Famed Ansel Adams photos of Yosemite, Golden Gate to be featured on new US stamps

For more than 150 years, visitors have taken hundreds of millions of photographs of Yosemite National Park.

But many of the park’s most iconic images — timeless, internationally famous shots of Half Dome, Tunnel View, Mirror Lake and other wonders that strikingly depict America’s natural heritage — were made by Bay Area native Ansel Adams.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Postal Service will issue 16 commemorative stamps featuring some of Adams’ most renowned photographs, including images of Yosemite Valley, the Golden Gate Bridge, and other majestic western landscapes, from the Grand Tetons to Monument Valley, Arizona.

The first such tribute to Adams’ work by the Postal Service, the stamps will be released at a first-day issue ceremony in Yosemite National Park, only a few feet from the Ansel Adams Gallery, where Adams, who died in Monterey in 1984, worked for decades redefining nature photography.

“It’s an incredible honor for Ansel,” said Matthew Adams, his grandson, on Thursday. “It shows that his popularity continues 40 years after he passed. His work resonates across time. He would be excited and honored.”

Adams timeless black-and-white photographs are celebrated for their sharp focus, high contrast and complex dark room craftsmanship. Many of them he took with large format cameras on a tripod mounted to a platform he built on the roof of his 1940s-era Woody station wagon.

An art director with the Postal Service, Derry Noyes, worked with the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust to select the 16 photographs featured on the stamps, Matthew Adams said. Before he died, the legendary photographer set up the trust to manage the rights to his images.

The Postal Service is printing 20 million of the stamps, said David Coleman, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service in Washington D.C.

More than 400 stamp collectors, photographers, and other fans of Adams’ work are planning to attend the ceremony at 11 a.m. Wednesday in Yosemite Valley to unveil the stamps. Anyone who pays admission to enter the park is allowed to attend.

“There’s a huge buzz around the park,” said Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman. “We’re super-excited. Ansel Adams is synonymous with Yosemite. He pioneered a lot of his techniques with the big box cameras here in Yosemite in the 1930s and 1940s.”

...continued

swipe to next page