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Adams' photographic career began with the first trip he took to Yosemite, with his father in June 1916. He brought along a Kodak Brownie box camera. The trip was "a tremendous event," he recalls. From that moment, the Sierra—"that great earth gesture"—dominated Adams' life, changed his vocation, gave him his subjects. He was married there, to fellow Californian Virginia Best, a marriage that has lasted 51 years. One of his two children was born there, and not a year has passed since 1916 without his making at least one return visit. Often the visits have been elaborate affairs. Adams, working for the Sierra Club as a photographer and guide, would lead as many as 200 people trekking stubbornly across the landscape. He even staged mock Sophoclean dramas in the woods, written by himself. A photo from 1931 shows Adams, in a white sheet, cavorting as "the Spirit of the Itinerary" in a play entitled Exhaustos, featuring King Dehydros and a Chorus of Sunburnt Women.
In Adams' album from his 1916 trip, with its tiny sodium-browned prints of the Merced River, Half Dome and the scarps of the great valley, one can see the latent images of his work, struggling to become photographs. But as yet they were just vacation snapshots. "They couldn't have meant anything at all to anyone else," he says. "But as I kept doing it over several years, it began to mean more. I was seeing more. Then I got better cameras. Then I began to separate things, to see them more clearly." The first picture he took that he thinks of as "fully visualized" as a photograph was in 1927: a view of Half Dome from the west ridge, which he caused "to look how it feels—a huge, monumental thing" by means of a dark red filter. "Visualization"—deciding in advance how a photo will look, rather than clicking away in the hope of a fortunate accident—is the essence of Adams' work. It is the difference between approaching a trout with a dry fly and dynamiting the brook.
When Adams' first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, was privately published in 1927, he was a fine technician who did not know much about the history of his own medium. He had not seen, or at any rate had not noticed, the work of his 19th century predecessors, Western landscape photographers like Carleton E. Watkins and Timothy H. O'Sullivan. He was still influenced by the so-called pictorialists, photographers given to arty blurs and poses. He also disliked the canonical painters of the American sublime, Bierstadt and Moran. "Indians and bears walking out to the edge of cliffs!" he snorts. "They'd paint the Half Dome as though it were chewing gum. No essence, no spirit—just scene painting." Adams' problem was to find a modernist vision in photography, one that corresponded to the postimpressionist avantgarde, whose works he had glimpsed at the San Francisco Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. In 1930 he saw that vision in the work of a photographer twelve years his senior, Paul Strand.