"Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point, Winter"

gelatin silver print

During the 1930s and early 1940s, Adams made many photographs from Inspiration Point, culminating in his 1944 Clearing Winter Storm. Several variants of this image exist. One was reproduced in Adams’s book Yosemite Valley in 1959, and another was used on a Hills Brothers coffee can in 1970.
(Sotheby's, 2016)

Ansel Adams made this image around 1959 with an 8x10-inch view camera. The image was once used in a commercial job, as he recalls in Ansel Adams: An Autobiography: “In 1969, for one of my last commercial jobs, I selected a photograph, Yosemite Valley, Winter […] for reproduction on a Hills Brothers coffee can. The idea was to produce something of lasting attractiveness after the original contents of the can had been consumed […] Potentially corny: actually reasonable. There were thousands of three-pound cans filled with coffee sold nationwide in grocery stores for $2.35 each."
When she saw the coffee cans, reliably acerbic Imogen Cunningham criticized him for selling out. Cunningham had shown her work alongside Adams and Edward Weston in the 1932 Group f/64 Exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. To make her point, she had a friend deliver one of the cans filled with manure complete with a sprouting marijuana plant dubbing it a "pot in a pot." Ansel Adams took the ribbing well, saying: "I enjoyed Imogen's joke, but when my good friend and fellow photographer Henry Gilpin, then deputy sheriff of Monterey County, dropped by and spotted the plant he quietly suggested that I destroy it. I did.” In addition to being 'published' on the coffee can, it is on the cover of the book Yosemite and the High Sierra.
(Nicky Guerreiro, The Ansel Adams Gallery)