Refugio Beach, California

1943–1944

“Moonrise”: first publication and first exhibition

“Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” is first published in the U.S. Camera 1943 annual, chosen by the magazine's “photo judge,” Edward Steichen, so the picture finds an audience before its first formal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944. Over the next nearly forty years Adams re-interprets it, making more than 1,369 unique prints.

c. 1944

Manzanar: a photo-essay on the internees

Distressed by the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, Adams requests permission to visit the Manzanar War Relocation Center in the Owens Valley. The resulting photo-essay first appears in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and is later published as the book “Born Free and Equal,” which many rejected as disloyal; it was a significant departure, in style and philosophy, from the work for which Adams is generally known.

1945–1946

The first fine-art photography department in the US

Adams is asked to form the first fine-art photography department in the United States at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) — in 1945 or 1946. He invites Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston as guest lecturers and Minor White as principal instructor.

1946

Photographing the national parks on a Guggenheim Fellowship

The first of Adams's three Guggenheim Fellowships, awarded in 1946, is meant for photographing every national park. Of the twenty-eight parks he photographs twenty-seven, missing only Everglades in Florida, and the series yields memorable images of Old Faithful Geyser, Grand Teton and Mount McKinley.

1946 · Award

Guggenheim Fellowship