Ansel Adams (born 113 years ago on February 20, 1902) didn’t have the best early experience with the American West. As a four-year-old, he was thrown into a garden wall during an aftershock following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. His nose was broken and stayed permanently crooked. To his credit, he didn’t hold it against the region, which he spent his career as a photographer helping others fall in love with.

In 1916, two things happened to a teenage Ansel that marked him forever: He visited Yosemite National Park with his family for the first time, and hid dad gave him a Kodak Brownie box camera, his first. He was permanently smitten by both. He quickly became a photography enthusiast, while joining the Sierra Club and becoming a summer caretaker at Yosemite. He spent his summers hiking, camping, and taking pictures, while trying to launch a musical career the rest of the time.

His first pictures were published in 1921, and he would eventually give up his musical ambitions. (His small, easily bruised hands didn’t mark him as a pianist.) He spent 60 years in photography, with his career marked by black-and-white photographs of the West, especially his first love at Yosemite. (This photo, "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," became one of his most popular.) He developed the Zone System to optimize film exposure and development, and the complete sense of control he gained from this system might have explained his lifelong preference for black-and-white film.

He taught photography workshops, and supposedly told his students "It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium." He won numerous awards, and even had a photo placed on board the Voyager spacecraft. If aliens ever encounter that repository of Earth’s knowledge, one thing they’ll find is Ansel Adams’ photo of the Tetons and the Snake River. He died at age 82 in 1984.

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