The Tetons and the Snake River is a black and white photograph taken by Ansel Adams in 1942, at the Grand Teton National Park, in Wyoming. It is one of his best known and most critically acclaimed photographs.
The picture was taken from an elevated point of view and depicts the Snake River in a mountainous valley. A dramatically lit black-and-white photograph depicts a large river, which snakes from the bottom right to the center left of the picture. Dark evergreen trees cover the steep left bank of the river, and lighter deciduous trees cover the right. In the top half of the frame, there is a tall mountain range, dark but clearly covered in snow. The sky is overcast in parts, but only partly cloudy in others, and the sun shines through to illuminate the scene and reflect off the river in these places. [1] [2]
A mural-sized print of this photograph was sold for $988,000 at Sotheby's New York, on December 14, 2020, the highest price ever reached by an Ansel Adams work. [3] [4]
There are prints of this picture in the collections of several art museums, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, in Ann Arbor. [5] [6] [7]
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.
Jackson is a resort town in Teton County, Wyoming, United States. The population was 10,760 at the 2020 census, up from 9,577 in 2010. It is the largest town in Teton County and its county seat. Jackson is the principal town of the Jackson, WY-ID Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Teton County in Wyoming and Teton County in Idaho. The town, often familiarly or mistakenly called Jackson Hole, derives its name from the valley in which it is located. Jackson is a popular tourist destination due to its proximity to the ski resorts Jackson Hole Mountain, Snow King Mountain, and Grand Targhee, as well as Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park.
Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator. He is considered among the most important figures in the history of photography.
Thomas Moran was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family, wife Mary Nimmo Moran and daughter Ruth, took residence in New York where he obtained work as an artist. He was a younger brother of the noted marine artist Edward Moran, with whom he shared a studio. A talented illustrator and exquisite colorist, Thomas Moran was hired as an illustrator at Scribner's Monthly. During the late 1860s, he was appointed the chief illustrator for the magazine, a position that helped him launch his career as one of the premier painters of the American landscape, in particular, the American West.
Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. In 1936, he helped found the Photo League, a cooperative of photographers who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
William Eggleston is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition of color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Eggleston's books include William Eggleston's Guide (1976) and The Democratic Forest (1989).
Nancy Wynne Newhall was an American photography critic. She is best known for writing the text to accompany photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, but was also a widely published writer on photography, conservation, and American culture.
Laura McPhee is an American photographer known for making detailed large-format photographs of the cultural landscape. Her images raise questions about human effects on the environment and the nature of humankind's complex and contested relationship to the earth.
Binh Danh is an American artist known for chlorophyll prints and daguerreotypes on the subjects of war, immigration, and National Parks.
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. The photograph shows the Moon rising in a dominating black sky 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.
Margaret Woodward Weston, known as "Maggi", is an American photography collector and promoter who started one of the first commercial art galleries in the United States devoted solely to photography.
Neil Folberg is an American-Israeli photographer and gallerist.
Thomas D. Mangelsen is an American nature and wildlife photographer and conservationist. He is most famous for his photography of wildlife in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, as he has lived inside the zone in Jackson, Wyoming, for over 40 years. In 2015, he and nature author Todd Wilkinson created a book, The Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek, featuring a grizzly bear known as Grizzly 399, named so due to her research number. He has been active in the movement to keep the Yellowstone area grizzly bears on the Endangered Species List. Mangelsen is also known for trekking to all seven continents to photograph a diverse assortment of nature and wildlife. A photograph he took in 1988, Catch of the Day, has been labeled "the most famous wildlife photograph in the world". In May 2018, he was profiled on CBS's 60 Minutes. He has received dozens of accolades throughout the decades.
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.
The Three Tetons is an 1895 oil painting by Thomas Moran. It depicts Grand Teton and the neighbouring peaks of Middle Teton and South Teton, from the Idaho side. The National Park Service describes Moran as, after Albert Bierstadt, the "other 'grand' painter of the Tetons".
Georgia O'Keeffe – Torso, also known as Georgia O'Keeffe – Nude, is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1918. It is one of the more than 300 photographs that he took of his future wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
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.
Working Students is a black and white photograph by German photographer August Sander, taken in 1926. The photograph depicts a group of four students, who also worked for a living, from the Weimar Republic. It was included in his photography landmark book Antlitz der Zeit (1929), and became one of the most famous pictures that Sander took back then.
Aspens, Northern New Mexico is a black and white photograph by American photographer Ansel Adams, taken in 1958.
Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California is a black and white photograph taken by American photographer Ansel Adams, in 1944. It depicts the Sierra Nevada, as seen from Lone Pine, in California.