Trees and Snow

1931

First solo museum exhibition at the Smithsonian

In 1931 the Smithsonian Institution hosts Adams's first solo museum exhibition, “Pictorial Photographs of the Sierra Nevada Mountains by Ansel Adams” — sixty prints taken in the High Sierra and the Canadian Rockies. The Washington Post writes that his photographs are like portraits of giant peaks inhabited by mythical gods.

1932

Group f/64: the de Young exhibition and manifesto

In 1932 Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston show together at the M. H. de Young Museum and soon form Group f/64, which stands for “pure” or “straight” photography against pictorialism. Adams writes the group's manifesto for the exhibition: pure photography, it declares, has no qualities of technique, composition or idea derived from any other art form.

1936

Solo show at Stieglitz's gallery in New York

Gathering his recent work, Adams holds a solo show in 1936 at Stieglitz's New York gallery “An American Place.” The exhibition proves successful with both critics and the buying public, and the revered Stieglitz himself praises Adams warmly.

1938

“Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail”

In 1938 Adams creates the limited-edition book “Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail,” part of the Sierra Club's effort to secure national-park status for Kings Canyon. The book and his testimony before Congress play a vital role in the success of that campaign.

1939–1942

The Zone System, with Fred Archer

While teaching at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, Adams and the portrait photographer Fred Archer develop the Zone System — a calibrated scale of brightness, based on sensitometry, from Zone 0 (black) to Zone X (white) that lets the photographer determine in advance how the film must be exposed, developed and printed. The date is given variously as around 1939–1940 or as 1942.

1940

Helps establish MoMA's photography department

In 1940, together with the trustee David H. McAlpin and the curator Beaumont Newhall, Adams helps establish a photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York — the first at a major American art museum — acting as McAlpin's and Newhall's chief advisor. On December 31, 1940 the department opens with the exhibition “Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Esthetics,” which took aesthetic quality as its guiding principle.