Ansel Adams

Acquired from the photographer, 1960

By descent through family

Ansel Adams, My Camera in Yosemite Valley (Boston, 1949), cover

Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: Yosemite and the Range of Light (Boston, 1979), pl. 21

James Alinder and John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams: Classic Images (Boston, 1985), pl. 22

Andrea Gray Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs (Boston, 2007), p. 115

Peter Galassi, Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley: Celebrating the Park at 150 (Boston, 2014), p. 137

The photographs in Lots 27 through 31 were acquired by Bill and Winnie Kinard directly from Ansel Adams in late 1959 or early 1960, and they have remained with the Kinard Family for more than six decades.  These photographs are accompanied by a copy of the original typed correspondence with Adams on his early '131 24th Avenue · San Francisco 21, California / Telephone Skyline 1 1282' letterhead. When asked recently to reflect on these photographs, the Kinard descendants wrote:

'Our parents, Bill & Winnie Kinard, worked in Yosemite during their college breaks in the late 1930s.  It was during these years they met Ansel Adams.  Their mutual love of Yosemite found our parents seeing Ansel again at his home in San Francisco in 1959.  Ansel invited them in for drinks and he entertained them with his accomplished piano playing.  During their visit, Ansel helped our parents select winter images of Yosemite which he felt complemented each other.  As a follow-up to this meeting, Ansel sent a typed letter to our Mom in January 1960, sharing his ideas about how the mural-sized prints he personally developed should be framed and displayed.  Needless to say, we, as a family, have enjoyed these wonderful prints for over 63 years.  We trust anyone who acquires them will cherish them as much as we have.'

Adams’s first foray into making mural-sized photographs came in 1935, when he was asked by his employer at the time, the Yosemite Park & Curry Company, to undertake a series of murals of Yosemite for the San Diego Exposition of that year.  In 1941, Adams was commissioned by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and the National Park Service to create images for an elaborate photomural series that was intended to hang in the U. S. Department of the Interior building in Washington, D. C.  In the mid-1950s, Adams was commissioned by the American Trust Company (now Wells Fargo Bank) to execute a series of photomurals for their branches.  Over the decades, Adams became an accomplished photo-muralist, making murals and large-format photo-screens for a variety of corporate and private clients, well into the 1970s.  He also became an articulate spokesman for the form, writing articles such as ‘Photo-Murals’ for U. S. Camera magazine in November 1940, and including discussions of mural theory and practice in books such as his own The Print: Contact Printing and Enlarging of 1968.  In his 1985 autobiography, Adams wrote, 'I was fascinated with the challenge of making a photographic print in grand scale. Many of my large-format Yosemite negatives took on a new resonance in mural-sized proportions' (p. 187). 

Adams made few mural-sized prints of Half Dome, Merced River, Winter, Yosemite Valley.  In the past two decades, only three other examples have appeared at auction: a 30-by-40 inch print made circa 1970 from the David H. Arrington Collection, sold at Sotheby’s in 2020; a 23-by-30 inch print made in the 1970s sold at Christie’s in 2008; and a 40-by-60 inch early print sold at Sotheby’s in 2005. This celebrated image is best-known from the numerous books it illustrated and from the small SEY (Special Edition Yosemite) prints that were popular mementos from Best's Studio in Yosemite National Park.