Esay on ansel adams biography timeline

By William Turnage, Reprinted courtesy of the author and Oxford University Press

This Ansel Adams biography was published by Oxford University Press for its American National Biography.

Adams, Ansel (Feb.

20 — Apr. 22, ), photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. The grandson of a wealthy timber baron, Adams grew up in a house set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate.

When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in the financial panic of , and Adams’s father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly attempting to recoup.

An only child, Adams was born when his mother was nearly forty.

His relatively elderly parent