The photographs in this series were taken by Ansel Adams for a Department of the Interior mural project, the theme of which was nature as exemplified and protected in the National Parks.
In the mid-1930's, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes conceived the idea of commissioning painted murals for the department's headquarters building in Washington, DC. Impressed by Adams' work, Ickes later broadened the scope of the project to include mural-size photographs and recommended Adams for the photographer. According to Adams, in Ansel Adams, An Autobiography, he was "appointed at the maximum annual salary then allowed for any position not subject to congressional approval: twenty-two dollars and twenty-two cents a day for no more than 180 days' work a year, plus five dollars per diem expense..." Adams began his travels to the parks in October 1941 and a year later submitted the prints in this series to Interior. None of the photographs, however, were ever reproduced as murals as the project was halted during World War II and never resumed.
The majority of the images in this series are landscapes taken between 1941 and 1942 at Grand Canyon (AAF), Grand Teton (AAG), Mesa Verde (AAJ), Rocky Mountain (AAM), Yellowstone (AAT), Carlsbad Cavern (AAW), Glacier (AAE) and Zion (AAV) National Parks; and Death Valley (AAD), Saguero (AAN), and Canyon de Chelly (AAC) National Monuments. The one Yosemite National Park (AAU) photograph that is of Half Dome was taken in 1933 and is inscribed: "For Horace Albright (National Park Service director) with Best Regards." The Kings Canyon (AAH) photographs are dated 1936 and were taken prior to the establishment of a national park in the area. Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club of which he was a member lobbied for the establishment of a national park in Kings River Canyon. In his autobiography, Adams wrote that in 1936 he traveled to Washington, DC and took with him several photographs of Kings River as lobbying tools.
Included also are photographic prints of Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico (AAA); San Ildefonso, New Mexico (AAP); Taos Pueblos, New Mexico (AAQ); Tuba City, Arizona (AAR); Walpi, Arizona (AAS); Boulder Dam, Colorado (AAB); and Owens Valley, California (AAL). The photographic prints of Navajo at Canyon de Chelly (AAK) are among several images in this series of Native Americans, and their homes and customs.
Ansel Easton Adams (02/20/1902-04/24/1984) took his first photographs of Yosemite Valley, California in 1916, but it was not until 1930 that he decided to make a career of photography. In the late 1920's he began work as an official photographer for the Sierra Club. Adams was one of the founders of Group f/64 whose members strove to create an art form through purely photographic methods. He was instrumental in the establishment of a Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, a department of photography at the California School of Fine Arts (later San Francisco Art Institute), and Friends of Photography, a creative photography organization. Adams taught courses and workshops on photography, exhibited widely, and published several books on photography.
Ansel Adams throughout a "long and prolific career created a body of work which has come to exemplify not only the purists approach to the medium, but to many people, the definitive pictorial statement on the American western landscape." (International Center of Photography Encyclopedia of Photography. New York, New York: A Pound Press/Crown Publishers, Incorporated, 1984).
