Trees

Ansel Adams is best known for his sublime, high-contrast black-and-white photographs of the American West, showcasing the natural beauty of trees. Chief among Adams’s subjects are the sprawling forests that blanket the United States’s largest national parks and reserves. Early in his career, the photographer played with the pictorialism method of photography, creating soft luminous pictures of forestry in an attempt to imitate grand landscape paintings. He then shifted dramatically, embracing the pure photography technique, defined by the stark, unmanipulated black-and-white photos of the wilderness he traversed. Elegant pictures of snow-covered branches, delicate pine needles, massive root systems, and misty woodlands brimming with foliage are all quintessential motifs in Adams’s extensive body of nature photography.