Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer and conservationist, and a pioneer of the "pure" photography movement. He is well known for his work in the documenting and photographing of national parks. He initially experimented with pictorialism, brushing over photographs with oils to try and achieve a soft focus akin to painting, but later moved towards the "pure" approach, involving high depth of field and sharp focus.
His work appeals to me as it involves photographing and documenting natural landscapes in a "pure" way. Although I recognise this in itself is debatable - his images are black and white and have an immense sense of scale. They seem to go beyond a landscape as we would encounter it with the human eye, or even the typical image of alandscape - less pure encounter or documentary but more grand.