Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams got his first camera at 14 on a trip to Yosemite in 1916, and the park became both subject and cause. He honed his craft through the Sierra Club, then co-founded Group f/64 in the early 1930s, a circle that insisted on pure focus and full tonal range against the soft-focus pictorialism then in vogue. With Fred Archer he developed the Zone System, a technical method for controlling exposure and print density with near-scientific precision. The Interior Department hired him to photograph national parks, and those images became instruments of conservation - his advocacy helped expand the park system itself. He advised the Museum of Modern Art on its first photography department, co-founded Aperture magazine, and helped establish the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. In 1980 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for the work and the persistence.