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The Comprehensive Collector’s Guide to Ansel Adams’s Photographs
Collecting prints of the legendary photographer’s images can be a never-ending journey.
V ery rarely, a single artist’s name can act as a stand-in for an entire medium or genre of work: what Pablo Picasso represents to modern painting, Ansel Adams represents to 20th-century photography. No other photographer has done more for the recognition of the medium of photography as a fine art. His landscapes, still lifes and even his lesser-known portraits attract new enthusiasts with each passing year, while his landmark publications continue to educate photographers of the 21st century.
Adams was every bit as concerned with the quality of his prints as he was with the negative itself. He was a master of the darkroom, working with and training other master printers throughout his six-decade career. Adams famously considered photography to be a process beginning with the act of seeing and ending with making, rather than taking, the final picture.
As Alan Ross, a photographer, educator and Adams’s former assistant told Sotheby’s: “While Ansel Adams is indeed properly celebrated for having made a lifetime of magnificent photographs, I feel much of that magnificence exists in the print itself.” The level of skill and attention that Adams put into crafting each print imbues his oeuvre with a special kind of magic that can be felt in each and every photograph when seen in person.
Ansel Adams prints and portfolios are often featured as highlights in Sotheby’s auctions – including the upcoming sale of Ansel Adams: A Legacy, Photographs from There Meredith Collection on 16 October. If you are looking for a particular image or want to know more about photography auctions, a Sotheby’s Specialist can help.
Ansel Adams: The Printer-Photographer
For Adams, being a photographer meant also being a fine printmaker. In the same way that a painter’s preparatory sketch prefaces a final work, Adams believed that employing his camera to create a desired negative was only part of a process.
“Photography is more than a medium for communication of reality, it is a creative art,” he wrote in the introduction of The Print (1982), the third in a trio of manuals intended for educating serious photographers (after The Camera, 1980, and The Negative, 1981). “Therefore, emphasis on technique is justified only so far as it will simplify and clarify the statement of the photographer’s concepts.”
This emphasis on technique in the service of art is apparent throughout Adams’s work and process.
Ross recalls that “one of Ansel’s favorite lines was, ‘The negative is the score, and the print is the performance’ meaning that a poor musician can make a complete mess of a celebrated piece of music.” For Adams, a negative served as a blueprint for the art-object, and only in the hands of a virtuosic printer can the photograph achieve what the photographer originally conceived in his mind’s eye. “His prints are what express the mood of a scene,” says Ross. “Not the negative.”
Yet while Adams was highly technical and left no detail unattended, he was not doctrinaire about how things should be done – he evolved his printing practice over time.
Ansel Adams’s Bodies of Work
Adams’s work can be roughly segmented into several categories. Throughout his career, Adams explored different photographic papers and subjects as part of his constant experiments to find new ways of expressing his artistic vision.
Ansel Adams’s Early Works
A native of San Francisco, California, Adams was given his first Kodak Box Brownie camera during a trip to Yosemite National Park. He was immediately drawn to the natural landscape and had his first picture published in the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1922, when he was just 20 years old. With Ansel Adams’s first photographs in Yosemite as a young man, he began refining his technique and honing his unique style. Adams’s earliest landscape efforts are of towering mountains and rocky peaks, printed on almost pearlescent, vellum-like paper. These early pictures are Pictorialist in spirit, with soft focus, printed on papers that only allow for a shallow range of tones, and show bucolic, outdoor subjects that are largely free of human figures or man-made architecture.
Prints from the 1910s and 1920s are extremely rare today, in no small part because so few of them were made. Many are housed in institutional collections, although several notable examples from The David H. Arrington Collection of Ansel Adams Masterworks were sold by Sotheby’s in 2020, including Juniper and Colby Pass. The opportunity to collect these images is truly a rare and special occasion.
Ansel Adams’s Most Famous Photographs
As Adams matured, his horizon line lowered on the sheet and his paper choices evolved, contributing to a cleaner and more modern aesthetic in line with photographers associated with f/64, a short-lived but influential group of photographers. Adams rendered his landscapes with deep, inky blacks and bright whites, and harnessed the darkroom skills necessary to masterfully print fleeting thunderclouds and winter storms suspended over snowy peaks.
Aimee Pflieger, a VP Senior Specialist of Photographs at Sotheby’s, says that “some of Adams’s most iconic images were created during this period, such as Maroon Bells, Near Aspen, Colorado (1951) and Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941). Adams created images during this time that are the bedrock of 20th-century photographic history.”
Never satisfied, Adams continued to experiment subtly with his negatives for decades. He returned to negatives again and again, like a piece of music, finding new ways to evoke emotion through his landscapes. Adams would often make prints on demand for collectors, dating the reverse of the mount with the negative and print date, as well as using a series of different stamps throughout the decades.
