A nice reflection on the mastery of Ansel Adams, who would be celebrating his 100th birthday, by the Atlantic Monthly.

< i>He was a balding, bearded, crooked-nosed man, self-taught, energetic, excited by ideas, a great ham and mimic and comedian. At his piano he was an entertainer in the style of Victor Borge, playing chords with an orange or, if no fruit was handy, with his rear end. By day, in the darkroom, he was an ascetic. In the evening, after happy hour, he turned sybarite. This oscillating regimen had left him with a paunch and had compromised his health, delicate since childhood. In the history of his art Adams was an unprecedented combination of technical virtuosity and inspired eye. He had trained to be a concert pianist, and his approach to photography—his perfectionism, his mastery of tonal scales, the operatic feeling in his grander images—was essentially musical. Adams took photography into a big, moody, exhilarating, Wagnerian country of inky peaks and dazzling snowfields, where no one had climbed before.