By 1968, Ansel Adams had become the face of the American conservation movement. With that, his political stance echoed the message of his work, which remained largely unchanged. Similar to his work on Bridalveil Fall, shot four decades earlier, Adams uses a veil of mist to highlight the drama of the scene. A master of the darkroom, Adams would painstakingly work to print the perfect shades of gray, a skill exhibited here. Dark trees fill the foreground. A gray mist hangs in the midground. The snowcapped mountains in the background exist as pure visions of the color white. The variety of hues allows Adams to marry elegance with politics: each individual shade shows a different thing worth preserving about Yosemite, while the haunting haze that covers the mountains evokes the horrors of potential loss.

David Kuhio Ahia, PO ’18
Getty Multicultural Undergraduate Intern


Between 1978 and his death in 1984, Ansel Adams created a special inventory of fine photographic prints of his most important and favorite images. Adams created these prints in order to make his work more available to a wide range of institutions for public display and educational purposes as part of their permanent collections. These prints were sold in sets to individuals, corporations, and institutions suject to the written agreement that each set would not be sold on the open market, bu rather would be donated to institutions for public display and educational purposes. These sets of fine prints became known as the Ansel Adams Museum Sets.

Some of the institutions that have received gifts of Museum Set prints include The National Gallery of Art, the Wilderness Society, the Stanford art Museum, the de Young Museum, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Cornell University, and Princeton University.

Scripps College is very pleased to be the recipient of an Ansel Adams Museum Set through the generosity of the Virginia Adams Charitable Trust, created by Adams's wife, Virginia Best Adams. This gift to the Scripps College collection was made directly by the Virginia Adams Charitable Trust.

The copyright to this work and all works in the Ansel Adams Museum Set is held by the Virginia Adams Charitable Trust.

This work bears the signature of the artist in pencil at the lower right, directly beneath the photo.

silver gelatin print

This object has the following keywords:

• Landscapes
• Mountains
• Nature

This object is a member of the following portfolios: