Photographer Amsel Adams is remembered for panoramic black-and-white images that promoted the enjoyment and conservation of our national parks. A new exhibition at Naples’ Baker Museum of Art celebrates that connection as we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“It's one of the reasons why the organization chose to include this exhibition in this season's program, thinking about the foundation of the country and also of our continued interest in conservation in the United States,” said Curator of Modern Art Dianne Bras-Feliciano.
“Discovering Ansel Adams” tracks the development of the photographer’s unique style and influence from his first visit to Yosemite National Park in 1916.
“When he was 14 years old, he begged his family to take him to Yosemite and his father brought him a Kodak Brownie camera,” Bras-Feliciano recounted. “So he started there and took his first photographs. And then he taught himself how to develop and print those photographs.”
He returned to Yosemite every year after that, but his connection to the Sierra Club was a turning point in his trajectory as an advocate for our national parks and their conservation.
“Before being the conservation group that we know, it was like a mountaineering, a hiking club where people went two weeks to stay in nature spaces,” Bras-Feliciano noted. “It wasn't, it also wasn't a small group. Apparently about 200 individuals went and camped and had all these experiences that clearly influenced Adams' love for nature and his interest in creating all this conservation photography.”
His growing reputation as a photographer and a marketer caught the eye of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who tasked Adams in 1941 with producing photographic murals of national parks and other notable American landscapes.
“He convinced them that he had to better have a trip throughout the whole National Park system, including the monuments, the reservations, everything that the DOI managed, and he successfully achieved that and took a lot of the great photos that you see here,” said Bras-Feliciano. “But World War II started, so he never was able to make the photograph, the photographic mural for the DOI.”
Through these experiences, Adams forged a visual language that defined his career and cemented his role as an advocate for landscapes in the United States.
But his images had the consequence of reinforcing the “myth of the pristine wilderness” popularized by Adams' idol, John Muir, that led to the expulsion of Native Americans from America’s national park land.
“Something that I brought to this exhibition is that I included a few text panels,” Bras-Feliciano said. “One of them is related to this point of the National Parks, that even though they are very important in terms of conservation for different species, I think I invite viewers to think about what it took to create the National Parks and all the forced and sometimes violent displacement of Indigenous people who already lived and took care of those lands.”
To be clear, the process or removing Indigenous people from National Parks had begun years before Adams was even born. And while Adams did not shy away from controversy — for example, he documented the interment of Japanese Americans at Manzanar in 1943 — he did not oppose the National Park Service’s policies regarding the removal of Native Americans from Yosemite or any other national park.
“I'm a historian, so that's something that I wanted to highlight when we think about these beautiful landscapes, that they were not uninhabited, they were not empty, they had been taken care of for thousands of years before,” Bras-Feliciano noted.
It’s an aspect of the Ansel Adams story you’ll hear only at the Baker Museum. While the National Park Service used to have signage acknowledging the presence and ultimate removal of Indigenous populations from our National Parks, that verbiage has now been removed pursuant to an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in March of last year directing the Park Service to remove public content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past and present.”
The exhibition runs to Aug. 2.
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“Discovering Ansel Adams” is displayed on the third floor of The Baker Museum of Art.
The exhibition presents a rich collection of photographs, documents, and personal artifacts drawn from the extensive Ansel Adams Archive at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography.
“It is based on over 20 years of research conducted by Dr. Rebecca Senf, CCF’s chief curator,” Bras-Feliciano pointed out. “What is interesting to me about this show is that it not only includes the highlights, the most impactful works that everyone knows, but also a lot of archival material from the CCP collection.”
Senf began her career at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where she co-curated a major exhibition of the work of Ansel Adams that was drawn from the Lane Collection – at the time the largest collection of his work in private hands. That experience led Senf to do her doctoral dissertation on Ansel Adams’s early work, which entailed studying his prints in many public and private collections and getting to know him through the copious correspondence housed in the Ansel Adams Archive at the Center for Creative Photography. Now, as Chief Curator at CCP, Senf produces exhibitions from that archive that underscore the complexity, humor, sincerity, and enthusiasm of Adams, which she has come to know first-hand.
The exhibition provides viewers with a rare window into the formative years of Adams’ career.
It begins with Adams’ first photographs of Yosemite National Park, which he took in 1916 as a 14-year-old tourist from San Francisco. Visitors follow his progression from early experimentation to mastery, witnessing the pivotal moments that shaped his approach to photography. By the time they reach the end of the exhibition, viewers glean insight into how Adams arrived at the powerful, mature visual language he used from the 1940s onward and how he transformed his passion into a lifelong mission to capture and protect the natural world.
“The first gallery has original photos from the early 19th century,” Bras-Feliciano noted. “There is even a facsimile album that has the small photographs that he took on his first trip to Yosemite. And then what interested Dr. Senf was how he progressed from those tiny low-contrast photographs that feel very intimate to his panoramic views, the sweeping views that everyone loves about the National Parks.”
Sierra Club and the Yosemite Curry Parking Company
The exhibition also highlights Adams’ affiliation with the Sierra Club, which was more a club for mountaineers when Adams first joined than the conservation organization it is today.
“Back then, it apparently had about 200 individuals who camped and had all these experiences that influenced Adams' love of nature and his interest in creating conservation photography,” said Bras-Feliciano.
At the same time, Adams realized he needed to make a living.
