ANSEL ADAMS was always in motion, always ready to laugh, always gentlemanly. He was a big, bearded man dressed in work pants and a colorful shirt, with his signature Stetson. After a morning in the darkroom, he would emerge beaming, holding up a dripping wet print, and announce, "I think I got it!" Occasionally the piano would call,and he would sit down at his beloved Mason & Hamlin to commune with Bach or Scriabin. But it was photography in the great American wilderness that set his mind and body racing.

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In a career that spanned six decades, Ansel Adams produced a remarkable body of work that is at once an artistic tour de force and a powerful tribute to his beloved American wilderness. Adams was given his first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie,in 1916, and made his first photographs during a family vacation in Yosemite National Park. Thus began a career and a lifetime devoted to making indelible images of America's wild places,its national parks, and its great mountain ranges.

This book is the largest compilation of Adams' photographic oeuvre ever published. Organized chronologically, it presents the full range of his finest work, from early efforts in the 1920s,to his projects in the national parks in the 194os, up through his last important photographs of the 196os. Included are Adams'most popular images -- many of them icons of twentieth-cen-tury art -- as well as a number of masterly but little-known photographs.

AnselAdams: 40o Photographs offers an unprecedented survey of his development as an artist, of the themes and subjects that animate his work, and of the evolution of a style that is uniquely that of Ansel Adams -- America's best-known and best-loved photographer.

Introduction: The Long View

1916-1930 Yosemite and the High Sierra

1931-1939 Group f/64 and Alfred Stieglitz

1940-1949 National Parks and Monuments

1950-1959 Conservation, Publications, and Commissions

1960-1968 Carmel

Notes on Selected Photographs

Afterword

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Title Index

SubJect Index

Credits