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By Root 3207 0

upon us and it was glorious,” Adams recalled of his trip of June 1916. “One wonder after another descended upon us. . . . There was light everywhere. . . . A new era began for me.” Adams’s father soon thereafter bought his son a Brownie camera. Young Ansel was off and running, constantly searching for the right natural scene. “I believe photography has both a challenge and an obligation,” he wrote of his own philosophy, “to help us see more clearly and more deeply, and to reveal to others the grandeur and potentials of the one and only world which we inhabit.”3

Much like John Muir, his hero, Adams started wandering in the Sierra Nevada looking for picture-perfect vistas. Anxious to help save the Yosemite wilderness, he joined the Sierra Club. Occasionally he wrote articles for the Sierra Club Bulletin. His art introduced Yosemite to the general public, increasing consciousness about the old-growth redwoods of Mariposa Grove and the priceless vistas from Glacier Point. Yosemite, it seems, had aroused all his subtle creative strains. In 1934 Adams, determined to protect Yosemite for perpetuity, joined the Sierra Club’s board of directors; he remained active there until 1971. Following the lead of Alfred Stieglitz, who believed photography should be as high an art as painting, Adams adopted a variety of new lenses, determined to reveal Yosemite profoundly. Mountain landscapes, captured by the wide-angle lens, enraptured him.4 Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, taken in 1927, was his first visualization—that is, he visualized the photo before it was shot, determining its essence in a quasi-scientific yet romantic way.5 “My photographs have now reached a stage when they are worthy of the world’s critical examination,” Adams declared in 1927. “I have suddenly come upon a new style which I believe will place my work equal to anything of its kind.”6

Starting in the early 1930s, Adams rejected the notion that his photographs were “pictorial”—a dreaded word used in Henry Luce’s magazines Time and Life. Instead, Adams, with other West Coast photographers including Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke, formed Group f/64, championing so-called “straight” realist photographs. The group’s name was derived from the smallest lens aperture on large-format cameras, which gives the greatest depth of field with maximum definition from foreground to background. They preferred pioneer western photographers like William Henry Jackson to New York’s avant-garde.7

The way Adams photographed the West—his spiritual command of the landscape—allowed Americans to better appreciate their wilderness heritage. Adams’s photograph of McDonald Lake in Glacier National Park, for example, helped increase the number of family visits to northwestern Montana. Starting with his first book, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, Adams regularly published his black-and-white landscapes of Yosemite in various popular formats including wall calendars. With a black beard and a broad-rimmed floppy hat, and dressed like the young Muir, Adams worked at his trade wherever high-country light met rock. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes read Adams’s Sierra Nevada and marveled at the exquisite photography, amazed that the young Californian had so elegantly captured the mountainous Kings River Canyon region, where giant sequoias were found along with ponderosa pine, incense, cedar, and white fir. Awestruck by the book’s nobility, feeling as if he were on a raft going down the Kings, Kaweah, and Kern rivers, Ickes brought Sierra Nevada to the White House to show to his boss. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wouldn’t give it back. The New Dealers now considered Adams a favorite artist.8

Ickes wanted to make his mark at the Department of the Interior by creating a new kind of national park in the era of dust bowls, soil erosion, and wildlife depletion. Building on Bob Marshall’s ideas about wilderness and relishing Adams’s photos, he envisioned a vast John Muir–Kings Canyon Wilderness Park. When he went to Capitol Hill to take up the matter, he soon discovered