‘Ansel Adams at 100’, celebrating the centenary of Adams’ birth, provides an opportunity for critical reappraisal and to view a large variety (over 100) of full-sized, original prints, rather than the few, small, badly reproduced images that may have become hackneyed through over-exposure (in every sense of the word).

So too, his concentration on nature, rather than people makes his work ‘empty of political content’ unlike American photographers of the following generation (Frank, Klein, Arbus) and the photojournalists who took centre-stage during the Second World War and its aftermath. The ubiquity of Adams reproductions in the United States - on everything from diaries, calendars, postcards, refrigerator magnets and chocolate boxes - and his sheer popularity has lead to his downgrading by many critics. No big city apartment is complete without a framed Ansel Adams poster for the residents to marvel at the moon they see from their windows casting shadows from skyscrapers in imitation of the silhouettes of the Rocky Mountains. All rights reservedĪnsel Adams photographs demonstrate an obsession with nature - immense, primitive, unsullied by human activity - but the way he portrays stark mountains and brutal cliffs echo, consciously, the man-made canyons and concrete peaks of New York and Chicago. Copyright © 2001 by the Trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Collection of Margaret Weston, Weston Gallery, Inc. Mount Robson, Jasper National Park, Canada, 1928. Ansel Adams at 100 Ansel Adams’ images are as fundamental to the narrative of the American West as the films of John Ford or the legends of Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid and Doc HollidayĪnsel Adams.

Ansel adams most famous photos