National Park Service - Ansel Adams.

In 1941 Ansel Adams was commissioned by the National Park Service to produce photographs for a large photographic mural planned for the new Department of the Interior Building in Washington, D.C. The project developed from Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes's programme of murals representing the department's responsibilities, and Ickes expanded the idea to include photography after becoming familiar with Adams's work and conservation interests. Adams was asked to represent nature as both a national resource and something protected through the national park system. During 1941 and 1942 he travelled extensively through the American West, photographing Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Mesa Verde, Carlsbad Caverns, Zion and other national parks, as well as Death Valley, Saguaro and Canyon de Chelly National Monuments. The assignment was broader than conventional landscape photography: Adams also photographed Boulder Dam, transmission infrastructure, Acoma, Taos and other Pueblo communities, Navajo people, buildings and everyday activities, connecting landscape, human occupation, conservation and federal management of the West. He also incorporated earlier photographs of Kings Canyon made in 1936, when he had been actively supporting the campaign to establish the area as a national park. The project was interrupted after the United States entered the Second World War following Pearl Harbor and the intended mural was never completed. Nevertheless, 226 signed and captioned prints survived from the project, creating an unusually extensive record of Adams working directly for the federal government rather than producing photographs solely as independent fine-art landscapes. Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was already closely associated with Yosemite and the conservation movement when he received the commission. Born in San Francisco, he first visited Yosemite in 1916 and initially planned a career as a concert pianist before committing himself fully to photography during the 1920s. His approach was based on meticulous control of exposure, development and printing, using large-format cameras to translate the scale, texture and tonal range of the western landscape into highly controlled black-and-white prints. In 1932 he helped establish Group f/64 with photographers including Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, promoting sharply focused photography and rejecting the soft-focus conventions of Pictorialism. Adams subsequently developed the Zone System with Fred Archer, providing photographers with a systematic method of relating exposure and negative development to the tonal values intended in the final print. His photographic practice was inseparable from his involvement with conservation: he served for decades on the board of the Sierra Club, used photographs and publications to support protection of wilderness areas, and was directly involved in campaigning for Kings Canyon. The National Park Service commission therefore brought together several central strands of his career: large-format landscape photography, technical control, environmental advocacy and the use of photography to shape public understanding of the American West. Although the wartime cancellation prevented the original mural from being realised, the surviving photographs provide an important bridge between Adams's better-known independent landscape work and the institutional use of photography to represent American land, conservation and national identity. Ansel Adams https://www.anseladams.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansel_A... Music Theta to Delta Meditation (Short Version) - Joseph Beg Camera is on: Twitter:   / camerasnaps​   YouTube:    / camerasnaps​   Instagram:   / camera_wtfstop_podcast   Merch: http://camera.myspreadshop.co.uk Facebook:   / camera.proje.  . Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0I5BX44... Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/ed3... Thank you for all your support. Photographs by Ansel Adams, created for the U.S. Department of the Interior and National Park Service, 1941–1942. Images held by the U.S. National Archives and available without copyright restrictions. #nationalparkservice #americanwest #landscapephotography #nationalparks #documentaryphotography #photographyhistory #america #blackandwhitephotography #largeformatphotography #conservationphotography #photography #yosemite #grandcanyon #yellowstone #grandteton #camera