Ansel Adams

Renowned landscape photographer Ansel Adams raised photography to the status of a fine art, and used his photographs widely in efforts to preserve wilderness and protect the planet. Noted photographer Jerry Uelsmann calls Adams’ photographs “pantheistic hymns to nature.”

Adams was a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, and his photographic practice was deeply entwined with this advocacy.  He developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club. He was later contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks. 

Having joined the Sierra Club in 1916, in 1934 Adams was elected as a member of the Board of Directors of the Sierra Club, a role he maintained for 37 years. His tenure spanned the years that the Club evolved into a powerful national organization that lobbied to create national parks and protect the environment from destructive development projects. In his later years, Ansel Adams re-focused much of his conservation work on behalf of The Wilderness Society.

Adams has sometimes been criticized for focusing entirely on natural landscapes devoid of human beings.  He is accused of lacking social significance by not including people in his scenes of unspoiled nature.  His friend Nancy Newhall has articulated an excellent response to this view, and he himself defended his artistic choices most forcefully:

DOES LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY HELP WITH THE SOCIAL ISSUES OF THE DAY?
“Because your greatest work is of nature and deals with the eternal, you are accused of being ‘Inhuman,’ ‘not interested in humanity,’ ‘oblivious to the GREAT issues of Today.’ They don’t realize that what takes their breath away when they look at your work is your profound expression of HUMAN emotion. That you touch the innermost spirit as few artists in any medium ever have.”
– Letter from Nancy Newhall, to Ansel Adams
late 1960s

“I still believe there is a real social significance in a rock – just as there is in a line of unemployed. For that opinion I am charged with inhumanity, unawareness.”
– Letter from Ansel Adams, to Edward Weston

“I agree with you that there is just as much ‘social significance in a rock’ as in ‘a line of unemployed.’ All depends on the seeing . . . If we [photographers] have in some way awakened others to a broader conception of life – added significance and beauty to their lives – . . . then we have functioned, and are satisfied.”
– Letter from Edward Weston, to Ansel Adams

“It is childish to continue to dwell on the negative aspects of society, at least to concentrate on them. I am not afraid of beauty, of poetry, of sentiment. I think it is just as important to bring to people evidence of the beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a ‘document’ of ugliness, squalor, and despair. For every grim image of Harlem, there should be some buoyant truthful image of a hopeful society and some image of the natural scene . . . Is there no way photography can be used to suggest a better life?”

“America is a land of joy – more than any other land. With all the misery, all the economic troubles, and the crack-pot politicians, we are still the most beautiful country in the world. I am a congenital optimist; I feel we are coming out of this mess earlier than most people think; and that the world will be a better place for it.”
– Ansel Adams
late 1960s

The noted photographer and conservationist often credited John Muir as an inspiration, and his amazing photographs are often paired with Muir’s writings. One of Adams’ earliest books of photography was Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada with text by John Muir.

In 1938 he published a limited-edition book, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail as part of the Sierra Club’s mission to fulfill John Muir’s dream to add the wilderness region north of Sequoia National Park to the National Park System. The park was proposed as “John Muir National Park.” Adams testified before Congress; in later years he often would meet with congressional representatives personally to lobby for national parks and wilderness areas.  In this case, after a fierce battle in Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a bill March 4, 1940, establishing Kings Canyon National Park.

In 1997, a book of Ansel Adams photography was published with Muir’s writings; America’s Wilderness

As noted on our Environmentalists in Song page, there are several songs celebrating Ansel Adams and his legacy:

• Ansel Adams by Andrew McKnight, on his album Something Worth Standing For.

Wallace Stegner said,

“A place is not fully a place until it has had its poet. Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada have had two great poets, Muir and Adams. In consequence I think these mountains are better understood, held worthier of respect and protection than they would be if those two had never looked on them with reverence and been delighted with spring dogwood blossoms, and exhilarated by glacier pavements, dazed by half- mile cliffs, and glorified by snow peaks blossoming like roses in the dawn.”

(Ansel Adams and the American Landscape: A Biography By Jonathan Spaulding, 
(University of California Press, 1998), quoted in Gilliam, Harold, "Yosemite and the Twin Fires of Genius," 
San Francisco Chronicle, September 15, 1985 reporting on the August, 1985 official dedication in Tuolumne Meadows 
of Mount Ansel Adams and the naming of Yosemite National Park as a World Heritage Site.)

