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Ansel Adams Art

American, 1902-1984

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.

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Period: 1940s
Artist: Ansel Adams
Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine
By Ansel Adams
Located in Palm Desert, CA
"Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine" is a photography by famed and landmark photographer Ansel Adams. The photograph is signed on verso with artist's stamp, "Photograph by Ansel Adams Winter...
Category

1940s Ansel Adams Art

Materials

Silver Gelatin

Upper Yosemite Falls, Spring, Yosemite National Park, California
By Ansel Adams
Located in Carmel, CA
Your chance to own an original Ansel Adams photograph. Signed in pen. Special Edition print printed by someone else. Authorized by the Ansel Adams gallery accompanied with Certificat...
Category

1940s Ansel Adams Art

Materials

Silver Gelatin

Mission San Xavier del Bac, Tuscon, Arizona
By Ansel Adams
Located in Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA
Original vintage gelatin silver photograph printed circa 1944 by Ansel Adams. Signed in pencil lower right on the front of the mount. Very good vintage condition: some silvering top left quadrant, small edge chips on sides. Photograph is archivally overmatted to 18 1/6 x 14 1/2 inches so frame ready. Comes unframed. ANSEL ADAMS (AMERICAN, 1902 - 1984) Ansel Easton Adams was known for his black and white photographs of the California's Yosemite Valley. Adams was also the author of numerous books about photography, including his trilogy of technical instruction manuals (The Camera, The Negative, and The Print). He co-founded the photographic association Group f/64 along with other masters like Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke...
Category

1940s Ansel Adams Art

Materials

Silver Gelatin

Trailer - Camp Children, Richmond, California
By Ansel Adams
Located in Santa Monica, CA
Ansel Adams (United States, b. 1902-1984) Trailer - Camp Children, Richmond, California, c. 1944, printed 1977 Signed in pencil on mount recto; Titled & dated in ink with artist's co...
Category

1940s Ansel Adams Art

Materials

Silver Gelatin

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Previously Available Items
Oak Tree, Snowstorm, Yosemite National Park, California , 1948
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Saguaro Cactus, Sunrise, Arizona by Ansel Adams Vintage print
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Saguaro Cactus, Sunrise, Arizona 1946 by Ansel Adams A cactus appears to tower over the rest of the landscape of Arizona. Unframed Matted Overall size : 12 x 16" inches / 31 x 41 cm Image Size: 7.5" x 9.25'' inches / 19 x 23.5 cm Printed 2012 Silver Gelatin Print Mint condition Certificate of authenticity Framing option available Shipped securely from London, England. Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer...
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Thunderhead from Glacier Point, Yosemite
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Signed on the front of the mount. Stamped, titled and dated on the back. Comes framed in Optium custom wood grain frame. Printed January, 1979. Pristine.
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Oaktree, Snowstorm, Yosemite National Park, California
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Moonrise from Glacier Point, 1948
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1960 Yosemite Menu with cover Fresh Snow, Yosemite Valley, California, 1947
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A rare framable piece of Ansel Adams ephemera. with crease down middle as issued. Adams, Ansel (Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22, 1984), photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California. His life was, in his words, “colored and modulated by the great earth gesture” of the Yosemite Sierra (Adams, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, p. xiv). He spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had given him. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and self-confidence. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent the first of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as “keeper” of the club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge. The Sierra Club was vital to Adams’s early success as a photographer. His first published photographs and writings appeared in the club’s 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one man exhibition in 1928 at the club’s San Francisco headquarters. By 1934 Adams had been elected to the club’s board of directors and was well established as both the artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite. Nineteen twenty seven was the pivotal year of Adams’s life. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and took his first High Trip. More important, he came under the influence of Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance magnate and patron of arts and artists. Literally the day after they met, Bender set in motion the preparation and publication of Adams’ first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. In addition to spending summers photographing in the Sierra Nevada, Adams made several lengthy trips to the Southwest to work with Mary Austin, grande dame of the western literati. Their magnificent limited edition book, Taos Pueblo, was published in 1930. In the same year Adams met photographer Paul Strand, whose images had a powerful impact on Adams and helped to move him away from the “pictorial” style he had favored in the 1920s. Adams began to pursue “straight photography,” in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized, and the final print gave no appearance of being manipulated in the camera or the darkroom. In 1927 Adams met photographer Edward Weston. They became increasingly important to each other as friends and colleagues. The renowned Group f/64, founded in 1932, coalesced around the recognized greatness of Weston and the dynamic energy of Adams. Although loosely organized and relatively short-lived, Group f/64 brought the new West Coast vision of straight photography to national attention and influence. San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum promptly gave f/64 an exhibition and, in that same year, gave Adams his first one-man museum show. Although profoundly a man of the West, Adams spent a considerable amount of time in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Alfred Stieglitz circle played a vital role in his artistic life. In 1933 the Delphic Gallery gave Adams his first New York show. His first series of technical articles was published in Camera Craft in 1934, and his first widely distributed book, Making a Photograph, appeared in 1935. Most important, in 1936 Stieglitz gave Adams a one-man show at An American Place. Clients ran the gamut, including the Yosemite concessionaire, the National Park Service, Kodak, Zeiss, IBM, AT&T, a small women’s college, a dried fruit company, and Life, Fortune, and Arizona Highways magazines — in short, everything from portraits to catalogues to Coloramas. Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium. Weston and Strand frequently consulted him for technical advice. He served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other photographic concerns. Adams described himself as a photographer — lecturer — writer. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that he was simply — indeed, compulsively — a communicator. Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, the often envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph...
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1940s Ansel Adams Art

Ansel Adams art for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Ansel Adams art available for sale on 1stDibs. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of James Whitlow Delano, James Bacchi, and Jay Mark Johnson.

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Questions About Ansel Adams Art
  • 1stDibs ExpertApril 5, 2022
    Photographer Ansel Adams spoke of the ‘Art of Visualization’ around his photography methods. This concept revolves around the photographer imagining where the audience’s eye will move across a scene before taking the shot. Visualization helps the photographer frame a scene in a way that aligns with their intent. Shop a collection of Ansel Adams photography from some of the world’s top sellers on 1stDibs.
  • 1stDibs ExpertFebruary 1, 2024
    Ansel Adams' most famous photo is open for debate. One of his first photographs to draw attention from the public was 1927's Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, an image of the Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. Other notable photos by Adams include Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico; Half Dome, Merced River, Winter, Yosemite National Park, California; San Francisco From Twin Peaks and Sand Dunes, Sunrise, Death Valley National Monument, California. On 1stDibs, explore a wide variety of Ansel Adams art.

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