Noon Clouds, Glacier National Park, Montana

Ansel Adams's youthful dream of becoming a concert pianist was eventually replaced by a lifelong pursuit of photography. His lyrical, sublime landscapes of the American West transcend mere fact to express the symphonic in nature. Adams began taking photographs around 1916, when his parents gave him a small Brownie camera. After meeting photographers Edward Weston in 1927 and Paul Strand in 1930, he abandoned his earlier pictorial style for "pure" photography. In 1932, Adams and six other San Francisco photographers-Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, and Weston-created a group they called f/64, after the large-format view camera's smallest aperture, which provides the greatest depth of field. The group exhibited together only once, at San Francisco's De Young Museum in 1932; later that year, Adams had his first one-man show there.

Adams experimented with different cameras and techniques, using papers with a high gloss, employing long exposures with the aperture set at f/64, and pioneering a system that enabled him to capture an impressive range of light values based on a scale of ten zones ranging from black to white. In determining his compositions and exposures, Adams exploited the critical role that can be played by middle tones. Noon Clouds is a spectacular example of Adams's use of his zone system to capture-with remarkable clarity-both near and far details, while also suggesting the transient nature of the cumulus clouds floating above the mountains.

Adams exerted full control over the development of his images, including their final printing. Brilliant in description and technical precision, photographs like this one celebrate his deep reverence for nature. A preservationist who joined the Sierra Club at the age of seventeen, Adams made powerful photographs of some of the country's most dramatic landscapes. They remain as popular today as they were in his lifetime.