Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902, the only child of Charles and Olive Adams. He grew up in a house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and had a strong appreciation for beauty. By 1908 Adams was an enormously curious and gifted child, and began a precarious and largely unsuccessful journey through the rigid structure of the public school system. In 1914 Adams taught himself to play the piano and excelled at his serious study of music, however he despised the regimentation of a regular education, and was taken out of school. For that year, his father bought him a season pass to the Panama-Pacific Exposition, which he visited nearly every day, and began to receive
private scholastic instruction from tutors. In 1916 Adams convinced his parents to take a family vacation in Yosemite National Park. It was here that he took his first picture at the age of 14 with a box Brownie camera given to him by his parents.
