He was an only child, born on February 20, 1902, in San Francisco, California, to Olive and Charles Adams. When he was a year old, the Adams family moved to a house with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. When Adams was four, he fell and broke his nose during the 1906 earthquake. At age 13, he convinced his father to take him out of public school, which he hated, and devoted his time to piano and private tutors. He also is said to have visited the nearby Panama-Pacific Exposition almost daily. At age 14, during a family vacation to Yosemite, Adams began taking photos, marking the major turning point in his life.
In 1928, Adams married Virginia Best, the daughter of a Yosemite gift shop owner, and she accompanied him on many wilderness treks.
Adams took photos in Arizona, California, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. He processed the B & W photos using a silver gelatin developing process without paper, and was paid about $22 a day. He pioneered zone exposure technology that he developed in 1932 with Edward Weston to try and obtain maximum tonal range in an outdoor-exposed photo. He spent every summer working and photographing in Yosemite, and was a lifelong supporter of preservation for natural wilderness areas. In 1927, Adams published his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, and hundreds of books, photos, calendars and magazine articles followed.
Adams continued photographing, publishing, and exhibiting his work as well as excellence at the piano while maintaining a professional photography studio in San Francisco. In 1937, a darkroom fire destroyed thousands of his negatives.
Ansel Adams was a longtime Director of the Sierra Club, but he began as the custodian! He helped establish many educational opportunities for photographers; including the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Department of Photography at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and many more. Adams received the Sierra Club's John Muir Award in 1963, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Carter, and many other awards, fellowships, and honorary doctorate degrees. He continued trekking into the Western wilderness throughout his life, especially the High Sierras, and later worked with several U.S. presidents on environmental preservation issues. In correspondence dated August 18, 1942, from Adams to E. K. Burlew, First Assistant Secretary, Department of the Interior, Adams states: the photographs (contained within PixureFrame) are the property of the U.S. Government.
Ansel Adams died in 1984, as a result of heart failure and cancer. Posthumously, an Ansel Adams Wilderness Area of more than 100,000 acres between Yosemite National Park and the John Muir Wilderness Area was created.
Many thousands of examples of his work remain in photographs, magazine articles and books to remind us of his marvelous use of light translated into shades of black. His images and environmental preservation work are a legacy for continuation of the American wilderness, and his enthusiasm and tremendous success in a self-taught photography career is an inspiration to all to follow our dreams, for Adams only had a formal degree from grammar school.