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Condition: All items are offered for sale subject to Swann Galleries' standard terms and conditions of sale, which are published in our catalogues.

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Notes: Ansel Adams's most popular photograph, which is an icon of American landscape photography. This dramatic print was created in the early 1960s and is adhered to a Crescent board. Adams's signature appears on mount recto and an early Carmel studio hand stamp is on mount verso.


The story of how this powerful image was made is now legendary. Adams was returning from a less-than-successful day in the field when he casually glanced out his car window and saw this haunting scene. He quickly set up his 8x10 view camera but discovered that his exposure meter was not to be found. Luckily, he was able to recall the luminance of the moon, and using his Zone System, he calculated the appropriate exposure. The light changed before he could take a second exposure.


Making prints from the resulting negative was a laborious task because of the image's wide tonal range. Adams eventually treated the lower half of the negative to make printing the foreground less difficult. For all of Adams's careful documentation of the process of creating this image, the actual date of its creation was debated for some time. Eventually, an astronomer was called in to calculate the date using the position of the moon; October 31, 1941.


From a Private Collector; to the present owner in 1980.


Ansel Adams: Classic Images, 32.

Photography in America, 130-131.

Photography from 1839 to Today, 643.

Masterworks of American Photography: The Amon Carter Museum Collection, 125.

Ansel Adams in the Lane Collection, 37.

Ansel Adams (1972), 63.

Ansel Adams at 100, 96.

Ansel Adams: The Grand Canyon and the Southwest, frontispiece.