Browse Ansel Adams’s Iconic Photographs at Auction
“The negative is the score, and the print is the performance.”
- Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams’s Polaroids
When Polaroid film made a splash in the market in the late 1940s, it was a technological marvel. Its inventor, Edwin Land (the namesake of the massively popular Polaroid Land Camera), was approached by Adams, who was interested in his new film and cameras. This collaboration lead to inspired images and a deep friendship. Adams worked with Polaroid cameras on and off for the next three decades, offering Land his feedback and critiques of the technology. His unmatched technical prowess was a boon to Land and the Polaroid team.
Two kinds of Polaroid photographs can be found in Adams’s oeuvre: unique Polaroid prints and enlargements produced from Polaroid negatives. The former are direct positive prints created inside a camera, while some Polaroid film, most notably Polaroid Type 55 film, also produced a negative that Adams used to make enlargements in a darkroom.
Images from this latter type of Polaroid are some of the rarest in Adams’s oeuvre. Nonetheless, they make regular appearances at auction, including in Ansel Adams: A Legacy | Photographs from the Meredith Collection on 16 October 2024.
Browse Ansel Adams’s Polaroids at Auction
Ansel Adams’s Portfolios
Adams published multiple portfolios over an almost 50-year span, from 1927 through 1976. These portfolios, identified by sequential numbers, contained what Adams considered to be some of the best examples of his work. While full portfolios, complete with their original folders and printed text pages can be found on the market, individual photographs from broken-up portfolios are often frequently found at auction or in galleries.
Friends of Photography
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In 1967, Ansel Adams co-founded the Friends of Photography to promote the medium as a fine art. The prints available in Ansel Adams: A Legacy | Photographs from the Meredith Collection were selected by Adams himself and gifted to the organization after his death. They represent not only highlights of the artist’s career as assessed by the man himself, but also a physical connection to this important organization that forever changed the perception of photography with the public and inspired countless other photographers over the decades.
Browse Ansel Adams’s Portfolios at Auction
Ansel Adams’s Murals
While creating large-format prints by using digital printing methods has become commonplace today, the patience, exactitude and specialized equipment needed to create large-format photographs was once something only possible but by a few skilled hands.
While Adams typically printed his images in a format that hovered around 15 by 19 inches (or the reverse), he was one of the earliest enthusiasts of large-format photographic printing, making his first mural-sized prints in 1935 for the San Diego Exposition. He would continue this practice throughout the following decades, even writing tutorials on how to achieve these oversized pictures for his own books and as magazine articles.
“While I never tire of viewing Adams’s most well-known images made in his ‘standard’ size,” says Pflieger, “I find myself floored by the aptitude and finesse with which he created his mural-sized prints. There’s a level of detail and tonal range in these prints that is truly spectacular to see.”
Several mural-sized prints have been featured at Sotheby’s, including the truly mammoth Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point, Winter, Yosemite National Park, which was sold as part of A Grand Vision: The David H. Arrington Collection of Ansel Adams Masterworks in 2020. Adams’s larger prints are particularly prized in the collector community.
Browse Ansel Adams’s Large-Format Prints at Auction
How to Date an Ansel Adams Print
As a beginning collector, it can be difficult to know how to assess a print by Ansel Adams.
“Stamps, signature style, paper choice and mounting material may seem like a lot of variables to assess at first, but instead of being overwhelmed just look at as many prints as possible,” recommends Pflieger. “You can ask a Sotheby’s Specialist to see prints unframed, and we are here to help you understand the breadcrumbs left by Adams to help you learn about each print’s production.”
The stamps on the backs of an Adams print can provide helpful clues as to when a given print was made. These stamps were produced with spaces to allow for hand-written titles, dates and locations. The Adams studio used more than a dozen different stamps beginning in the 1920s.
For example, in Ansel Adams: A Legacy | Photographs from the Meredith Collection, most of the prints were made in the 1960s and 1970s, as evidenced by stamps on the mounts that Adams used during those decades. A 1960 picture, for example, bears a stamp with a San Francisco address and a negative number, while a 1970 picture has a stamp with a Carmel, California, address, where Adams lived at the time.
While the details of dating Ansel Adams photographs and placing them within his oeuvre are nuanced, Sotheby’s Specialists are on hand to help. To learn more about Ansel Adams and upcoming photography auctions, reach out to the Photographs Department.
Highlights from Ansel Adams: A Legacy
Photographs from the Meredith Collection
The photographs have been copyrighted by the Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, and the Trustees reserve all publishing right and copyrights as well as all rights to use the name, likeness, and persona of Ansel Adams for commercial purposes and that, other than for public display of the photographs themselves, the photographs may not be reproduced for any purpose or utilized in violation of such copyrights, nor may the name, likeness, or persona of Ansel Adams be utilized for any commercial or other purpose, without the expressed written consent of the Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.
