Are the photos that Ansel Adams created more documentation or art? To answer this question, I feel the need to define documentary photography. Documentary Photography is defined as the act of chronicling events or environments both significant and relevant to history as well as everyday life. In the 1930’s, a surge of documentary photography swept across America with the start of the Great Depression. Many photographers at the time captured these events with vivid emotion and stark truth. Ansel however, was not photographing houses covered in dust or long food lines. He saw beauty in nature and was obsessed with capturing mountains and trees with a high tonal range and clarity of vision. Because of this, he is generally not considered a documentary
