Getty Museum
Mt. Williamson from Manzanar, California
Creator
Ansel AdamsAmerican Photographer · 1902–1984
All works by this person →Ansel Adams was first trained in music, but in 1930 he gave up a career as a concert pianist to pursue photography. Although he began his career as a Pictorialist, Adams soon became an advocate of the sharp-focus, unmanipulated image. Along with Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston and others, he was one of the cofounders of Group f/64. The name derived from the smallest aperture of the camera lens, w
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1944
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
"As the war moves to a climax, the only enduring things seem to be the aspect of Nature--and its reciprocal, the creative spirit," wrote Ansel Adams to Alfred Stieglitz on Christmas Day the year this photograph was made. Toward the end of World War II, Adams undertook a project to document Japanese-American detainees at the Manzanar facility in northern California. There he made this photograph of the sun rising over Mount Williamson on the east side of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Strong, diagonal beams of sunlight seem to bisect the twin peaks in the background of this optimistic scene. The exuberance of nature belies the pall of war and racial suspicion that hung over the locale.
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