Ansel Adams: Photographs from the Collection

The decades-long career of American photographer Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was shaped by the artist’s abiding conviction in the inspiring, nourishing power of the natural world. Sparked by his own formative boyhood experiences in Yosemite National Park, Adams would go on to become an influential environmentalist, his urgent message bolstered by his increasingly popular photographs of some of the most iconic landscapes of the western United States. For Adams, these two callings, environmental advocacy and photography, were closely linked. Even in the face of widespread social and political upheaval—for example in the 1930s and ’40s, when many of his best-known images were made—Adams was steadfast in his belief that access to unspoiled nature was an essential part of human well-being, that there was “real social significance in a rock,” as he once memorably put it. Meanwhile, his heroic, masterfully printed photographs earned him an unprecedented level of commercial success and name recognition, while also making a powerful case for the awe and solace to be found in the nation’s wild places.

This exhibition, curated by Molly Kalkstein, the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography, brings together a selection of some of Adams’s most beloved landscape photographs from the permanent collection of the Johnson Museum.