Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras by Ansel Easton Adams. San Francisco: Jean Chambers Moore-Publisher, 1927. Portfolio. 32.5 x 26 cm. [6] pages (unnumbered). 18 plates (each with double guard sheet with descriptive letterpress). 150 copies printed at the Grabhorn Press of San Francisco. Eighteen photographic prints of the Yosemite and Kings Canyon High Sierra printed on Kodak Opaline paper. This spectacular and painstaking production, sponsored by Albert M. Bender, was Adams' first commercially produced portfolio, preceded by photographs published in newspapers and magazines and separate prints. In his preface to The Portfolios of Ansel Adams, the photographer comments: "My first selection of photographs was Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras ... While made with care and devotion, it was more representational in approach than my later productions and reflected a style of work less realized in character and emphasis than my photography after 1930 -- the year I saw Paul Stand's negatives in Taos, an experience which profoundly influenced my concept of photography." See Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams. Volume I: The Eloquent Light (1964) for a biography of Adams through 1938. Robert Cahn, "Ansel Adams, Environmentalist," Sierra, LXIV (May/June 1979), 31-36; 45-49, provides an excellent summary of Adams' career as a photographer and conservationist. Margins water and smoke stained. Restored and cleaned. Now housed in a quarter leather clamshell box. The survivor of a very bad fire in the Bay Area many decades ago. The cloth portfolio perished, but the contents were saved. (#151599).
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