Fine Art Photographs at Auction: Ansel Adams - Brief Biography & Book List

Brief Biography

Ansel Adams was born in 1902 in San Francisco. He remained a Californian his entire life, passing away in 1984 in his home in Carmel. One of America's most widely known photographers, he began his career as a musician, studying the piano. Though photography was initially only a hobby, it was a passionate one for him, intimately connected to his love of Yosemite Valley and the surrounding Sierra Nevadas. From the time he was a teenager, he alternated between winters in San Francisco and summers at Yosemite. In both locales, he pursued both music and photography.

Eventually, in his 20s, he embraced photography as his true calling. He was devoted to the outdoors and to the wilderness, and played a very prominent role in the Sierra Club and the conservation and environmental movement in general. This Sierra Club biography of him explains his contributions in detail. As the biography on his publisher's website notes, however, his pursuit of landscape photography was not done out of social service but one of individual passion and perhaps even "worship."

Adams career was marked by success after success. He successfully published a wide range of both photo books and technical manuals. As this Publisher's Weekly article details, his books have been - and remain - extremely popular. He authored several regular newspaper and magazine columns throughout his career, published in numerous magazines, and was one of the co-founders of the magazine Aperture. This website contains just a partial (but extensive) list of his publications. Adams also helped found several photography departments, including the photography department at New York's MOMA and the Center for Creative Photography at University of Arizona. A more complete list of accomplishments can be found here, and an excellent chronology of his life can be found here. A well written and more extensive biography written for the Oxford University Press has been republished at the Ansel Adams Gallery website.

Several excerpts from a radio interview conducted in 1976 are available on the BBC's website. The last interview he gave (Summer, 1984) is available on-line here. PBS made a film documenting Adams' life. A transcript has been posted to their website.

Books