Largely because of Adams’s efforts on behalf of the Sierra Club, Kings Canyon National Park was established by Congress in 1940. He sent copies to elected officials as well as the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, who shared it with President Franklin D. Those images evolved into his 1938 limited edition publication, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail - an early example of Adams’s understanding of how to use photographs for publicity and marketing. He brought a portfolio of photographs to persuade public officials and make his case for protecting this special area located to the south of Yosemite. ![]() Shortly after joining the Club’s Board of Trustees in 1934, he traveled to Washington, D.C., on its behalf to advocate for the demarcation of Kings Canyon as a national park. His work with the Sierra Club directly led to Adams’s engagement with land conservation on a national level. This portfolio - originally marketed for $50 - represents Adams’s first major commercial endeavor and a crucial turning point in his development as a professional photographer. Extant complete Parmelian Prints portfolios are rare although published in a projected edition of one hundred and fifty, only seventy-five are believed to have been completed, many of which are now in institutional collections or have been disassembled. In 1927 he released his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, comprising eighteen photographs taken in the 1920s. Grant signed the Congressional bill that designated Yellowstone the first national park - a decision influenced in no small measure by Jackson’s photographs of this area.Īnsel Adams, “The Sentinal,” included in his 1927 portfolio “Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras”Īdams’s most encyclopedic body of photographs from the 1920s documents his numerous outings in the Sierra Nevada. Watkins’s photographs throughout the Sierra Nevada helped to establish a park in the Yosemite Valley in 1864 when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, thereby placing this wilderness area in the care of the State of California. Today’s modern conservation movement was largely born out of these daring, often death-defying photographs made deep in the mountains and valleys of America. While the Survey initially aimed to earmark locations with valuable natural resources that could support future industry, the photographs they produced captivated both politicians and citizens, who were awestruck by the beauty of the Western landscape captured by Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, and others. ![]() Geological Survey teams who photographed unpopulated swaths of the North American landscape in the 1860s and 1870s. ![]() WATKINS, “EL CAPITAN, 3600 FT., YOSEMITE VALLEY”.Īdams’s deep-seated love of Yosemite expanded into his life-long advocacy of the National Park System, the concept for which developed out of the U.S. The prints that were submitted by Adams can be found within Record Group 79, Series AA (79-AA): Ansel Adams Photographs of National Parks and Monuments, 1941 – 1942.Images from left to right: ANSEL ADAMS, “LOST VALLEY, YOSEMITE”. Original Caption: “The large stalagmite formations and the onyx drapes above it, ‘in the Kings Palace,’ Carlsbad Caverns National Park,” New Mexico.
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