The U.S. Camera Photographic Forum: Teaching the Art of Seeing

Ansel Adams with Workshop Class in Upper Studio, Best's Studio, Yosemite, photograph by George Smith, ca.1942. Photograph courtesy of the Adams Family Archives.

In 1940, Yosemite became the setting for a new kind of photographic education.

That year, Ansel Adams began his photography workshop program in Yosemite, in partnership with U.S. Camera magazine and co-taught with his friend and frequent collaborator, Edward Weston. Called the U.S. Camera Photographic Forum, the program brought students into the Valley to study with Adams and Weston, together two of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. It was one of the earliest photography education programs in the country, and it marked the beginning of a teaching tradition that remains central to The Ansel Adams Gallery today.

Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, Photograph courtesy of Kim Weston

For Ansel, the Forum represented a natural extension of the work he had been doing for years. Yosemite was his great subject, his spiritual home, and the landscape in which he’d first come to understand photography as a serious artistic calling. By 1940, he was no longer simply making photographs of the Valley. He was helping others to learn how to see it.

The U.S. Camera Photographic Forum was conceived as an immersive experience. Students did not come to Yosemite merely to receive technical instruction. They came to enter a complete photographic environment: one in which the landscape, the camera, the negative, the darkroom, and the final print were understood as parts of a single artistic process. This fulfilled Ansel’s vision of “a teaching environment of utmost simplicity,” complete with “the classic image of the instructor communicating with his students under an olive tree (perhaps a cactus in our case) surrounded with thoughts and ‘vibes.’”

In this pursuit, Ansel and Weston were ideal guides. Both men had helped define the modernist ideal of fine art photography: images sharply focused, carefully composed, and revealing the full expressive power of the photographic medium. Yet their approaches were also distinct. Weston brought an extraordinary sensitivity to form, surface, and abstraction; Adams brought his command of light, exposure, atmosphere, and printmaking. Together, they offered students a rare gift: not a formula, but a way of thinking.

Adams would later describe his ideal workshops as “idea factories,” rather than “production lines,” a distinction that captures his humanistic approach to teaching. For him, photographic education was not meant to produce rigidly trained technicians producing identical results: instead, he aimed to awaken students’ powers of perception. The goal was for participants to leave with “encouragement and excitement,” having discovered new artistic possibilities they could continue to explore on their own.

That philosophy imbued every aspect of the workshops, where Yosemite Valley itself became the classroom. A workshop day might begin outdoors, with students studying the changing light across granite walls, trees, riverbanks, and meadows. There, a familiar subject could become entirely new in a matter of minutes. The work continued in the darkroom, which Ansel saw as something distinct from a traditional school laboratory, where every student would spend long hours printmaking and developing in sequence. Instead, he saw it as a demonstration venue: a place where students could witness the expressive possibilities of the negative and the print in action, and where Ansel’s teaching could become almost theatrical in its intimacy and force. Jeanne Adams later remembered one of the most memorable parts of the workshops: Ansel would sometimes take a student’s negative and develop it himself while the group watched. The negative might already be strong, but in Adams’ hands, something else appeared. As Jeanne recalled, there was “something about the life that came out of it” that felt unique.

Ansel Adams photographing Yosemite ca. 1943, Photograph courtesy of the Adams Family Archives

The early workshops were also substantial commitments. Jeanne recalled that when the program began in 1940, the workshops lasted two weeks. Later, as patterns of travel and leisure changed, they were shortened. But the original length speaks to the ambition of the program. The U.S. Camera Photographic Forum arrived at a moment when photography itself was still fighting for recognition as a fine art. Adams had long believed that photography deserved rigorous study, serious criticism, and technical excellence equal to any other art form—in Yosemite, he helped create a setting where that belief could be practiced directly.

In the years that followed, Adams’ workshops became an essential part of his life and of the Gallery’s history. Students came to Yosemite not only to learn from a master photographer, but to stand in the landscape that had shaped him. The workshops offered a rare continuity between place, practice, and philosophy; to study photography under Ansel in Yosemite was to encounter the source of the work itself.

Today, The Ansel Adams Gallery continues this tradition through its own photography education programs in Yosemite. Much has changed since 1940, but the program’s deeper purpose remains remarkably constant: to help students slow down, look closely, understand light, and make photographs with intention.

The U.S. Camera Photographic Forum began as an experiment: a gathering of students, teachers, cameras, and questions in one of the most photographed landscapes in the world. More than eighty years later, its legacy endures each time a photographer enters Yosemite with a camera and learns, perhaps for the first time, not simply to take a picture, but to see.