Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist. Adams began to photograph professionally in 1930, and in 1932 was a founding member of the f/64 group in San Francisco, California. In 1940 he created the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, New York, along with Beaumont Newhall and David McAlpin. From 1942 to 1944 Adams acted as the photographic adviser to the United States Army and photographed at the Manzanar Relocation Center. In 1944, his work from this project was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and published in the book,
Born Free and Equal. In 1962 Adams moved to Carmel, California where he founded the Friends of Photography in 1967. He continued to document the landscape of the American West.
Joseph Maida is an artist, writer, and educator, who chairs the BFA Photography and Video Department at New York's School of Visual Arts. Maida has exhibited his work extensively in the United States, Europe, Japan and China in solo exhibitions at Wallspace, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, the Nikon Salons, Tokyo and Osaka, and 403 International Art Center, Wuhan, among others. Maida's work has also been included in group exhibitions in New York at the International Center for Photography (ICP); Yancey Richardson Gallery; Art in General; Artists Space; the Queens Museum; and the Bronx Museum and internationally at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; the Kunsthalle Wien; the Witte de With, Rotterdam; C/O Berlin; and the Photographers’ Gallery, London, among others. Maida's commissioned work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, W, Wallpaper*, and Vice, and Maida's monographs New Natives and Born Free and Equal were published by L’Artiere (Bologna, Italy) in 2015 and CONVOKE (New York, NY) in 2018 respectively. Maida earned his BA summa cum laude in architecture and art history from Columbia Universityand his MFA in photography from Yale University.