According to Adams biographer Therese Lichtenstein, “Although Adams felt that Muir’s writing was too elaborate, he nonetheless shared his love of the wilderness and his conservationist ethics.”

Beginning in 1919, he spent four summers as custodian at the Club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge (now the Club’s Yosemite Conservation Heritage Center) in Yosemite Valley. In 1934, Adams was elected as a member of the Board of Directors of the Sierra Club, a role he maintained for 37 years.

Adams’ 1938 book The Sierra Nevada and the John Muir Trail, was influential in fulfilling John Muir’s dream to add the wilderness region north of Sequoia National Park to the National Park System. The park was proposed as “John Muir National Park.” After a fierce battle in Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a bill March 4, 1940, establishing Kings Canyon National Park.

In 1955, Adams and Nancy Newhall organized the important exhibition This is the American Earth. The exhibition focused on conservation ethics and ideals, and was displayed at the LeConte Lodge in Yosemite National Park. About half of the photographs from forty different photographers were those of Adams. In 1960, the Sierra Club published the book as its first “exhibit format” book, This is the American Earth, which still serves as a beautiful statement of conservation principles.

Ansel Adams received the Sierra Club John Muir Award, its highest honor, in 1963. This was only the third time this Award was given.  In 1968, he was awarded the Conservation Service Award, the highest award of the Department of the Interior. He received many other award’s, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, for “his efforts to preserve this country’s wild and scenic areas, both on film and on earth.” The Sierra Club made Adams an Honorary Vice-President in 1971. 

After naming the Ansel Adams Conservation Award in his honor, and giving it to Adams in 1980, The Wilderness Society since that time has given its Ansel Adams Conservation Award to “a current or former federal official who has shown exceptional commitment to the cause of conservation and the fostering of an American land ethic.”

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for “his efforts to preserve this country’s wild and scenic areas, both on film and on earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature’s monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a national institution.”

In 1984, the year he died, the Ansel Adams Wilderness area was declared, covering 100,000 acres between Yosemite National Park and the John Muir Wilderness Area. In August, 1985, a year after Adams’ death, a 11,700 foot peak located south of Mount Lyell at the head of the Lyell Fork of the Merced River on the southeast boundary of Yosemite National Park was officially named Mt. Ansel Adams. This peak had been unofficially named for Adams on a Sierra Club High Trip in 1933 by the climbers who made the first ascent. Because geographic features are never officially named for living people, the U.S. Geological Survey would not sanction it until several months after Adams died.

Adams expressed a strong pantheistic belief system:   “We are now sufficiently advanced to consider resources other than materialistic, but they are tenuous, intangible, and vulnerable to misapplication. They are, in fact, the symbols of spiritual life–a vast impersonal pantheism–transcending the confused myths and prescriptions that are presumed to clarify ethical and moral conduct.”

In a 1925 letter to Virginia Best (who later became his wife) Adams expressed his belief in the divinity of the mountains:  “I hope you had a most delightful trip in the High Country, and that you were benefited in mind and soul and body by the divine influence of the mountains. I think nothing can be compared to the Hills for the elevation of spirit, and peace of mind, which they produce in man when he lives intelligently among them . . . I look on the lines and forms of the mountains and all other aspects of Nature as if they were but the vast expression of ideas within the Cosmic Mind, if such it can be called . . . The complexities of the modern world . . . are extremely foolish in the face of the eternal openness and beauty of these mountains.”

Such pantheistic perception, Adams believed, could lead to a better world:

“In contemplation of the eternal incarnations of the spirit which vibrate in every mountain, leaf, and particle of earth, in every cloud, stone, and flash of sunlight, we make new discoveries on the planes of ethical and humane discernment, approaching the new society at last, proportionate to nature…”

Resources:

This is the American Earth (About the original 1955 exhibit and 1960 book) by Harold W. Wood, Jr. , with an Introduction by Justice William O.
Douglas, the Foreword by David Brower, and an excerpt from text by Nancy Newhall (December, 2024) (PDF)

Ansel Adams, Pantheist by Gary Suttle (off-site web page)

Ansel Adams, Famed Photographer and Pantheist by Gary Suttle in   with additional photographs, quotations, and resources, in Pantheist Vision, Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter 2022/23.  (PDF file on box.com)

The Strength of the Shutter: Photography and the Environmental Movement by Lena Eyen

Ansel Adams Original Photographs – from the Ansel Adams Trust

Ansel Adams Photographs in the Records of the National Park Service – in the National Archives