1stDibs ExpertJanuary 27, 2025
The photographer who is famous for their landscapes of the American West is Ansel Adams. The San Francisco–born photographer is celebrated for his majestic black-and-white photography that brought the deserts, mountains and forests of the American West to the public. His images, beloved for their raw beauty and the magic of their subjects, are known around the world and widely reproduced. Adams’s photographs were first published in 1921. Even these early efforts demonstrate his eye for composition and sensitivity to tonal balance and textural contrast. In the mid-1920s, he began to play with soft focus, as in the dreamy 1927 Lyell Fork Meadows, which appears bathed in a hazy, nostalgic light. The 1948 Sunrise over Sand Dunes in Death Valley exemplifies Adams’s later experiments with stark contrasts in light and geometric framing, transforming the landscape into a near abstraction. On 1stDibs, shop a range of Ansel Adams photography.