Early Influences

Ansel Adams’s affinity with the wilderness began at a young age and his early experiences would later come to shape his love for nature, which, in turn, was to be the impetus behind most of his work in advocating the protection and preservation of the wilderness.

Adams was born in San Francisco, California on February 20, 1902, and grew up as an only child, in the sand dunes area by the Golden Gate. His father and aunt tutored him at home as young Adams have had difficulty fitting in at school. Perhaps due to the lack of the company of siblings and classmates, young Adams often found joy and solace in nature.

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“As a small child I had played in the crisp winter snow at Carson City, and seen the stately oaks at Atherton on the hot, brittle fields rising towards the San Mateo Hills and beyond to the madrone-lush folds of the Santa Cruz Mountains. A few months among the beaches and rain forests of Puget Sound had made indelible the scents of sea and spruce, tar and sawdust. Such early images are often as clear and compelling in memory as the actual vistas of today.”

– Ansel Adams

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In 1915, Adams’s father, Charles Hitchcock Adams, brought 13-year-old Adams a year’s pass to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (an event to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal which was held in San Francisco) in the hopes of giving his son an opportunity to pursue his interest in nature and science that he himself was denied in his youth.

Armed with a Brownie Box camera his father has given him, young Adams visited the exposition everyday that year and took pictures of the exposition and of the Golden gate area.

The following year, Ansel Adams and his family made their first visit to the Yosemite National Park. The first visit proved to have a profound impact on Adams. He would later return to photograph the park every year throughout his lifetime.

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“That first impression of the valley—white water, azaleas, cool fir caverns, tall pines and stolid oaks, cliffs rising to undreamed-of heights, the poignant sounds and smells of the Sierra…was a culmination of experience so intense as to be almost painful. From that day in 1916 my life has been colored and modulated by the great earth gesture of the Sierra.”

– Ansel Adams, recounts his first visit to the Yosemite National Park

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