Ansel Adams started taking photographs as a
child in the early 1900s. At age 17, he joined the Sierra Club, a group dedicated
to preserving the natural world’s resources. For the rest of his life, Adams
photographed the American West and was a tireless activist for national parks
and the preservation of the American wilderness. In his photographs Adams
sought to capture the overwhelming emotional experience that the magnificence
of nature often creates in the viewer.

Ansel Adams kept a careful record of the making of Winter Sunrise: “While [photographing] at Manzanar [a
Japanese-American internment camp] for a fortnight in the winter of 1944,
Virginia and I arose very early in the mornings and drove to Lone Pine with
hopes of a sunrise photograph of the Sierra. After four days of frustration
when the mountains were blanketed with a heavy cloud, I finally encountered a
bright, glistening Sunrise…I waited, shivering for a shaft of sunlight to flow
over the distant trees. A horse grazing in the frosty pasture stood facing away
from me with exasperating, stolid persistence. I observed the final shaft of
light approaching. At the last moment the horse turned to show its profile, and
I made the exposure. Within a minute the entire area was flooded with sunlight
and the natural chiaroscuro was gone.”