The Portfolios Of Ansel Adams

Adams produced seven portfolios between 1948 and 1976. A prolific printer who created every image himself, he made more than 13,000 photographs by hand for these seven sets. Only seventy-five copies of Portfolio One were made, initially selling for $100 each.

The Portfolios of Ansel Adams

Toward the end of his seven-decade career, the famed photographer Ansel Adams began focusing on his artistic legacy, writing an autobiography and issuing portfolios of his most famous and technically accomplished works.

In 1952, Adams wrote Carlson proposing a series of photographicportfolios with accompanying text by Nancy Newhall, the well-known writerand wife of photo-historian Beaumont Newhall. The six portfolios that eventuallywere published between 1952 and 1954, contained some of Adams' best-knownphotographs of the Southwest: Canyon de Chelly, Tumacacori, Organ Pipe CactusNational Monument, Sunset Crater, Death Valley and his visual explorationof the mission and people of San Xavier del Bac.

The Frederic H. Leubuscher garden portfolios include images that document Leubuscher's professional landscape and garden design work. The collection includes photographs of awards received by Leubuscher for a number of garden show exhibits that he designed as well as photostatic copies of a booklet about artificial pools he wrote that was published by the Fels Engineering Corp. of Essex Fells, New Jersey.

The Lawrence 'Larry' James Beck papers, located in the Cultural Resource Center of the National Museum of the American Indian, contain biographical materials, sculpture portfolios, art shows, notes, sketches and drawings, publications, correspondence and visual material including photos, slides and negatives of Larry's art.

For the annual Sierra Club High Trips from 1930 through 1936, Ansel served as photographer and assistant manager, which meant long days filled with more distractions than he liked. He would get up early, make some photographs in the favored morning light, and see that everyone got under way. Then he would hike ahead of the pack to select that evening's campsite; then more photographs in late afternoon; then he would conduct the campfire and a department of lost and found, and explain the next day's route and possible climbs along the way. Paid a small fee for expenses, he also sold portfolios of outing photographs to Club members. The Club encouraged both his climbing and his camera, linking them in a tightening, self-reinforcing bundle of enthusiasms. 041b061a72