
A trek off-the-beaten-path brought Ansel Adams to stand at sunset on this Wyoming site where, looking over riverbend, the iconic Tetons and the Snake River came into being. The viewer’s eye is drawn along the silvery, snaking river in the sunken tones of the foreground and around the bend to the high-pitched mountains of the Grand Tetons illumined by a dramatic sky. As Adams said of this vista: “The grand lift of the Tetons is more than a mechanistic fold and faulting of the earth’s crust; it becomes a primal gesture of the earth beneath a greater sky.” This slow meandering then sharp thrust upward carries a movement spiritual and emotional as well as mechanical. Adams gloried in these cragged cathedrals of America and, through his imaging of them, Americans around the country reveled in them as well. For many citizens, it was through images that they beheld the grandeur of the country.
Adams printed his works for decades after he snapped the actual photo. This specific Tetons and the Snake River gelatin print was made in 1950 by Ansel Adams himself for Oscar Solbert, the first Director of the George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum) in Rochester, New York. The Solbert Family remained in possession of this print until 1998. Because of its careful protection in a private collection, this photograph is in strikingly beautiful condition.
Tetons is among the rarest of Adams’s large-format photographs due to the limited quantity ever printed. Only eight images were made from the Tetons negative in this mural size, and this one is rarified for its printing date of 1950, less than a decade after Adams captured the photo. In later years, Adams would allow two printing studios to print his works but enforced distinction of those works. Photographs printed by an outside studio are sepia toned, and those Adams printed himself, such as this example of Tetons, are in black and white.
Video
History
Ansel Adams approached the wilderness of America with reverence. His respect for the natural world animated his life’s work as America’s foremost landscape photographer. An avid technician of photography and its enthusiastic advocate, he lectured widely and published numerous manuals that remain influential technical texts today. An unremitting environmental activist, Adams wrote thousands of letters detailing and encouraging conservation philosophy to bureaucrats, newspaper editors, and fellow Wilderness Society and Sierra Club colleagues. He worked tirelessly in verbal and visual means, trusting clarity would light his path to truth.
MoreAnsel Adams Photographs Sold at Auction

- Strong result for a comparable subject and size
- Printed c. 1950, the same period as our photograph
- Sold for over $700,000 in 2010

- Demonstrates the demand for the most iconic images from Adams’s oeuvre
- Half the size of The Tetons and the Snake River
- Sold for over $600,000 in 2006

- Mural-sized image that sold in 2010
- Less desirable subject than The Tetons and the Snake River
- Achieved nearly $500,000 at auction in 2010
Comparable Photographs in Museum Collections