“So, he did a lot of commercial photography when he worked for the Yosemite Curry Parking Company, which managed the concessions at the Yosemite Park. Anything you wanted to do in Yosemite, from lodging and dining in the restaurant to hiking and skiing, you had to go through the Yosemite Curry Parking Company, and he worked for them at the marketing department, something that Dr. Senf really highlighted because she thinks that even though he might not have realized during the eight years he spent with them, it nevertheless had a definite influence and impact in his work because he had to learn how to create persuasive photographs that made people feel that they wanted to visit the Yosemite Park year-round.”
Photographs like “Snake River” weren’t just popular among outdoor enthusiasts. His growing reputation as a photographer and a marketer caught the eye of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes., who tasked Adams in 1941 with producing photographic murals of National Parks and other notable American landscapes.
In preparation to render the photographic mural, Adams visited and photographed a large number of National Parks. Although World War II prevented him from doing the mural, he had a huge archive of photographs depicting the country’s parks.
It’s important to note that this pre-dated the creation of our interstate highway system (which was begun in 1956) and at a time people did not travel long distances for vacation and leisure purposes. For thousands, Adams’ black-and-white photographs of western panoramas and vistas were their first exposure to Yosemite, the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone and other National Parks.
In fact, in a letter dating to this period of time, Adams wrote that he wanted to create photographs that appealed to a wide audience and would convey what it's like to be in nature.
More on Adams’ role in perpetuating the ‘pristine parks myth’
“I have included a few text panels in this exhibition to provide viewers with context,” noted Bras-Feliciano. “One of them is related to the point that even though our National Parks are very important in terms of conservation for different species, their creation entailed the forced and sometimes violent displacement of the Indigenous people who already lived and took care of those lands,” said Bras-Feliciano. “I'm an historian, so that's something that I wanted to highlight when we think about the beautiful landscapes Adams captured in his photographs. They were not uninhabited. They were not empty. They had been taken care of for thousands of years before they became National Parks.”
The exclusion of Native Americans from National Park land was not part of their original design. Conservationists such as John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau and western painter George Catlin wanted National Parks to preserve not only the land and animals, but also the Indigenous people who occupied them. But by the time President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law on March 1, 1872 (establishing the concept of a national park), that thinking had changed.
Writers like John Muir advocated to the Department of the Interior and National Park Service that what people demanded were pristine vistas devoid of humans, especially Native Americans. Wanting to encourage tourism to these areas, DOI and the park service agreed that the presence of Native Americans would act as a deterrent. Additionally, forced removal of Native Americans to reservations was consistent with the federal government’s overarching agenda of destroying tribal sovereignty and “civilizing” Native Americans to become Christian farmers whose loyalty was to the U.S. government, not their respective tribes.
Adams was a staunch admirer of Muir. He considered him a mentor and key influence. Muir was actually one of the Sierra Club’s founders and Adams celebrated his legacy, publishing the “Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail” in 1938.
It is likely that Adams adopted Muir’s pristine wilderness position without question. While there is no evidence that Adams advocated for the removal of Native Americans from Yosemite or any other National Park, he did not intercede on behalf of the Yosemite Indigenous (the Ahwahnechee, who’d lived in Yosemite Valley from the 14th century and the Sierra Miwoks and Paiutes who later settled in the valley) when the federal government adopted restrictive policies that ultimately led to their exclusion from the park.
Yosemite National Park was created in 1890. The Ahwahnechee, Miwoks and Paiutes were not removed, but their way of life was restricted and they were forced to sell baskets and other goods to tourists for their livelihood. By 1916, members of all three tribes merged their camps into one village. That village was replaced by a village of cabin houses built in 1933 by the park superintendent. But the leases to these cabins expired and the residents were forced to leave the valley as soon as they retired or lost their employment in the park. By the 1940s, the park’s Native population had been cut in half. Park officials destroyed the homes of those who left in order to stop newcomers from taking their place, gradually pushing every Native family out of the park. By the 1960s the park service had burned all of the cabins except one, which they converted into a management office. Jay Johnson, the final Native employee to retire, left the park in 1996.
If he was mindful of these events, Adams said nothing publicly and to be fair, he didn’t just exclude Native Americans from his photographs. He routinely excluded all people from all his images in order to capture the "spiritual-emotional" aspect of nature. (It’s also why he embraced black and white photography to the exclusion of color prints.)
Nevertheless, his work helped solidify the exclusionist policies established by Muir and earlier conservationists and his work is often seen as a visual continuation of the ethos and love for the “unspoiled” Sierra wilderness established by Muir earlier in the century.
America250
As noted earlier, the Baker Museum brought the Ansel Adams exhibition to Southwest Florida because of its connection to the country’s National Park System. Since the passage of the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act in 1872, the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service have worked to preserve more than 420 sites around the United States that have been deemed as nationally significant for their natural and cultural qualities. Ansel Adams’ photographs helped promote these parks and underscore the importance of protecting and conserving them for future generations.
While the removal of Native Americans from the nation’s National Parks is part of that story, visitors will no longer be told that Native Americans once occupied and cared for these lands. That’s because President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 directing the Department of Interior and National Park Service to remove public content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living.”
For example, in California’s Muir Woods National Monument, signs on the contributions of Native Americans and women have been removed, including a note informing visitors that John Muir once referred to Indigenous people using racist language in his diaries and ignored “the genocide they survived.”
Similarly, a display on founding father George Mason in Washington, D.C. has removed references to him “paradoxically” owning slaves despite being a champion of “individual rights.”
The White House defended both removals.
In a statement, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told CNN that Trump “is honoring our country’s extraordinary heritage and restoring a sense of national pride. The President has put an end to the radical left’s divisive and inaccurate characterization of our nation’s history, which infiltrated our National Parks and museums, and is restoring truth and sanity,” she said.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
Sponsored in part by the State of Florida through the Division of Arts and Culture.
