Today is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Ansel Adams. It hardly seems necessary to make the case for his impact on photography and photographers, and should it be necessary there are many others who are better equipped than I to make that case. But I can’t let the date go by without writing something.

Arriving in California and the San Francisco Bay Area at the age of four, having a father who was an enthusiastic photographer,  and living here during the last half of the 20th Century and into the 21st, it is no surprise that my literal view of the world has been affected by Adams’ way of seeing it. Unlike a number of people in my “circle” who knew him and worked with him and can tell their own real Ansel Stories, I was not fortunate enough to have any substantial direct contact with the man. (Although I was very interested in photography from a young age and I knew people who ended up working with him, where Adams zigged left towards photography, as a young man I zagged right toward music.) The closest I came was when my father dragged me and perhaps one or more of my brothers to the local community college to hear a lecture by some photographer. We assembled in a small, dingy classroom and some old, bearded guy talked about photography. Yes, that bearded guy. While I have a visual memory of seeing Adams there, I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t recall a single thing that he said.

Today, it is popular in some circles to overlook the visual power of his best photographs, to regard him as being “merely a landscape photographer,” to overlook the tremendous number of photographers affected directly and indirectly by him, to misrepresent him as some sort of pure “realist,” to point out that not every photograph he made was “perfect,” and even to regard his work as something of an anachronism.

However, Adams’ way of seeing (along with that of others such as Weston) strongly affected my visual orientation to the world, in ways that I didn’t comprehend when I was young. I distinctly recall the first time that I was more or less turned loose in Yosemite with a “real camera” (something with bellows, as I recall) by my family, I went off and happily made black and white photographs of cliffs and waterfalls… and one specific photograph of North Dome framed by trees that surprised me by managing to evoke (though probably only for me) something like the feeling that Adams’ photographs evoked. At the time I don’t think I had a clue of the vein I was tapping into, but I now look back and realize that I must have baffled my parents when, at junior high school age,  I became obsessed by making photographs of rusty fence gates and oak trees in empty fields and tide pools at Point Lobos. The powerful and direct images that Adams created  started me dreaming about the imagined high country of the Sierra, and by my mid-teens I had managed to finagle my way into accompanying friends on my first backpacking trip.

Yes, I took a camera.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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