize the different levels of gray in the final photograph with great precision.
His images began to become symbols of Anglo-America, many of them centered on Yosemite National Park. Ansel Adams fought to defend nature and its animals, landscapes being the main subject of his photographs. It is precisely for this that he was often criticized, since you could rarely see a person in a photograph of him. French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson said of him: "The world is falling apart and all Adams and Weston photograph are stones and trees." Despite opinions like that, he received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 1981.
Some say that Adams photographed places that no longer exist, but for others the opposite is true; some places still exist because of Adams and his enthusiasm and effort to save these places, through his photographs.
He died on April 22, 1984, of heart failure, possibly aggravated by pancreatic cancer.
Work
The Mural Project
In 1941, Adams was hired by the US Government Department of the Interior to take photos of wildlife parks, aboriginal reservations, and other locations, to be used as wall photos in the Department's new building in Washington D. C. Part of his agreement with the Department was that he could also take photographs for his own use, using his own film and processing. Although Adams kept meticulous records of his trip and his expenses, he was less disciplined about dating his images and refused to record the date of "Moonrise over Hernandez," so it was not clear if he belonged to Adams or the US Government. The position of the moon allowed the image to be dated by astronomical calculations and it was determined to have been taken on November 1, 1941, a day that Adams had not worked for the Department, so the image belonged to Adams. The same dispute turned out not to be true of many other negatives, including The Tetons and Snake River which, having been made for the Mural project, are owned by the US government. The Mural project was halted by the entry into World War II of the United States in 1942, and was never completed.
Most important photos
- Monolith, The Face of Half Dome1927.
- Rose and Driftwood1932.
- Clearing Winter Storm1937.
- Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico1941.
- Ice on Ellery Lake, Sierra Nevada1941.
- Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox at Canyon de Chelly 1945.
- Aspens, New Mexico1958.
Books of photographs
- Ansel Adams: The Spirit of Wild Places, 2005. ISBN 1-59764-069-7
- America's Wilderness1997 ISBN 1-56138-744-4
- California1997 ISBN 0-8212-2369-0
- Yosemite1995 ISBN 0-8212-2196-5
- The National Park Photographs1995 ISBN 0-89660-056-4
- Photographs of the Southwest1994 ISBN 0-8212-0699-0
- Ansel Adams: In Color1993. ISBN 0-8212-1980-4
- Our Current National Parks1992.
- Ansel Adams: Classic Images1986. ISBN 0-8212-1629-5
- Polaroid Land Photography1978. ISBN 0-8212-0729-6
- These We Inherit: The Parklands of AmericaNancy Newhall, 1962.
- This is the American Earthwith Nancy Newhall, 1960. ISBN 0-8212-2182-5
- Born Free and Equal1944. Spotted Dog Press
Technical books
- The camera, 2002. Editorial: Omnicon. ISBN 84-88914-11-3
- The negative1999 Editorial: Omnicon. ISBN 84-88914-10-5
- Copy it.1997 Editorial: Omnicon. ISBN 84-88914-07-5
- Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs ISBN 0-8212-1750-X
Contenido relacionado
Janet jackson
Joan Miro
Mitsuteru Yokoyama
Kurt Cobain
Shirley Jones