Ansel Adams' Job is Paying Up to $100K--National Parks Photographer Opening, Here

It turns out that virtually the same job that legendary photographer Ansel Adams took in 1941 is now being advertised with the U.S. Department of the Interior, shooting large-format photos of national parks and the outdoors. The photos are for the Library of Congress's permanent collection.

What's more, the salary is up to nearly $100,000 a year. It's open to applications until December 15.

Adams is of course famous for shooting evocative images -- in large format, which just means "big film" -- of the nation's West and helping to preserve some of it in the bargain.

Adams' own work with the Department of the Interior involved shooting a photomural project, and it was interrupted by World War II. He arrived there after publishing two books of photos, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras and Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail. The latter was praised by the renowned photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his wife, artist Georgia O'Keeffe. He had also been chosen to represent the Sierra Club in presenting a proposal to make Kings Canyon National Park; the club felt that his photos of the area would be persuasive, according to the website of the Ansel Adams Gallery at Yosemite National Park.

Photographs have been influential in backing up parks or conservation efforts all along: Carleton Watkins' images of Yosemite Valley prompted it to be set aside as a state park in 1864, and some by William Henry Jackson made vivid an area at the corner of Wyoming where it meets Montana and Idaho, so that Congress created Yellowstone as the first national park, in 1872.

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