[citation needed] On January 1, 1967, Ansel Adams held a gathering of friends and associates at his home in Carmel, California, to talk about starting a new organization to promote photography.
[1] In its first publication, Portfolio I: The Persistence of Beauty, published in 1969, Nancy Newhall wrote about this meeting: ... on New Years' Day 1967, a dozen or so of us met at Ansel Adams' house.
Instead, we decided to found a society, national and even international in scope, whose purpose should serve as the long-dreamed-of center, bringing in outstanding talent from everywhere, initiating exhibitions, holding workshops and programs of lectures and films, and publishing, in various forms, mongraphs on individual photographers and works of interpretation, enlightened criticism and history.
The membership should include not only practicing photographers but musicians, poets, painters, sculptors, critics, collectors, art historians, museum directors and others who are deeply interested.
[2]During the first decade the organization operated with an all-volunteer committee structure, and it grew rapidly because the exhibitions held at its Carmel gallery were very successful, attracting both local collectors and artists as well as visitors from around the country.
The Trustees decided that to optimize their mission of promoting fine art photography the organization should reach out to a larger audience, and they began to raise money to move to a new building in San Francisco.
[5] After a three-year fundraising campaign, the organization raised $2.5 million to lease and renovate a former health clinic in the Yerba Buena district of San Francisco.
The following year they published a book, Ansel Adams: New Light, Essays on His Legacy and Legend,[7] which provided a written record for some of the proceedings of the conference and added additional thoughts by other scholars.
Grundberg thought the organization could attract new members by broadening the kinds of photography it exhibited, and he initiated a series of shows by photographers whose artistic vision was very different from Adams and his circle.
[8] During the closure, the organization hired Deborah Klochko as executive director and launched a new fundraising campaign to help pay off its debts.
Six photographers were included in the exhibition: Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Brett Weston and Minor White.
[11] After they moved into the Ansel Adams Center in 1989 they continued offering larger and sometimes multiple simultaneous exhibitions including Jo Ann Walters.