Ansel adams biography report printable

Ansel Easton Adams, photographer and environmentalist, was born on February 20, 1902 in San Francisco, California, the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams and Olive Bray.  An only child, Adams was born when his mother was nearly forty.  He was raised in an environment that was deeply Victorian, and Adams was a solitary child; at the age of twelve, he taught himself to play the piano and read music.

Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth.  Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician, profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography.

Always a lover of nature, Adams' life was, in his words, “colored and modulated by the great earth gesture” of the Yosemite Sierra; he spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death.

There, he began using the Kodak N