Ansel Adams

Classic Images

Plot

Chosen by Adams during the last years of his life as the finest examples of the quality and range of his artistic achievement, the seventy-five photographs reproduced in Classic Images comprise a last-statement portfolio of his remarkable life's work. These images by which he wanted to be remembered were intended for exhibition throughout the country as "The Museum Set."

Classic Images includes many of Adams' most famous and best-loved photographs and encompasses the entire scope of his work —elegant details of nature, architectural studies, portraits, and above all the magnificent landscapes for which he is so revered. In these epic vistas, Adams celebrated the vast spaces of the American West with a synergy of aesthetic vision and technical brilliance. The images range from his beloved Yosemite to the Pacific Coast, the Southwest, Alaska, Hawaii, and the Northwest.


An authoritative biographical essay, contributed by The Friends of Photography Director James Alinder, serves as the essential primer for a full understanding of Adams' development as a great American artist; although written with a historian's accuracy, it salutes the humanity of a close friend. Alinder's detailed chronology closes the volume.


In his eloquent introduction, John Szarkowski, Director of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art, speaks to the American people's extraordinary love for Adams and his heroic work, reflecting that "Adams' photographs seem to demonstrate that our world is what we would wish it was—a place with room in it for fresh beginnings."