Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

In his own best-selling 1985 autobiography, Adams presented a life almost as neatly cropped and printed as his pictures, omitting nearly all of his personal relationships and many major emotional details. Here, Mary Street Alinder - who worked with Adams on that memoir and was his assistant in his later years - draws a much more revealing portrait. Her biography covers in depth his difficult childhood in San Francisco and the profound impact of the Yosemite Valley on the boy who would become its consummate artist, exploring the mixed consequences of that lifelong relationship. It examines Adams's connections to the photographers and painters who preceded him; the philosophic influences who were either recast or neglected in the memoir; the famous and not-so-famous figures in his circle, including Mary Austin, David Brower, Imogen Cunningham, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Dorothea Lange, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston; and