WASHINGTON, D.C.- For the first time in a decade, an exhibition of photographs by Ansel Adams will be on view in Washington, D.C. Opening September 15 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Ansel Adams will give visitors a new look at the work of this important and influential artist through more than 125 images on loan from The Lane Collection—the largest private collection of works by Adams in existence. Acquired directly from Adams by the late William H. and Saundra Lane, during a 10-year period in the early 1960s and 1970s, the collection showcases Adams’ exceptional range and spans the length of his six-decade career.

Alongside several of Adams’ iconic landscapes, Ansel Adams will present rarely exhibited prints —offering new insight into one of the few photographers in the history of the medium whose name and images enjoy worldwide recognition. Although best known for his dramatic black and white vistas of the American West, Adams (1902—1984) was a versatile photographer who made portraits of artist friends, close-up nature views, striking architectural and urban views and documentary images. This exhibition takes a broad and inclusive look at Adams’ work, with particular emphasis on his early career.

“Ansel Adams gives us the opportunity to explore the hidden depths of an artist known for just a few iconic images. The wide range and high quality of pictures in The Lane Collection reveal a photographer with many dimensions, not just the well-known maker of dramatic landscapes,” said Paul Roth, curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Ansel Adams is arranged chronologically in several sections: Early Work (including photographs of the High Sierra, Canadian Rockies, and Pueblo Indians), Group f/64: Exploring Straight Photography, Yosemite, The American Southwest, Alfred Stieglitz and New York, The National Parks, and Late Work. (See Ansel Adams Walk-Through Press Release).

ABOUT ANSEL ADAMS - Adams’ photographic style, which fuses romanticism, poetic vision, technical precision and environmental advocacy, has had an unparalleled influence on all landscape photography in its wake—and on how Americans see and think about their country’s wilderness areas.

Born in 1902 to an upper class family in San Francisco, Ansel Adams was an unusually curious and precocious child. Trained by private tutors after the age of twelve, he began preparing for a career as a concert pianist. At the age of fourteen, he simultaneously discovered photography and Yosemite Valley National Park in California, using his first camera to record views during a family trip. After his 1928 marriage to Virginia Best, daughter of a Yosemite concessionaire, Adams devoted himself to photography.

Adams’ earliest landscape photography reflected the prevailing soft-focus “pictorialism” common to art photography of the time. In 1930 he met New York photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand, who fused hard-edged modernist aesthetics with social concern in his pioneering work. Strand’s commitment to photography as a medium for direct, realistic depiction influenced Adams greatly. By the time of his first solo museum exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 1931, Adams had found his mature style. In 1932 Adams joined fellow photographers Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard van Dyke, and John Paul Edwards, among others, to form Group f/64, a coalition of artists devoted to photographic realism. The modernist evolution of Adams’ technique began a lifetime of dedication to craft. Adams became a restless and innovative experimentalist, developing many now-standard photographic practices and reinventing his approach at many stages in his career.

Adams’ sharply-focused wilderness views became immensely popular, and his fame spread beyond the art world. His books Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography (1935), and Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (1938) expanded his audience from camera hobbyists to a broad public interested in the American western landscape. Adams’ reputation was further established by a 1936 show at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery An American Place, and by his inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art’s first historical survey of the medium in 1937. Throughout that decade and into the 1950s, Adams photographed the natural scene and promoted his own work through publications, exhibitions, and personal appearances. Later books, such as Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada (1948), My Camera in the National Parks (1950), and This is the American Earth (1960), made Adams the best-known and most widely respected photographic artist in the world.

Though known principally for his imagery, Adams is perhaps equally important as a pioneering educator and a tireless crusader for the institutional recognition of photography as a fine art. He was a driving force behind the establishment of the photography departments at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1946 he founded the Department of Photography at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute). With photographer Minor White and others Adams created the photo journal Aperture in 1952, and his Yosemite Workshops revolutionized photographic education from their inception in 1955. In later years Adams continued to advocate for photography’s acceptance as an art form, co-founding The Friends of Photography in 1967 and the Center for Creative Photography in 1975.

Adams is equally recognized for his important role in the development of the environmental movement in the United States. A longtime member of the Sierra Club’s board of directors, Adams intended his photographs to inspire the conservation of natural resources. His art had a great impact on public policy throughout his career, particularly on the creation of the Kings Canyon National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. His fame gave him unusual access to national leaders, and he tirelessly lobbied congressmen, Secretaries of the Interior, and Presidents of the United States from the 1930s onward.

By the late 1950s Adams’ environmentalism and energetic work on behalf of the medium began to supersede his own creative work. Experiments with new techniques, tools, and materials led to diverse types of imagery, and he made fewer of the iconic landscapes for which he was best known. As demand for his older work increased, Adams began to print many of his earlier images in a more graphic style, using dramatic tonal contrasts to recast his original vision (in the manner, he said, that older musical compositions are reinterpreted by subsequent generations of musicians). The popularity of these new prints, and the increasing ubiquity of Adams’ imagery in books and on posters and calendars, played a significant role in the establishment of a market for fine art photography. By the time of his death in 1984, Adams was as widely known and celebrated as any other artist before him.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION - Ansel Adams is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which hosts The Lane Collection under the supervision of Karen Haas, curator of The Lane Collection. Haas is co-curator of this exhibition with Rebecca Senf, Assistant Curator of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. Ansel Adams arrives at the Corcoran after an international tour with stops at the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Japan; the New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada; and the Detroit Institute of Arts in Michigan. Adams photographs from the Corcoran’s own collection, from the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, and from private collections have been added to the original exhibition, augmenting the Lane Collection holdings.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE - A softcover exhibition catalogue, Ansel Adams, is available in the Corcoran Shop for $40 a copy. Authored by Karen E. Ha