They are icons of black and white photography: the shots by Ansel Adams. His technically perfect landscape shots from the High Sierra, specifically from Yosemite National Park in the state of California, have lured generations of nature lovers to the landscapes he photographs.
The San Francisco-born photographer (1902 to 1984) was a co-founder of the f/64 group – the name stands for the smallest f-number of a still camera – that formed in the United States in the early 1930s. Its members also included the photographer Edward Weston and the photographer Imogen Cunningham, who, with their clear aesthetics, saw themselves as a counter-movement to the prevailing and transfiguring style of pictorialism at the time.
“A great photograph is one that fully expresses how you feel about what is being photographed, in the very meaning of the word,” Ansel Adams once said. He actually wanted to be a concert pianist and was more of a photographer on the side. However, in 1929 it was received by the park administration, the Yosemite Park and Curry Company, the task of photographing the valley in winter for publicity so that tourists do not only visit the valley in the summer months.
The illustrated book by Pete Souza
The high-contrast and extremely sharp images of the granite giants, especially Half Dome, were taken with the large-format plate camera. He photographed this motif again and again over the decades.
Adams also wrote German-translated textbooks such as The Camera and Das Positiv als Photographisches Bild, and served on the board of directors of the Sierra Club, the oldest and largest conservation organization in the United States.
His famous pictures of Yosemite Valley have been published in a new book called Ansel Adams’ Yosemite. Pete Souza, President Obama’s official White House Photographer, wrote a foreword for the photo book in which he writes: “In today’s mostly colorful world of online photography, his images stand out more than ever.”
You can also click through the following photo series:
– People in ice and loneliness – the photographer Paolo Verzone visits Svalbard
– Lost Places on Rails: A journey to railway cemeteries around the world
-“Last Folio: “Images that hit the heart