Winter Storm

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.

1941–1942

The Mural Project for the Department of the Interior

In 1941 Adams contracts with the National Park Service for 180 days to photograph the national parks, Indian reservations and other lands under the department's management, for mural-sized prints to decorate its new building; he sets off on a road trip with his friend Cedric and his son Michael, combining the work with commissions for the U.S. Potash Company and Standard Oil. The project ends on June 30, 1942, and because of the war the murals are never made: Adams sends the department 225 small prints but keeps the 229 negatives.

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.