Light on the Landscape

PRACTICE AND WORK

AN EDITORIAL ASSIGNMENT LED TO PERSONAL EXPRESSION

When Ansel Adams gave lectures late in his life, he made a point of letting his audience know that he had worked for sixty years as a commercial photographer. Although famed for his art, he accepted assignments and projects that helped pay the bills and allowed him to travel around the country while pursuing personal image making along the way.

For example, during a break on a project for Kodak in the Southwest, he made his famous photographs of aspens in New Mexico. During World War II, while he worked on a documentary project on the Japanese internment camp of Manzanar near Lone Pine, California, Adams photographed two icons of landscape photography—Winter Sunrise, Sierra ...