Episode Details

The photographer whose images define stillness in the American West began as a hyperactive boy thrown into a brick wall during the aftershocks of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. This episode follows Ansel Adams from a childhood of expulsions, a family fortune lost, and a father who pulled him out of school at 12 to educate him at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition and with Emerson's essays. We look at his early dream of becoming a concert pianist, the Kodak Brownie he received on a 1916 Yosemite trip, and how the Sierra Nevada cured the crippling anxiety that followed his 1918 bout of Spanish flu.

We then trace his rejection of Vaseline-smeared pictorialism for straight photography, the red-filter visualization behind Monolith, the Face of Half Dome in 1927, the founding of Group f/64, the 1937 darkroom fire, and the Zone System he developed with Fred Archer to turn exposure into applied physics. The story of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, shot in 1941 from a memorized lunar luminance value and later dated by an astronomer to a weekend that gave him the copyright, leads into his environmental lobbying, his role in creating MoMA's photography department, and his controversial Manzanar photo essay, Born Free and Equal.

• The cheapest pine box: a funeral home story that reveals his ruthless boundaries
• Why a camera leveled the playing field when his hands were too small for the concert stage
• How the Zone System maps shadows and highlights across an eleven-step scale
• The tension between straight photography and decades of dodging and burning one negative
• Kings Canyon, President Carter, and the Ansel Adams Wilderness where his ashes were scattered