As a younger person, I was an Ansel Adams superfan. For most of a decade, I used the annual spiral-bound Ansel Adams engagement calendars to keep track of meetings and activities. I’d pore over the beautifully reproduced images from my desk in New York City and pine for the faraway landscapes pictured therein — many of them in California, my home state.
I was reminded of this while attending the opening of “Beyond the Wilderness” at Westmont College’s Ridley-Tree Museum in Santa Barbara. The exhibit focused primarily on photographs Adams took in Los Angeles on assignment for Fortune magazine during the lead-up to World War II. This is not a body of work that Adams is known for, nor one he favored. The image from the series he reportedly liked best framed a cemetery statue of an angelic figure against a forest of oil derricks. Judging by the images shown at Westmont, Adams seemed drawn to those derricks. In another photo, one looms large next to an amusement park called Children’s Paradise.
Not included in the exhibition, though mentioned several times, was the work Adams produced at Manzanar, where more than 10,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated during the war. Adams volunteered to document their lives and was granted access to the camp. The result is a stunning body of work that I only recently discovered. Published in a book titled Born Free and Equal and featured in an exhibit of the same name, the photographs were not well received at the time. Nevertheless, Adams believed them to be among his most important work, highlighting the dignity and ingenuity of the imprisoned, who were, in his words, “suffering under a great injustice.”
During one of his trips to Manzanar, Adams took one of his most famous nature photos, Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, an iconic view of Mount Whitney and the surrounding peaks. The incarcerated Japanese Americans were living just miles away, in the shadow of barbed wire and those same stunning peaks. Pondering that proximity is reminiscent of the kind of whiplash we experience today as the U.S. government harasses, bludgeons and imprisons our fellow citizens and we desperately look to nature to find solace and feel human again.
It is not wrong to seek solace in nature. But we cannot turn a blind eye to injustice, however far away it occurs. We have to figure out how to keep both things in view: the angels and the oil derricks. To get up each morning and meditate for a moment on beauty before diving into whatever fresh horrors the news of the day brings. The threats and the cruelty are unlikely to cease. Like Ansel Adams at Manzanar, we are called to bear witness, and to respond.
This article appeared in the February 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Called to respond.”
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