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Ansel Adams and the American Landscape: A Biography. By Jonathan Spaulding. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. xvi, 516 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-520-08992-8.)
Ansel Adams is the nation's most popular and culturally significant landscape photographer. His photographs have graced museum walls, gorgeous picture books, and mammoth posters festooning dorm-room walls; today they have found their way to screen savers and web sites. They have inspired generations of nature enthusiasts, conservationists, and even ecowarriors. As they have come to substitute for a steadily shrinking wildness in nature, they have offered solace to an audience increasingly alienated from the biosphere, relegated to cubicles at work and home.
Like his work, Adams the man was a walking paradox demanding a synthesis he himself never achieved. A lifelong lover of nature and a founding member of the Sierra Club, Adams sold his skills to mineral...