Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams first saw Yosemite in 1916, at fourteen, on a family trip, and was given his first camera there. He spent the rest of his life photographing the American West in black and white, sharp from front to back, and he and Fred Archer worked out the Zone System, a method for controlling every tone in a print. He was also a lifelong campaigner for wilderness.

In Yosemite a ranger introduced the teenage Adams to the painter Harry Best, who kept a studio in the valley, and Adams later married Best's daughter Virginia. She inherited the studio in 1936 and ran it until 1971; today it is The Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Village, a stop on our Yosemite walk. Stand outside and look up at Half Dome, the rock face he photographed in 1927 for Monolith, the Face of Half Dome.