Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras is a portfolio of 18 silver gelatin photographic prints made by Ansel Adams in 1927. It was the first publication of a portfolio of his prints, produced not long after he decided to become a professional photographer, and has since been called "a landmark work in twentieth-century photography." [2]
As a member of the Sierra Club in the 1920s, Adams joined the club's annual month-long High Trips in the Sierra Nevada in addition to making several trips on his own. During these trips he captured large-format black-and-white images of many of the region's well-known features, including King's River Canyon, Muir Gorge, the pinnacles at the headwaters of King's River, Mount Brewer, The Black Kaweah, Mount Ritter, the Minarets, the area around South Fork of the San Joaquin and Evolution Valley. The best known of these images is Adams' first masterpiece: Monolith, the Face of Half Dome , taken in Yosemite Valley. The photographs he took on these trips became the core of the Parmelian Prints portfolio. [3]
According to Adams, the idea for the portfolio came from Albert Bender, a well-known San Francisco art patron. The day after first meeting Adams in 1926, Bender met with him in Bender's office and suggested Adams create a portfolio which Bender would both support and help sell. Bender called his friend Jean Chambers Moore, a well-known publisher who agreed to oversee the production of the portfolio through the then highly respected Grabhorn Press. Bender immediately suggested an edition of 100 copies, plus 10 artist's copies, of 18 prints each. Within a few hours Bender had sold 56 sets of the edition by phone to his wealthy friends before any of them had met Adams or seen what the portfolio would look like. [4]
The title of the portfolio was problematic to Adams. The term "parmelian" was a meaningless word invented by Moore, who believed that calling them "photographic prints" would not allow them to be taken seriously as art. [5] Adams later said "I am not proud at allowing this breach of faith in my medium." [4] To add to his chagrin, the word "Sierras" was also wrong. According to Adams, "The name Sierra is already a plural. To add an s is a linguistic, Californian, and mountaineering sin." [4]
When the portfolio was published it included the statement "One Hundred and Fifty Copies Printed by the Grabhorn Press, San Francisco, August MCMXXVII". Moore apparently decided to increase the number of copies made after Bender's initial success in selling them, but neither Adams nor Moore kept track of how many copies of the portfolio were actually printed. Adams later estimated that only about 100 were completed. Of these, an unknown number were later destroyed in a warehouse fire; it is thought that no more than 75 copies were ever delivered to clients.
Adams himself printed each of the images for the portfolios on Kodak Vitava Athena Grade T Parchment paper, which was both cream-colored and translucent due to the thinness of the paper. The prints measure 5 3/4" x 7 3/4" (14.6 x 19.7 cm) on sheets of 10" x 12" (25.4 cm x 30.5 cm). [2]
The eighteen prints included in the portfolio were titled as follows:
In August, 2011, a complete copy of the portfolio was offered for sale for $110,000. [2]
The Sierra Nevada is a mountain range in the Western United States, between the Central Valley of California and the Great Basin. The vast majority of the range lies in the state of California, although the Carson Range spur lies primarily in Nevada. The Sierra Nevada is part of the American Cordillera, an almost continuous chain of mountain ranges that forms the western "backbone" of the Americas.
Half Dome is a quartz monzonite batholith at the eastern end of Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park, California. It is a well-known rock formation in the park, named for its distinct shape. One side is a sheer face while the other three sides are smooth and round, making it appear like a dome cut in half. It stands at nearly 8,800 feet above sea level and is composed of quartz monzonite, an igneous rock that solidified several thousand feet within the Earth. At its core are the remains of a magma chamber that cooled slowly and crystallized beneath the Earth's surface. The solidified magma chamber was then exposed and cut in half by erosion, therefore leading to the geographic name Half Dome.
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
The Ansel Adams Wilderness is a wilderness area in the Sierra Nevada of California, United States. The wilderness spans 231,533 acres (93,698 ha); 33.9% of the territory lies in the Inyo National Forest, 65.8% is in the Sierra National Forest, and the remaining 0.3% covers nearly all of Devils Postpile National Monument. Yosemite National Park lies to the north and northwest, while the John Muir Wilderness lies to the south.
The exposed geology of the Yosemite area includes primarily granitic rocks with some older metamorphic rock. The first rocks were laid down in Precambrian times, when the area around Yosemite National Park was on the edge of a very young North American continent. The sediment that formed the area first settled in the waters of a shallow sea, and compressive forces from a subduction zone in the mid-Paleozoic fused the seabed rocks and sediments, appending them to the continent. Heat generated from the subduction created island arcs of volcanoes that were also thrust into the area of the park. In time, the igneous and sedimentary rocks of the area were later heavily metamorphosed.
