Product Description

In the century since the establishment of the world's first national park at Yellowstone, no individual has been a more ardent champion of the "national park idea" than Ansel Adams. Over a span of six decades, beginning in 1916, Adams photographed America's great national parks, making thousands of pictures, some of them among the most memorable images of the natural scene ever created.

In this book, a selection of Adams' legendary photographs of over forty national parks and monuments is presented, along with a sampling of his impassioned letters, speeches, and writings (all long out of print of never before published) about the critical issues facing the park system. These insightful, and sometimes controversial, writings by one of the great environmental thinkers of the twentieth century are as relevant today as when they were written. Top-quality reproduction in a reasonably priced paperback add to the appeal of this fascinating presentation of one of the most important themes in Ansel Adams' life and work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #221923 in Books
• Published on: 1992-05-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

From Library Journal
Illustrated primarily with familiar Adams images, many of which have appeared in one monograph after another, this volume doesn't offer any fundamentally new insights into the photographer's work. It does, however, remind us of his deep involvement with a number of national parks in addition to Yosemite. Beautiful duotone reproductions of the 78 photographs, an informative introduction, and selections from Adams's correspondence regarding national parks further enhance the book, whose smaller format (812 x 9) gives it a delicate, quietly thoughtful air. Given the care of the editing and the quality of reproduction, this paperback offers real value. Recommended for public and academic libraries as supplementary material on Adams, national parks, and conservation.
- Raymond Bial, Parkland Coll. Lib., Champaign, Ill.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
In a career that spanned more than five decades, Ansel Adams was at once America's foremost landscape photographer and one of its most ardent environmentalists. His work has been published in a multitude of books, posters, and calendars.

Customer Reviews

Adams the wilderness champion; illustrated.
Most people know Ansel Adams' iconic photographs of gorgeous natural scenery in US national parks. But Adams' passion for national parks went farther than documentation. He was also a forceful advocate who spoke and wrote in defense of preserving wilderness in national parks. This small gem pulls together familiar Adams images of national parks with his writing, both formal and informal, on national parks especially his most beloved Yosemite.

Adams' most significant contribution to conservation was popularizing the concept of wilderness as spiritual retreat; a concept that demands we protect wilderness from too much human use, too much human carelessness, and even too much human love. This is where this book offers something enlightening and became more than just another pretty compilation of Adams' photos. The images illustrate the places his words seek to describe, defend, and protect within the historical context of the national parks system formation and development at critical junctures.

The images are smaller scale than we are used to seeing them; however, they are sharp high-quality reproductions. This is not a comprehensive treatment of Adams' views or a complete compilation of his writing. The selections in this book introduce his views to new readers and remind those, like me, who may have overlooked it that Adams was a serious conservationist.

Ansel Adams by Barry Pritzker
The Ansel Adams book put together by Barry Pritzker is a nice arrangement of Ansel's great landscape photography. I like the large format of this book, roughly 14" x 12". The photos are gigantic and very beautiful. The size is representative of the work. One of the complaints I have is about the images themselves and the darkness of them. Ansel's work is full of contrast, which I really like about his photographs. However, the shadows in these prints are almost pure black. They should have been enhanced just a tad bit, maybe dodged in the shadow areas for reproduction purposes only. Viewing original prints and reproducing originals are going to have extremely different outputs of tonal range. I do like that the author created an introductory section to familiarize the readers a little more about photography and its roots. It shows pioneers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. It's a segway into the work of Ansel Adams.

I would have loved to see maybe some type of commentary about each image and how it was captured, a type of "Mind's Eye" insight for other photographers to understand the ideas behind the actual work. The title of the book is Ansel Adam's, so I really would have liked to see a little more diversity of his work. I'm pretty sure he must have made a portrait here and there in his entire lifetime. I know he couldn't have devoted his entire life to just landscapes alone. There has to be some other images, that even an Ansel fan like me, has never previously viewed before. I purchased the book because it was Ansel Adam's and his photography is very beautiful. I must be honest, when I opened the book and flipped through it, I was disappointed at the design of the book. It left me wanting more from the book itself. Out of a possible five stars, I would have to say the book is about two and a half stars.

A Brilliant Book Marred by a Too-Small Page Size
Ansel Adams was our photographer-advocate laureate of the national parks. This outstandng volume combines a look at his efforts both to capture the meaning of the parks and to lobby on their behalf. Fortified with a Guggenheim Fellowship in the 1940s, Adams was able to travel throughout the U.S. to visit the many national parks outside of his beloved, native California. This volume greatly benefits from those travels in creating his ideas and the 80 black and white images contained in it.

As Ansel Adams reminds us, "The National Parks, are, indeed a phenomena of an advanced society . . . ." When Yellowstone was established by President Grant in 1872, it was the first national park in the history of the world. Since then, we have been in a race between despoiling our wilderness environment and retaining some of it in national parks. The challenge is heightened by the pressures to commercialize and increase access to wilderness areas. How many people should visit Yosemite each year? These are the questions that Ansel Adams anticipated and helped us address. These questions are even more relevant and important today than when he first raised them. "Possessions, both material and spiritual, are appreciated most when we find ourselves in peril of losing them."

"There is a constant erosion of the concept and the reality of wilderness." Unfortunately, Adams was much more successful as a photographer than in achieving his environmental vision. Will his final epitaph of the future be of someone who captured images of what does not exist any more? I certainly hope not.

I recommend the preface by William A. Turnage very highly to understand Ansel Adams' vision and its effects on our society. The preface also contains a delightful section by Nancy Newhall on what it was like to be Ansel Adams' assistant for his dawn photography treks.

This book contains much more written material by Ansel Adams on conservation and the national parks than in any other book of his photographs that I have seen. I enjoyed reading about his ideas, and they helped me understand his photography better as well. He is trying to show us "the clear realities of Nature seen with the inner eye of the spirit [to] reveal the ultimate echo of God."

As I mentioned in the title to this review, the publisher put these images on pages that are too small to capture the detail of Adams' work in most cases. In fairness to the publisher, I should also point out that remarkable efforts have been made to reproduce these images well in the small format. Compared to other small reproductions of these same images, these are by far the best I have seen.

Some compositions in fact succeed in overcoming the limitations of the page size. These include:

Cliff Palace Ruin, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, 1941

Leaves, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, 1942

Forest, Early Morning, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, 1949

Leaf, Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, 1948

Forest, Beartrack Cove, Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, 1949

Teklanika River, Denali National Park, Alaska, 1947

Mount McKinley from Stoney Pass, Denali National Park, Alaska, 1948

Cinder Cone in Crater of Haleakala, Haleakala National Park, Hawaii, 1956

Mount Lassen from Devastated Area, Lassen Volcanic National Park, California, 1949

Mount Clarence King, Pool, Kings Canyon National Park, California, 1932

Many of the other photographs will be familiar to Ansel Adams' fans. If you have seen them reproduced in larger sizes, you can use your memory to add the missing detail. In this size though, the details being indistinct is like erasing chapters from a novel. Adams often accentuated reflections of details between different natural features in his compositions. When some details are obscured in small size, the reflections thus are not available to stimulate your mind.

In keeping with the spirit of Ansel Adams, I suggest that you consider becoming active in organizations (like the Sierra Club, which Adams belonged to for many years) that fight to save wilderness areas. If your great grandchildren are ever to experience the spiritual cleansing of the wilderness, we each must act now.

"Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere."