Visual Arts & Copyright
Works of the visual arts include a wide variety of pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works, as well as architectural works. Examples of visual arts works include paintings, sculptures, photographs, and other types of works.
Visual Arts
Ansel Adams: One Photographer, Many Lenses
Conservation & Social Justice
Two Medicine Lake, Glacier National Park
The photography of Ansel Adams is often recognized for its dramatic and important subject matter in portraying nature. It is also distinct for the technical innovations that Adams developed throughout his artistic career. His first portfolio of art was quite profitable, giving him the financial freedom to experiment extensively with new techniques. He shot many photos in black and white to clarify the beauty of natural elements and to create intensity and drama in them. He used the technique of chiaroscuro, contrasting light and dark to create impressive scale.
Ansel Adams was an important figure in the American conservation movement. During his life, he photographed some of the most beautiful sites in America and held dozens of gallery shows that promoted the High Sierra, the Grand Canyon, and more.
Social Justice
During the fall of 1943, Adams photographed at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, which was located in Inyo County, California, at the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains approximately 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles. This series was a departure from his usual landscape photography. Adams produced an essay on the Japanese-Americans interned in this beautiful, but remote and undeveloped region where the mountains served as both a metaphorical fortress and an inspiration for the internees. Concentrating on the internees and their activities, Adams photographed family life in the barracks; people at work– internees as welders, farmers, and garment makers; and recreational activities, including baseball and volleyball games.
In 1944 a selection of these images along with text by Adams was published by U. S. Camera in a 112-page book, Born Free and Equal. In a letter to his friend Nancy Newhall, the wife of Beaumont Newhall, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Adams wrote: "Through the pictures the reader will be introduced to perhaps twenty individuals . . . loyal American citizens who are anxious to get back into the stream of life and contribute to our victory." The book received positive reviews and made the San Francisco Chronicle's bestseller list for March and April of 1945.