Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail

As a founding member of Group f/64, Ansel Adams—along with other members of the California-based group—used the camera’s smallest aperture (known as f/64) in order to create photographs with greater depth of field, keeping as much of the image in clear focus as possible. They also embraced the use of glossy silver gelatin prints, which called attention to the photographic nature of their images.

Only five hundred copies of this publication were published in 1938, and each copy featured silver gelatin prints tipped in (pasted in) on individual pages. The white space around each picture emphasizes the photograph’s status as a work of art that stands on its own. 

Adams was a leader in the nature conservation movement and is today among the best known landscape photographers of the twentieth century; Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail provides one example of Adams’s many publications. Compare Adams’s sublime photographs of the American West to those captured almost a century earlier in Geological Survey of California: The Yosemite Book.