photo #6047323

Clouds in Art Week: FridayBuilding Cumulus clouds tower over White Pass in Kings River Canyon, Sierra Nevada, California, US in this 1936 print by American conservationist and photographer Ansel Adams. The tallest form of Cumulus, known as Cumulus congestus, shines bright white in the background. It is well on its way to developing into a Cumulonimbus storm cloud. Shadowed in the foreground, middle-sized Cumulus known as Cumulus mediocris gather in strength and height. They push their heads and shoulders upwards, lifting with them parcels of moist air to form at their tops to the right of the image some subtle, soft cloud caps known as pileus. In 1940, a few years after Ansel Adams created this photograph, this territory was dedicated as a national park. ‘I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful’ he wrote decades later in his autobiography, ‘– an endless prospect of magic and wonder.’Clouds - White Pass, Kings River Canyon (Proposed as a national park) (1936) by Ansel Adams, in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, US. The quotation is from Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (1985).