When the search began for a host city for the 1932 Olympic Games, the first ever to be held in the United States, Yosemite entered the conversation. Competing for the top spot against Lake Tahoe and Lake Placid, the park’s supporters promoted its natural beauty, its newly constructed ice rink, and its growing reputation as a winter playground. During this period, Ansel Adams was already closely connected with the Yosemite Park and Curry Company, who often commissioned him to photograph life in the Valley.

The opportunity to create the Parmelian Prints was unprecedented in Adams’ young career. He would ultimately select eighteen photographs drawn from years of strenuous trips into the High Sierra, gathering negatives made between the early 1920s and 1927, and print them on a delicate, vellum-like paper whose thin, translucent surface lends the images an almost luminous presence.

 In 1927, to celebrate the grand opening of Yosemite's Ahwahnee Hotel, a holiday celebration worthy of its setting was first commissioned, and came to be known as A Christmas at Bracebridge Hall. Ansel Adams first joined the cast as a young performer in those earliest years but would later take on the role of transforming the production's spirit into much of what it remains today.