Ansel Adams: Our National Parks [Paperback]

William A. Turnage (Editor), Andrea G. Stillman (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 21, 1992

In the century since the establishment of the world's first national park at Yellowstone, no individual has rivaled Ansel Adams in his unceasing effort--through both his photographs and writings--to support the philosophical essence and practical evolution of the "national park idea". Here are his greatest images of more than 40 national parks and monuments. 78 duotones.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Illustrated primarily with familiar Adams images, many of which have appeared in one monograph after another, this volume doesn't offer any fundamentally new insights into the photographer's work. It does, however, remind us of his deep involvement with a number of national parks in addition to Yosemite. Beautiful duotone reproductions of the 78 photographs, an informative introduction, and selections from Adams's correspondence regarding national parks further enhance the book, whose smaller format (812 x 9) gives it a delicate, quietly thoughtful air. Given the care of the editing and the quality of reproduction, this paperback offers real value. Recommended for public and academic libraries as supplementary material on Adams, national parks, and conservation.
- Raymond Bial, Parkland Coll. Lib., Champaign, Ill.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

In a career that spanned more than five decades, Ansel Adams was at once America's foremost landscape photographer and one of its most ardent environmentalists. His work has been published in a multitude of books, posters, and calendars.
--This text refers to the Poster edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition (May 21, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0821219103
• ISBN-13: 978-0821219102
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 0.4 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #416,966 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Book Marred by a Too-Small Page Size, November 14, 2000

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 110,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ansel Adams: Our National Parks (Paperback)

Ansel Adams was our photographer-advocate laureate of the national parks. This outstandng volume combines a look at his efforts both to capture the meaning of the parks and to lobby on their behalf. Fortified with a Guggenheim Fellowship in the 1940s, Adams was able to travel throughout the U.S. to visit the many national parks outside of his beloved, native California. This volume greatly benefits from those travels in creating his ideas and the 80 black and white images contained in it.

As Ansel Adams reminds us, "The National Parks, are, indeed a phenomena of an advanced society . . . ." When Yellowstone was established by President Grant in 1872, it was the first national park in the history of the world. Since then, we have been in a race between despoiling our wilderness environment and retaining some of it in national parks. The challenge is heightened by the pressures to commercialize and increase access to wilderness areas. How many people should visit Yosemite each year? These are the questions that Ansel Adams anticipated and helped us address. These questions are even more relevant and important today than when he first raised them. "Possessions, both material and spiritual, are appreciated most when we find ourselves in peril of losing them."

"There is a constant erosion of the concept and the reality of wilderness." Unfortunately, Adams was much more successful as a photographer than in achieving his environmental vision. Will his final epitaph of the future be of someone who captured images of what does not exist any more? I certainly hope not.

I recommend the preface by William A. Turnage very highly to understand Ansel Adams' vision and its effects on our society. The preface also contains a delightful section by Nancy Newhall on what it was like to be Ansel Adams' assistant for his dawn photography treks.

This book contains much more written material by Ansel Adams on conservation and the national parks than in any other book of his photographs that I have seen. I enjoyed reading about his ideas, and they helped me understand his photography better as well. He is trying to show us "the clear realities of Nature seen with the inner eye of the spirit [to] reveal the ultimate echo of God."

As I mentioned in the title to this review, the publisher put these images on pages that are too small to capture the detail of Adams' work in most cases. In fairness to the publisher, I should also point out that remarkable efforts have been made to reproduce these images well in the small format. Compared to other small reproductions of these same images, these are by far the best I have seen.

Some compositions in fact succeed in overcoming the limitations of the page size. These include:

Cliff Palace Ruin, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, 1941

Leaves, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, 1942

Forest, Early Morning, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, 1949

Leaf, Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, 1948

Forest, Beartrack Cove, Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, 1949

Teklanika River, Denali National Park, Alaska, 1947

Mount McKinley from Stoney Pass, Denali National Park, Alaska, 1948

Cinder Cone in Crater of Haleakala, Haleakala National Park, Hawaii, 1956

Mount Lassen from Devastated Area, Lassen Volcanic National Park, California, 1949

Mount Clarence King, Pool, Kings Canyon National Park, California, 1932

Many of the other photographs will be familiar to Ansel Adams' fans. If you have seen them reproduced in larger sizes, you can use your memory to add the missing detail. In this size though, the details being indistinct is like erasing chapters from a novel. Adams often accentuated reflections of details between different natural features in his compositions. When some details are obscured in small size, the reflections thus are not available to stimulate your mind.

In keeping with the spirit of Ansel Adams, I suggest that you consider becoming active in organizations (like the Sierra Club, which Adams belonged to for many years) that fight to save wilderness areas. If your great grandchildren are ever to experience the spiritual cleansing of the wilderness, we each must act now.

"Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere."

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect Gift!, May 17, 2000

By 

"nikla" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ansel Adams: Our National Parks (Paperback)

This book is really beautiful. The pictures have been really well selected. I think this book would make a perfect gift for almost anyone, since it has pictures from all over the United States.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ansel Adams by Barry Pritzker, June 15, 2004

By 

Bodhi Sarracino (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ansel Adams: Our National Parks (Paperback)

The Ansel Adams book put together by Barry Pritzker is a nice arrangement of Ansel's great landscape photography. I like the large format of this book, roughly 14" x 12". The photos are gigantic and very beautiful. The size is representative of the work. One of the complaints I have is about the images themselves and the darkness of them. Ansel's work is full of contrast, which I really like about his photographs. However, the shadows in these prints are almost pure black. They should have been enhanced just a tad bit, maybe dodged in the shadow areas for reproduction purposes only. Viewing original prints and reproducing originals are going to have extremely different outputs of tonal range. I do like that the author created an introductory section to familiarize the readers a little more about photography and its roots. It shows pioneers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. It's a segway into the work of Ansel Adams.

I would have loved to see maybe some type of commentary about each image and how it was captured, a type of "Mind's Eye" insight for other photographers to understand the ideas behind the actual work. The title of the book is Ansel Adam's, so I really would have liked to see a little more diversity of his work. I'm pretty sure he must have made a portrait here and there in his entire lifetime. I know he couldn't have devoted his entire life to just landscapes alone. There has to be some other images, that even an Ansel fan like me, has never previously viewed before. I purchased the book because it was Ansel Adam's and his photography is very beautiful. I must be honest, when I opened the book and flipped through it, I was disappointed at the design of the book. It left me wanting more from the book itself. Out of a possible five stars, I would have to say the book is about two and a half stars.