This exhibition was organized for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by guest curator John Szarkowski, Director Emeritus of MoMA's Department of Photography. Ansel Adams at 100 has been organized with the cooperation of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust and the Adams family.

Ansel Adams at 100 is the first major critical re-evaluation of the work of American photographer Ansel Adams (1902-1984) since his death. The exhibition, presented on the anniversary of the photographer's birth, features more than 100 prints and represents a substantial reappraisal of Adams äs an artist and working photographer. The exhibition draws largely from the first part of his career, the 1920s and 1930s, and situates his well- known works within the context of an unexpected and unfamiliar body of photographs.

For the exhibition and the accompanying book, Mr. Szarkowski chose what he considered to be the artist's best work and located the best existing prints of each image. Mr. Szarkowski states, "There has never been an Adams exhibition or an Adams book that is comparably responsive to the shape of his artistic life."

Adams had a long relationship with MoMA and was instrumental in the founding in 1940 of MoMA's Department of Photography, the first of its kind, along with MoMA librarian Beaumont Newhall and trustee David McAlpin. He was an active advisor to MoMA until 1946. Mr. Szarkowski met Adams in 1962 shortly after joining MoMA äs Director of the Department of Photography, and he included Adams's work in one of his first exhibitions for the Museum, The Photographer and the American Landscape (1963). In 1979, Mr. Szarkowski, working closely with the photographer, organized for MoMA the major exhibition Ansel Adams and the West.

Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902, lived there for 60 years, and spent the last two decades of his life in northern California. As a youth he first photographed Yosemite Valley with a Kodak Brownie box camera, and Yosemite became the lifelong subject for which he is best known. In his later life, Adams became an important educator and proponent for the medium of photography, an advocate for the Sierra Club, and America's best-known environmentalist.

Text: MoMA