Few artists influence their medium of choice like Ansel Adams came to influence photography. This is, of course, in large part because of Adams’ singular talent and vision. But it was also because of how new and malleable the medium was. It was only becoming an acceptable art when Adams started to experiment with his first camera. In those years, photography was a sort of Wild West of art. In fact, it’s no understatement to say that a war was being waged, one that was forged by Adams and his cohort and then won.

Planting the seeds

The traits that defined Adams’ life and career were there from the beginning: his environmentalism, his individualism, his love of nature in all its immense beauty. He was born in San Francisco in 1902 into a family that prospered from the lumber business his grandfather founded (which is either deeply ironic or an omen of his rebelliousness, given Adams’ lifetime love of forests). He was raised on the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American transcendentalist who advocated for self-reliance, the purity of the individual, and nature. His family first took him to Yosemite National Park in California when he was 14. The trip was the first of countless forays into the wild and made a defining mark on him. “The splendor of Yosemite burst upon us and it was glorious,” said Adams. “One wonder after another descended upon us … There was light everywhere … A new era began for me.”

On that trip, he was armed with an Eastman Kodak Brownie box camera, a gift from his father. It wasn’t the finest in camera equipment, but Adams photographed all of what he saw. He came back a year later with a more suitable camera, taking shots he’d develop himself, having acquired the necessary techniques through an apprenticeship. It wasn’t long before photography was his life—his purpose and his salve. When he fell ill to the Spanish Flu in 1918 and developed obsessive-compulsive disorder, it was Yosemite that supposedly cured him.

And yet photography wasn’t all of his life. For much of his youth, he was bent on becoming a pianist. He was considered quite gifted, but it wasn’t meant to be; his hands were simply too small for him to meet his grand ambitions. The instrument would, however, help him find his partner in life. In Yosemite, dying to play the piano, he found an introduction to the landscape painter Harry Best, who let Adams play on his rickety square piano. It was at the household that Adams would meet Harry’s daughter, Virginia. They would go on to marry in 1928.

When friends become foes

As Adams came of age, photography was in the depths of Pictorialism, a style that sought to establish the nascent medium as artful by imitating paintings. Pictorialism put composition and beauty over any ideas of creating an accurate visual record, allowing the artist to manipulate the image how they saw fit. It could have been the insecurity of a new medium trying to make itself more accessible (or similar to what people already knew) or it could have been an instinct for expression. Regardless, Pictorialism was everywhere, including in the mind of the young Ansel Adams. That is, until he turned 21. This was the year he declared he would stop hand-coloring his work—a hallmark of Pictorialism. Two years later, he swore off the style in total, making a complete 180 turn and finding a style that would come to define his career: precision, contrast, and reliance on craft. This was the very opposite of Pictorialism. He said that his style now invoked “visualizations,” a term that isn’t so easily described except by the man himself:

In the early 1930s, he found kindred souls to this philosophy, photographers who felt as strongly about Pictorialism—and what they could do better—as he did. Together they formed Group f/64, a cohort which held “pure photography” as its highest standard, defining the term as “possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form.” This is, of course, a direct reference to Pictorialism, which always sought to mimic painting. (The name Group f/64 refers to an aperture setting that ensures an impressive depth of field—something Adams is known for.)

When Adams brought this new style to the subject he’d been after his whole life—nature on a grand scale—his career switched into a higher gear. Suddenly he enjoyed great exposure and critical acclaim, not least of all from Alfred Stieglitz, one of Adams’ idols; you can find him quoting Stieglitz in the video above. His new status got him commercial work, on which he would subsist for more than 30 years. In 1939, he was named an editor of U.S. Camera & Travel (in 1952, he would cofound his own magazine, Aperture, which is still in print). In 1940, he put together his own photography show, A Pageant of Photography, helping to define what exactly successful photography was in the middle of a century that would be the medium’s most important. That same year, he helped establish the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1941, he took up a teaching post at a prestigious school in Los Angeles. There he more fully redefined photographic technique, inventing the Zone System, which is still used today. Through all these fruitful years, he relied on commercial work to make a living. It wouldn’t be until the ’70s that he created a financially sustainable career for himself. But that brought its own problems.

The rights of one of his most important works, Moonrise, were debated for decades. It was first published in U.S. Camera 1943 annual, and then exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944. Though he likely took the photo while on the government’s payroll, he assumed that they wouldn’t take good care of it and kept it for himself. Decades of debates followed, and he was eventually able to claim all rights for himself. This was crucial, as he has made over $25 million from sales of prints of that single image. It wouldn’t be his only tiff with the government and its supporters.

A few years after Moonrise was taken, he exhibited a photo essay of the Manzanar War Relocation Center (a subject Dorothea Lange also captured) at the Museum of Modern Art. When it was made into a book, Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans, Adams was labeled as disloyal. These photographs deviated significantly, both in style and substance, from the rest of his career; for the rest of it, he returned to his one true subject—nature.

From the vantage point of today, with Adams’ kind of dedication to craft now permanently in vogue, it can seem like a no-brainer that the world of photography would move on from Pictorialism. But it’s hard to tell how close we were to a reality where Adams spent his career on more artful, imaginative uses of the medium.

When Adams rejected Pictorialism in favor of the views espoused by Group f/64, he was heavily criticized, as mostly all visionaries are. The pictorialist William Mortensen called the group’s work “hard and brittle,” an ironic insult if ever there was one. Yes, Adams (and the rest of Group f/64) saw a more direct representation of reality, but that reality was anything but “hard and brittle.” While Adams’ photographs were precise, they were precise to what he saw in his mind’s eye, and these “visualizations” lent the landscape life and humanity. In this way, Adams redefined how we see nature, how we capture reality, and what artful photography can be.