Over the course of his long career, Ansel Adams (1902–84) confronted the vast landscapes of the American West with a shrewd innocence of eye. His black-and-white photographs, whether of Yosemite in winter or of the Sierra Nevada at sunrise or even of a shivering stand of aspens in a Colorado canyon, capture those vistas as if they were being glimpsed for the first time. That this was an illusion, the result of technical mastery as well as of artistic design, takes nothing away from the grandeur of his images; if anything, it enhances the effect. Adams drew on the resources of illusion to fix a fleeting instant of perception with the utmost exactitude.