The photographer whose images define stillness in the American West began as a hyperactive boy thrown into a brick wall during the aftershocks of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. This episode follows Ansel Adams from a childhood of expulsions, a family fortune lost, and a father who pulled him out of school at 12 to educate him at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition and with Emerson's essays. We look at his early dream of becoming a concert pianist, the Kodak Brownie he received on a 1916 Yosemite trip, and how the Sierra Nevada cured the crippling anxiety that followed his 1918 bout of Spanish flu.

We then trace his rejection of Vaseline-smeared pictorialism for straight photography, the red-filter visualization behind Monolith, the Face of Half Dome in 1927, the founding of Group f/64, the 1937 darkroom fire, and the Zone System he devel ...