Ansel Adams

1994 * Ansel Adams owns Yosemite Valley, photographically. His pictures have made this California landmark an international destination for tourists, many of whom, like the one seen here, are photo hobbyists trying to make Ansel Adamses of their own. The picture of this sightseer was made by a streetwise New York photographer who was prospecting for a different kind of gold, trying to stake his own claim on Yosemite.

Ansel Adams' words in 1944 should be a cautionary warning about what the U.S. government is now doing by detaining, interrogating, abusing and deporting Muslims in America ("In Manzanar's Shadow, a Plea for Racial Equality," Rearview Mirror, Feb. 19). In 1988, the U.S. government officially apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans, saying it was based on "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership." Sounds all too familiar. Can we put a stop to what is happening now, or must we wait 40 years for an "apology"?

Ansel Adams, the venerated photographer, was notably scrupulous about recording the details of his craft -- camera apertures, shutter speeds, film type -- as he documented the Western outback in monochrome. But he also was notoriously poor at writing down dates. Now a team of Texas astronomers has found that one of Adams' photos of the Yosemite backcountry, a solitary shot from Glacier Point of the moon rising over saw-toothed peaks beside a pillow of clouds, was misdated by four years.

Ansel Adams has so profoundly shaped the way city folks look at nature that it's easy to look at his photographs and see only cliches: romanticized panoramas and misty vistas. But there's more to the landscape photographer and his pictures.

Ansel Adams rarely acknowledged Sundays or holidays. Until just a few months before he died -- at 82 on Easter Sunday, 1984 -- the photographer was in his darkroom nearly every day. The only difference was that on Sundays, his assistant didn't come by, and he'd complain that he couldn't get as much done. Photographer John Sexton, a onetime Adams assistant, recalls a particularly frustrating morning for Adams in 1980.

Renowned wilderness photographer and mountain climber Galen Rowell and his photographer wife, Barbara, were killed in the crash of a private airplane early Sunday morning just south of the airport in Bishop, Calif. The twin-engine charter aircraft, an Aero Commander 690-B, crashed about 1:24 a.m. as it made its final approach to the airfield in the town on the eastern flank of the Sierra, according to the Inyo County Sheriff's Department. The pilot and all three passengers were killed.

Ansel Adams was a craftsman, artist, visionary, teacher, conservationist, mountaineer, jovial raconteur and the nation's premier landscape photographer. He is receiving a new burst of attention as the exhibit, "Ansel Adams at 100," tours the the U.S. and Europe on the centennial of Adams' birth Feb. 20, 1902. A companion book of the same title has been published by Little, Brown and Co.