Ansel Adams' classic photographs come to Museum of the Rockies

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

Ansel Adams was only 14 years old in 1916, when he convinced his family to vacation in Yosemite National Park and started taking photographs with a camera given to him by his parents.

Adams returned to Yosemite every year for the rest of his long life.

He would become a giant among American photographers and use his stunning images to persuade presidents and the public to preserve some of the nation's beautiful wild places.

Twenty-five of Adams' black-and-white photographs, including many of his “greatest hits,” are on display now at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman.

“Ansel Adams: The Man Who Captured the Earth's Beauty” is upstairs in the Loft Gallery. It will be on exhibit through Jan. 6, giving families a chance over the holiday season to see the famous photographs.

“Why people love his images is principally because Adams and ... others from the period really championed beauty,” said Steve Jackson, the museum's curator of art and photography.

Adams' vision is of nature that dwarfs human scale, Jackson said. He takes the viewer to places that are wild, sometimes dangerous and always beautiful.

“His love of being in the landscape is evident in the images,” Jackson said.

Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902. He survived the 1906 earthquake, but when a tremor threw him against a wall, suffered a broken nose. Young Ansel hated the regimentation of school, so his parents got him tutors. He taught himself piano, and for many years considered a career as a concert pianist.

It was seeing the crisp negatives of photographer Paul Strand that convinced him of the artistic possibilities of photography.

Adams was part of the modernist movement that rejected romantic, soft-focus pictures in favor of a pure, strict, straightforward approach. He was a cofounder of the Group f.64, which took its name from the tiny camera aperture that allows crisp focus of everything from the nearest pebble to the farthest mountain peak.

Jackson hung the photos in chronological order, starting with Adams' first masterpiece, “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome,” shot in 1927. One reason that photo is so dramatic, Jackson explained, is that Adams used a red filter to make the sky look almost black. It was the first time Adams used his “visualization” technique, imagining what he wanted the photo to look like and feel like before taking it.

Adams once wrote that he found he could make “an austere and blazing poetry of the real.”

Perhaps Adams' most famous photo is “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” from 1941, shot as the light glinted off cemetery crosses at an old adobe village beneath dramatic mountains and a rising moon.

His photograph “The Tetons and Snake River” is classic, capturing the famous snowy peaks as sunlight breaks through storm clouds and shines on the great S curve of the river. Thousands of similar shots of the Tetons have been taken since Adams' 1942 photo, but his was “the original, the touchstone,” Jackson said.

Adams, who came from a liberal family, was appalled during World War II by the incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps, long before most Americans came to see it as a shameful mistake. He documented the camp in Manzanar, Calif., and published “Born Free and Equal” in 1944.

A member of the Sierra Club board of directors for 37 years, Adams lobbied Congress to create the Kings Canyon National Park, and his photos helped persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to support it. Adams discussed conservation with presidents Ford, Reagan and Carter, who in 1980 awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

After his death in 1984, Congress created the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area near Yosemite. The following year, an 11,760-foot peak in the Sierras was named Mount Ansel Adams.

“He had a great sense of humor, he was a wonderful teacher, but he was one of the most humble people,” Jackson said. “He had a reputation that was larger than life, but even late in his life, you could still take a class and he was a teacher.

“Ansel Adams was a national treasure by the time he died.”

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