This is the second cache in a series based on famous photographers who's work I admire. Since starting geocaching my time for photography has been somewhat reduced so this is my attempt at combining the two interests.
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Moon and Half Dome, 1960
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"Sometimes I get to places when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter."
This is how the late Ansel Adams explained the seeming perfection of his photographs, seen by more people throughout the world than any other photographer. His black-and-white images of Yosemite National Park, the Grand Tetons, Monument Valley and other spectacular Western landscapes adorn many a home in the form of calendars, prints and coffee-table books, and every photography enthusiast learns about the man who made photography an art.
Ansel Easton Adams was born Feb. 20, 1902. A curious and gifted child, Adams taught himself to play the piano at age 12 and would initially pursue a career as a concert pianist. Unable to stand the regimented structure of school, Adams began working with a private tutor at 13.
The next year, 1916, he persuaded his parents to take a vacation in Yosemite National Park. That event was a turning point in Adams' life. From that first visit to Yosemite until his death, Adams maintained a love affair with the land and became an advocate for the environment.
The Yosemite visit also was the beginning of Adams' involvement with photography. Armed with his father's Kodak Brownie box camera and with one of the country's most beautiful landscapes before him, young Adams began taking photographs. And he never stopped.
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Tetons and Snake River
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The artistic nature of his photographs, his experiments behind the camera and in the darkroom, and his recognition by such powerful photographers as Alfred Stieglitz won Adams many friends and admirers. Stieglitz, in fact, was so impressed that he gave Adams an exhibition in 1936, the first exhibition this photographic giant had given to a photographer since Strand in 1917.
Having maintained a constant involvement with America's oldest and most influential environmental organisation the "Sierra Club", Adams was elected to its board of directors in 1934. He spoke eloquently and often to Congress and, over his lifetime, met with four presidents to discuss his country's lack of concern for the land and its resources.
With the nation's involvement in World War II in the 1940s, Adams' photographs became, according to biographer James Alinder, "expansive and heroic. Though he could not serve on active duty, he desperately wanted to be part of the war effort. He was able to find minor roles, such as teaching photography to army officers, but his most important contribution was in show America something of what it was fighting for," wrote Alinder in Ansel Adams: Classic Images. This was the period of "epic vistas, photographs that captured the glory of the country."
Dogwood Blossoms
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These were the most productive years of Adams' career.
"His photographic style attained full development, and he made many of his classic images," Alinder wrote. "His activities in support of photography as an art form also expanded. He increased his teaching and published accounts of the technique he codified, the Zone System. He also established academic departments for teaching photography and organized photography exhibitions."
In 1962, he and his wife built a home with an extensive darkroom overlooking the Pacific Ocean in California. Over the next 20 years, Adams produced most of the finest and now-famous prints of his career.
He finally stopped taking orders for prints at the end of 1975, but the 3,000 last-minute orders that came in took Adams three years to complete.
By 1979, Adams prints accounted for half of the total dollar value of photography sales in the United States. This humble, easy-going man was the subject of a Time magazine cover story, the only photographer ever to make the cover. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, by President Jimmy Carter and received the first Ansel Adams Award for Conservation ever given by The Wilderness Society.
Adams celebrated his 80th birthday in 1982 amid 200 guests at a dinner sponsored by The Friends of Photography, during which he was presented with the Decoration of Commander in the Order of the Arts and Letters, the highest cultural award given by the French government to a foreigner.
Adams died of heart failure in 1984. In a fitting tribute exactly one year later, an 11,760-foot peak in Yosemite was named Mount Ansel Adams.