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Dome cliff while hurtling headfirst upside down during a fall from a crumbling tree stump! He did manage to get a reasonably sharp negative from the experience. The man who developed the roll was curious as to how that one shot proved to be upside down on the roll. Ansel explained but felt after- wards that the developer always thought he was a little nuts. Ansel spent the summers of the next few years blithely taking snapshots of all the manifold sights of Yosemite National Park. His intent was primar- ily documentary rather than artistic or expressive, but as he noted, “The snapshot is not as simple a statement as some may believe. It represents some- thing that each of us has seen—more as human beings than photographers—and wants to keep as a memento, a special thing encountered.” At the same time, Ansel was being introduced to the darkroom, a step that separates the ham ama- teur from the professional photographer, especially in black-and-white photography. He got a part-time job with Frank Dittman, a San Francisco neighbor, working at his photo-finishing business for $2 a day. At this stage Ansel saw himself as little more than an enthusiastic hobbyist, but he was beginning the slow, step-by-step procedure of developing an intuitive sense for the mechanics of exposure and printing. Even then Ansel had an inkling of what the expressive powers of a photograph could be. He could see an image clearly in his mind’s eye but did not know yet how to capture it on paper. A view of Baker Beach gave a foretaste of the emotional impact a picture could convey, with its massive, dark cliffs towering over the ocean horizon and the light segmenting the cliff faces into clean planes. The scene remained with him as an emblem of something he wanted to achieve as a photographer.

Sierra Dawn Ansel Adams tracedhis first interest inphotogra- phy to a bout of measles at the age of twelve. The boy was put to bed for two weeks in a darkened room to protect his eyes. The gap at the top of the drawn shades created a primitive camera obscura, where images of the outside world were projected across the ceiling—the principle bywhich a pinhole camera works. Curious about the phenomenon, Ansel askedhis fatherCharles,who thenopenedup hisKodakBullseyecameraandshowedhimhowthe open shutter focused the light into a clear, upside- down image on a piece of semitransparent paper placed on the film plane. Ansel, whowas born onFebruary 20, 1902, inSan Francisco,hadsomethingofanunorthodoxupbring- ing, completing his formal schooling in the eighth grade and thereafter training as a classical pia- nist. It would be many years before he would make a final choice between music and photography. A seminal event in turning him toward photogra- phy was a family trip to California’s Yosemite NationalParkinJuneof1916,whenAnselwas four- teen. The teenager had pored over the purple prose and glorious tales of cowboys and Indians in a book called In the Heart of the Sierras, by Dr. Lafayette Bunnell. The day of the family’s arrival was filled with dazzling impressions that would last a life- time: the pervasive sunlight, the cool ferns and grasses, the green depths of the rivers, and what Ansel remembered in his autobiography as “the unbelievable glow of a Sierra dawn. A new era began for me.” WhiletheywereatYosemite,Ansel’sparentsgave him his first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie No. 1. The combinationof subject andcamerawouldprove irresistible. Ansel took his first picture of the Half

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