By Ansel Adams

By Peter Galassi

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A magnificent deluxe, oversized book timed for the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Yosemite Grant, an event that laid the groundwork for the National Parks system.

Ansel Adams first visited Yosemite in 1916, at the age of fourteen, and returned every year throughout his life. It was in Yosemite that he fell in love with Western wilderness and became a photographer; he made more photographs at Yosemite than at any other place.

Roughly 150 breathtaking images are exquisitely reproduced in this large-format clothbound book. There are notable portraits of El Captain (the famous rock face whose Dawn Wall was recently free-climbed for the first time), Half Dome, Cathedral Rocks, Royal Arches, and other distinctive rock formations that frame the valley; grand views in all seasons and all states of weather; intimate details of nature from the Valley floor; the waterfalls–Bridaveil, Yosemite, Vernal, Nevada; studies of trees, from the giants of the Mariposa Grove to the exquisite white blossoms of the dogwood. There are gathering and clearing storms, snow and ice, bright sunshine, and the subtle shades of dawn and dusk.

The photographs have been selected and sequenced by Peter Galassi, former Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. His abundantly illustrated introduction sets Adams’s pictures within the rich history of imagery of Yosemite.

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On Sale: Oct 28, 2014
Page Count: 204 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
ISBN-13: 9780316323406

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Ansel Adams

About the Author

In a career that spanned six decades, Ansel Adams was at once America’s foremost landscape photographer and one of its most respected environmentalists.

In Ansel Adams at 100, John Szarkowski notes that Adams’s role in the history of photography goes beyond his achievements as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. As a leader in the study and appreciation of photography as an art, he played a major role in establishing the first department of photography in an art museum, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (the same department that Szarkowski led from 1962 to 1991). Moreover, as a tireless advocate for improving the reproduction of photographs in books, Adams “badgered and cajoled his printers and platemakers” till they had “achieved in ink an unprecedented degree of fidelity to the chemical print.”

Although he devoted a lifetime to the cause of wilderness preservation, “Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service, but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save,” Szarkowski writes, adding that “Ansel Adams’s great work was done under the stimulus of a profound and mystical experience of the natural world.” Szarkowski dates that experience to the early 1920s and a camping trip in the High Sierra. As Adams later recalled, “I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light…. I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks.”

Commenting on this moment of vision, Szarkowski writes, “One might guess that Adams spent the next quarter century trying to make a photograph that would give objective form to the sense of ineffable knowledge that on occasion, in his youth, inhabited him in the high mountains. Yosemite and the Sierra gave him not only his principal subject, but also the experience that provided the basis for a useful artistic idea: ‘The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor.’”

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Peter Galassi

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Ansel Adams (1902 – 1984) was the most honored American photographer of the twentieth century. Through the exhibition and publication of his work, his writings, and his leadership in the Sierra Club, Adams was also a prescient and highly effective voice in the fight to preserve America’s remaining wilderness.

Peter Galassi was a curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, for thirty years, including twenty as Chief Curator, from 1991 to 2011. He organized or co-organized more than forty exhibitions and countless collection displays at MoMA, many of which were accompanied by major publications. He was twice a fellow in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has won the Eric Mitchell Prize and the International Center of Photography award for excellence in writing. In 2012 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a study of photography’s vernacular and modernist traditions.

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Ansel Adams

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Peter Galassi

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