Ansel Adams Winter

The San Francisco–born photographer Ansel Adams 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 as calendars and posters.

A sickly child with little attraction to sports or games, Adams early on developed an avid interest in the natural surroundings of his San Francisco home, on the heights facing Golden Gate Park. This passion found a productive outlet in photography, which he discovered at 14, when his father gave him his first camera during a family trip to Yosemite National Park. He spent much of the ensuing decades capturing Yosemite’s vast and varied wonders.

Adams’s photographs were first published in 1921. Even these early efforts demonstrate his eye for composition and his 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, which transform the landscape into a near abstraction.

Find a collection of Ansel Adams photography today on 1stDibs.

Find a broad range of photography on 1stDibs today.

The first permanent image created by a camera — which materialized during the 1820s — is attributed to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The French inventor was on to something for sure. Kodak introduced roll film in the 1880s, allowing photography to become more democratic, although cameras wouldn’t be universally accessible until several decades later. 

Digital photographic techniques, software, smartphone cameras and social-networking platforms such as Instagram have made it even easier in the modern era for budding photographers to capture the world around them as well as disseminate their images far and wide. 

What might leading figures of visual art such as Andy Warhol have done with these tools at their disposal?

Today, when we aren’t looking at the digital photos that inundate us on our phones, we look to the past to celebrate the photographers who have broken rules as well as records — provocative and prolific artists like Horst P. Horst, Lillian Bassman and Helmut Newton, who altered the face of fashion and portrait photography; visionary documentary photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose best-known work was guided by social justice; and pioneers of street photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who shot for revolutionary travel magazines like Holiday with the likes of globetrotting society lensman Slim Aarons.

Find photographers you may not know in Introspective and The Study — where you’ll read about Berenice Abbott, who positioned herself atop skyscrapers for the perfect shot, or “conceptual artist-adventurer” Charles Lindsay, whose work combines scientific rigor with artistic expression, or Massimo Listri, known for his epic interiors of opulent Old World libraries. Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron was given a Kodak camera as a child. Later, she shot on Polaroid film before buying her first 35mm camera in her teens. Barron's stunning portraits of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Warhol and other artists chronicle a crucial chapter of New York’s cultural history.

Throughout the past two centuries, photographers have used their medium to create expressive work that has resonated for generations. Shop a voluminous collection of this powerful fine photography on 1stDibs. Search by photographer to find the perfect piece for your living room wall, or spend some time with the work organized under various categories, such as landscape photography, nude photography and more.