sco in 1946. This would be the first academic department to teach photography as a profession.
In 1937, Adams moved to Yosemite, Calif., and after 1940 he photographed extensively in the country's national parks. In 1941 he began producing photo-murals for the U.S. Department of the Interior. It was because of the large scale of this work, such as the immense landscape "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" (1941), that Adams developed the zone system, a method of predetermining precisely what tone each part of the scene to be photographed would have in the final print. His sharply defined prints were in marked contrast with the evocative work of earlier pictorialists and even surpass the realistic detail of nineteenth century landscape photographs. Adams worked exclusively in black and white and used brilliant light to produce intense images.
As might be assumed from the images Adams preserved of nature and the landscape, especially that of the Southwest, Adams was a lifelong conservationist, serving from 1936 as a director of the Sierra Club. A number of his books--including My Camera in the National Parks (1950), This Is the American Earth (1960), and Photographs of the Southwest (1976)--are both collections of photographs taken during his years photographing the wilderness areas of the United States and pleas for preservation of those wilderness areas. This can be seen in the introductio
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