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Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984), The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942, gelatin silver print, image 39 15/16 x 51 1/4 in. (101.4 x 130.1 cm), Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Ansel Adams Archive, 76.562.2, © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984) Leaves, Glacier National Park, Montana, 1942, gelatin silver print, image 4 7/16 x 6 1/4 in. (11.3 x 15.8 cm), Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Ansel Adams Archive, 84.92.26, © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984), Yosemite Valley from Tunnel Esplanade, circa 1930, gelatin silver print, image 5 9/16 x 7 3/16 in. (14.1 x 18.3 cm), Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Ansel Adams Archive, 80.90.714, © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984), Helmet Rock, near Land’s End, circa 1918, gelatin silver print, image 2 11/16 x 3 11/16 in. (6.9 x 9.4 cm), Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Ansel Adams Archive, 85.122.6, © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
Discovering Ansel Adams
September 27, 2024–January 19, 2025
The Thomas R. Schiff Gallery (Gallery 234 & 235)
Ticketed. Free for Members. Save $2 when purchasing tickets online.
Adult tickets: $12 in-person, $10 online
Seniors, college students and children 6–17 years: $8 in person, $6 online
Children 5 years & under: free
Friends of Photography
Press Release
See the exhibition for free on Thursday nights from 5–8 p.m., on CAM Kids Day (November 2 and December 7, 2024 and January 4, 2025), Tuesday, December 24, and during Art After Dark on October 25 from 5–9 p.m. FotoFocus passport holders have free entry from September 27–October 31.
Premiering at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Discovering Ansel Adams provides an unprecedented exploration of the early career of Ansel Adams (1902–1984), demonstrating how, between 1916 and the 1940s, Adams developed from a 14-year-old tourist with a camera into America’s most celebrated photographer. Drawn from the definitive Adams collection at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, the exhibition brings together approximately 80 virtuosic photographs with unique ephemera including the artist’s handwritten correspondence, snapshots, personal possessions, and photographic working materials. Featured works range from small, one-of-a-kind photographs from Adams’s teenage years to jaw-dropping mural-sized prints of his most iconic mature views. Join the artist on his journey from teenage musician to young mountaineer, as he makes his first pictures at Yosemite, experiences the American Southwest, learns how to communicate with a broad national audience, and undertakes an epic quest to photograph America’s national parks. Along the way, discover how Ansel Adams became Ansel Adams.
Founded in 1975 by the President of University of Arizona and Ansel Adams, the Center for Creative Photography is one of the world’s finest institutions for the study of the history of photography, and a singularly important archive for Ansel Adams studies. Discovering Ansel Adams presents a rare opportunity to encounter the CCP’s Ansel Adams collection outside of Arizona.
Accessing the Exhibition
Elevators A and B provide the most direct access to this second floor exhibition. Visitors may enter and exit the exhibition via short stairways or via a ramp, located in Gallery 234. Seating is provided within the exhibition gallery. Large print label booklets are available in the gallery and online. Audio of select exhibition interpretation is available online and on the Bloomberg Connects app. For fidgets, social narratives, sensory headphones, and other tools, visit the CAM Access Cart. The Access Cart is located in Schmidlapp Gallery just beyond the museum’s front lobby.
Featured Media
Perspectives
Watch Ansel Adams reflect on the making of one of his most-loved pictures.
Survey
Share your feedback about the exhibition.
Exhibition Content
Download complete Ansel Adams large print labels, optimized for screen reader.
Video
Members Opening
Thursday, September 26, 5–7 p.m.
Sold Out – CAM Presents: Discovering Ansel Adams—Curators in Conversation
Thursday, September 26, 7–8 p.m.
CAM Kids Day: Landscapes in the Lens
Saturday, October 5, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.
Create Plus: Discovering Ansel Adams
Saturday, October 19, 1–4 p.m.
Art After Dark
Friday, October 25, 5–9 p.m.
Gallery Talk Plus: Discovering Ansel Adams with Stu Levy
Saturday, November 16, 1–3 p.m.
True American Landscapes: Ansel Adams and Civil Rights
Sunday, January 5, 2025, 2–3 p.m.
Audio Exhibition
Hear interpretive content for the exhibition, wherever you are.
Exhibition Playlist
Ansel Adams was an avid musician throughout his life. He even met his wife, Virginia Best Adams, while practicing on the piano in her father’s Yosemite art studio. Click below to hear a playlist selected from composers represented in Adams’s sheet music collection. Whether you listen in the Discovering Ansel Adams exhibition gallery or at home, consider how Adams’s expressive imagery relates to his lifelong love of music.
Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams
An unprecedented examination of the early career of one of America’s most celebrated photographers, by Dr. Rebecca A. Senf.
Published by Yale University Press in association with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, 2020. 288 pages, 175 color illustrations.
One of the most influential photographers of his generation, Ansel Adams (1902–1984) is famous for his dramatic photographs of the American West. Although many of Adams’s images are now iconic, his early work has remained largely unknown. In this first monograph dedicated to the beginnings of Adams’s career, Rebecca Senf argues that these early photographs are crucial to understanding Adams’s artistic development and offer new insights into many aspects of the artist’s mature oeuvre.
Drawing on copious archival research, Senf traces the first three decades of Adams’s photographic practice—beginning with an amateur album made during his childhood and culminating with his Guggenheim-supported National Parks photography of the 1940s. Highlighting the artist’s persistence in forging a career path and his remarkable ability to learn from experience as he sharpened his image-making skills, this beautifully illustrated volume also looks at the significance of the artist’s environmentalism, including his involvement with the Sierra Club.
Have you met Ansel Adams? Did you learn from him? Have his pictures or writings featured meaningfully in your life?
The Ansel Adams Archive at the Center for Creative Photography wants to hear about your encounter with Adams and his work—and preserve your story for future historians.
On Thursday, January 9, 2025, the curators of Discovering Ansel Adams will be on hand at the museum to help you tell and record your Ansel Adams oral history.
Appointments are required and free.
Inspired by Ansel Adams’s photographs of the American West? Explore Cincinnati’s hilltop vistas through your own lens! Find viewfinder installations positioned around the museum’s outdoor grounds and use them to frame your own shots. Reframe and refine as much as you like, and if you post, tag us @cincinnatiartmuseum on Facebook and @cincyartmuseum on Instagram.
Organized by the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, with the support of The Museum Box.
Discovering Ansel Adams is a Featured Project in the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial: backstories. Now in its seventh iteration, the Biennial activates over 100 projects at museums, galleries, universities, and public spaces throughout Greater Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky in October 2024—the largest of its kind in America. The backstories theme focuses on stories that are not evident at first glance. They offer context for what happened previously or out of view, providing narratives not yet told or presented from a new perspective. Once told, they shed light on current circumstances.
Support for this 2024 FotoFocus Biennial Featured Project was provided in part by FotoFocus.
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The Cincinnati Art Museum is supported by the generosity of tens of thousands of contributors to the ArtsWave Community Campaign, the region's primary source for arts funding.
Free general admission to the Cincinnati Art Museum is made possible by a gift from the Rosenthal Family Foundation. Exhibition pricing may vary. Parking at the Cincinnati Art Museum is free.
Generous support for our extended Thursday hours is provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.
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