Taos pueblo

"When Taos Pueblo, his first book, was published in 1930, Ansel Adams was just 28 ... Adams had only recently put aside a nascent career as a concert pianist to pursue photography full time, but he still wasn't sure he could make a go of it when he took up the Taos project in collaboration with Mary Austin, a popular novelist and nature writer based in Santa Fe. ... The twelve photos in Taos Pueblo--each an original print on silver bromide paper prepared especially for the book by Adam's San Francisco custom-paper supplier, William Dassonville--include several formal portraits reminiscent of Edward Curtis and nearly circumscribed, almost intimate landscapes that are a far cry from the inflated magnificence associated with Adam's later work. ... The book's solid success at the height of the Depression (all 108 copies sold over two years at $75 a piece) encouraged Adams to continue in his course as a photographer of the American landscape."--The Book of 101 Books : Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century / Edited by Andrew Roth. New York : PPP Editions in association with Ruth Horowitz, 2001.