Hi, I’m Nathaniel Stein, the museum’s curator of photography and on-site curator for Discovering Ansel Adams. I am sharing the introduction section of the exhibition.

Ansel Adams’s black-and-white photographs are among the most iconic American images of the twentieth century. For many viewers, Adams’s emotive, finely crafted pictures are synonymous with the grandeur of the American landscape. This exhibition offers insight into how Adams arrived at the powerful, mature visual language he used from the 1940s onward. It begins with Adams’s first photographs of Yosemite National Park, which he took in 1916 as a fourteen-year-old tourist from San Francisco.

How did a teenage snap-shooter from the city become a virtuosic cameraperson, darkroom technician, expert mountaineer, enterprising visual artist, and committed advocate for American wilderness? Drawn from the vast Ansel Adams Archive held by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, the photographs, documents, and personal items presented here tell a unique formation story about how Ansel Adams became Ansel Adams.

Hi, I’m Allie Blankenship, the museum’s curatorial assistant for photography. I am sharing the “Youth” section for the exhibition, Discovering Ansel Adams.

Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902, the energetic only child of doting, well-educated parents. By early adolescence, he had dropped out of conventional schooling in favor of alternative educational experiences. Notably, Adams was an avid piano student with a serious ambition to become a professional musician.

After reading about the wonders of California’s Yosemite Valley in 1916, Adams persuaded his parents to take him on a summer vacation to Yosemite National Park. The family explored the park like typical tourists, with the fourteen-year-old Adams taking photographs of waterfalls and geological formations he had seen illustrated in print.

Following his first encounter with Yosemite, Adams delved into two new passions: photography and mountaineering. Over the next decade, these disciplines became central to his identity, providing structure and direction for his personal and professional pursuits. He returned to Yosemite each year for the rest of his life.

Hi, I’m Allie Blankenship, the museum’s curatorial assistant for photography. I am sharing the “Photography as Music” section for the exhibition, Discovering Ansel Adams.

Parallels between music and photography run through Adams’s career. He believed in the capacity of both mediums to express and evoke emotions. Later in life, Adams famously said the photographic negative is like the composer’s score, while the print is like the score’s performance.

Scan the QR code below to access a playlist of music Adams enjoyed—some performed by the photographer himself. As you experience Adams’s pictures, personal and professional writings, and musical renditions, consider how an evolving commitment to expression connects them. Where is he bold and freewheeling, and in what ways measured and careful?

Hi, I’m Allie Blankenship, the museum’s curatorial assistant for photography. I am sharing the “Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras” section for the exhibition, Discovering Ansel Adams.

In 1927, with support from San Francisco arts patron Albert Bender, Adams produced his first major undertaking for the art market, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. This portfolio included eighteen loose photographs of mountains, rivers, lakes, and vistas, each enclosed in a paper folder, and all gathered into a case. The pictures show various facets of Adams’s hiking experiences, including many locations of personal significance from the high elevations surrounding Yosemite National Park. Despite Adams’s thoughtfulness about image selection, materiality, and presentation, the portfolio was a commercial failure. Adams learned he would need to think differently about how to reach audiences and markets.

Hi, I’m Emily Holtrop, the museum’s director of learning & interpretation. I am sharing the “Transitions” section for the exhibition, Discovering Ansel Adams.

Adams’s early adulthood was a time of experimenta­tion. In his 20s and 30s, he learned the art and craft of photography through trial and error, broadened his social and professional networks, and honed his understanding of audiences and markets. Adams’s experiences and relationships in these years fed the mature vision he would develop in his 40s.

From the late 1920s to the late 1930s, Adams produced the luxury collectible book Taos Pueblo to great commercial success, earned experience and livelihood as a hired photographer for the Yosemite Park and Curry Company, and continued to develop ideas about how to depict the wilderness places that had become so important to him. Also during the 1930s, Adams left Pictorialist influences behind. In 1932, he exhibited with a collective called Group f/64, fully embracing photographs that looked like they were produced by a camera. These photographs were highly detailed, focused throughout, and printed on glossy papers.

Hi, I’m Marion Cosgrove Rauch, the museum’s assistant director of docent learning. I am sharing the “National Parks and a Mature Style” section for the exhibition, Discovering Ansel Adams.

In 1941, the U.S. Department of the Interior invited Adams to create mural-sized photographs of America’s national parks for the department’s new headquarters in Washington, D.C. This project was pivotal for Adams, providing an outlet for his deep commitment to conservation as well as his artistic and professional ambition.

The national parks project catalyzed Adams to solidify the style that characterizes his most famous works. A characteristic Adams photograph evokes an emotional response in viewers, creates a sense of awe and wonder, and persuades audiences of the natural world’s power, importance, and value. Adams uses four main elements to accomplish this:

• A panoramic, sweeping view of the distant landscape
• An operatic use of light and weather effects
• An omniscient (god-like or bird’s eye) viewpoint
• A wide range of balanced shades of grey from light to dark

Adams’s body of work includes many other photographic approaches—intimate nature details, descriptive portraits, and documentary images of architecture, to name a few—but dramatic swaths of cloud-topped landscape are the icons of his career. Some regard Adams’s hugely influential style as the way to photograph the landscape.

Hi, I’m Nathaniel Stein, the museum’s curator of photography and on-site curator for Discovering Ansel Adams. I am sharing the “Legacies” section of the exhibition.

In his 30s, Adams was invited to write a manual about photography. In Making a Photograph (published 1935), he described the medium’s technical and aesthetic elements, inaugurating a long career as a teacher and advocate for the value and meaning of making photographs.

Adams made his own photographs, accepted commissions, and published and exhibited his work tenaciously throughout his career. He also explored new tools and materials with open-minded curiosity—contrary to the dogmatism some later observers have attributed to him. Indeed, one of Adams’s most profound legacies is as a mentor, inspiration, and impetus for other photographers.

Hi, I’m Nathaniel Stein, the museum’s curator of photography and on-site curator for Discovering Ansel Adams. I am sharing the “Your Ansel Adams Story” section of the exhibition.

Has Ansel Adams impacted your formation as an artist, teacher, or citizen of the natural world? The Ansel Adams Archive wants to preserve your story.

The Cincinnati Art Museum is collaborating with the Center for Creative Photography to create oral histories with Adams’s students and those meaningfully affected by his writings and photographs.  To find out more, please scan the QR code below.