Francis Peloubet Farquhar was an American mountaineer, environmentalist and author. In his professional life, he was a Certified Public Accountant.
Joseph Nisbet LeConte was an American explorer of the Sierra Nevada. He was also a cartographer, a photographer and a professor of mechanical engineering.
Mount Ansel Adams is a peak in the Sierra Nevada of California with an elevation of 11,766 ft. The summit is in Yosemite National Park near the park's eastern boundary. It lies 0.8 miles (1.3 km) northeast of Foerster Peak and 1.3 miles (2.1 km) west-southwest of Electra Peak at the head of the Lyell Fork of the Merced River. It was named in 1985 for Ansel Adams, the preeminent landscape photographer, conservationist, and member of the board of directors of the Sierra Club, a role he maintained for 37 years.
Thousand Island Lake is a large alpine lake in the Sierra Nevada, within the Ansel Adams Wilderness in eastern Madera County, California.
John Sexton is an American fine art photographer who specializes in black and white traditional analog photography.
Jules Marquard Eichorn was an American mountaineer, environmentalist, and music teacher.
The High Trips were large annual wilderness excursions organized and led by the Sierra Club, beginning in 1901. The High Trips lasted until the early 1970s, and were replaced by a larger number of smaller trips to wilderness areas worldwide.
George Cedric Wright was an American violinist and a wilderness photographer of the High Sierra. He was Ansel Adams's mentor and best friend for decades, and accompanied Adams when three of his most famous photographs were taken. He was a longtime participant in the annual wilderness High Trips sponsored by the Sierra Club.
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is a black-and-white photograph taken by Ansel Adams, late in the afternoon on November 1, 1941, from a shoulder of highway US 84 / US 285 in the unincorporated community of Hernandez, New Mexico, United States. The photograph shows the Moon rising in a dominating black sky with low clouds above a collection of modest dwellings, a church and a cross-filled graveyard, with snow-covered mountains in the background. Adams captured a single image, with the sunset lighting the white crosses and buildings. Because Adams did not date the image, attempts have been made to determine a date from astronomical information in the photograph. It is one of Adams' most popular works.
Taos Pueblo is a book by Ansel Adams and Mary Hunter Austin. Originally published in 1930, it is the first book of Adams' photographs. A seminal work in his career, it marks the beginning of a transition from his earlier pictorialist style to his signature sharp-focused images of the Western landscape. It has been described as "an astonishingly poignant…masterpiece" and "the greatest pictorial representation of the American West."
Dody Weston Thompson was a 20th-century American photographer and chronicler of the history and craft of photography. She learned the art in 1947 and developed her own expression of “straight” or realistic photography, the style that emerged in Northern California in the 1930s. Dody worked closely with contemporary icons Edward Weston, Brett Weston and Ansel Adams during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, with additional collaboration with Brett Weston in the 1980s.
Rondal Partridge was an American photographer. After working as an assistant to well-known photographers Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams in his youth, he went on to a long career as a photographer and filmmaker.
Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California is a black and white photograph taken by Ansel Adams in 1927 that depicts the western face of Half Dome in Yosemite, California. In the foreground of the photo, viewers are able to see the texture and detail of the rock as well as the background landscape of pine trees and the Tenaya Peak. Monolith was used by the Sierra Club as a visual aid for the environmental movement, and was the first photograph Adams made that was based on feelings, a concept he would come to define as visualization and prompt him to create the Zone System. The image stands as a testament to the intense relationship Adams had with the landscape of Yosemite, as his career was largely marked by photographing the park. Monolith has also physically endured the test of time as the original glass plate negative is still intact and printable. The photograph is a part of the portfolio Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, released in 1927.
Lodgepole Pines, Lyell Fork of the Merced River, Yosemite National Park is a black-and-white photograph taken by Ansel Adams in 1921. It is one of the photographs that he took at the beginning of his career, when he was following pictorialism, a style inspired by painting, that he soon would abandon for a more realistic approach to photography. This photograph with the title A Grove of Tamarack Pine was included in his Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras portfolio, published in 1927, and its also known by that name.
Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California is a black and white photograph taken by Ansel Adams, c. 1937. It is part of a series of natural landscapes photographs that Adams took from Inspiration Point, at Yosemite Valley, since the 1930s.