Amer­i­cans ven­er­ate the work of Ansel Adams but tend to get over­ex­posed to the usu­al Adams prints in den­tists’ wait­ing rooms, cor­po­rate offices, and oth­er anes­thet­ic spaces. At least that’s been my expe­ri­ence. It’s easy to for­get how much Adams’ work vital­ly defined the 20th cen­tu­ry per­cep­tion of the Amer­i­can West, as much as Fred­er­ic Rem­ing­ton’s defined that of the 19th.

Wednes­day, in hon­or of what would have been Adams 111th birth­day, we post­ed a fas­ci­nat­ing 1958 doc­u­men­tary to rein­tro­duce you to the Adams you may have thought you knew—“musician, moun­taineer, writer, teacher, pho­tog­ra­ph­er.” In the midst of redis­cov­er­ing Adams our­selves, we stum­bled upon an incred­i­ble trove of images at the Nation­al Archives—226, to be exact—taken at the behest of the Nation­al Park Ser­vice in 1941.

The pur­pose was to cre­ate a pho­to mur­al for the Depart­ment of the Inte­ri­or Build­ing in Wash­ing­ton, DC with the theme “nature as exem­pli­fied and pro­tect­ed in the U.S. Nation­al Parks.” While WWII put a stop to the project, the pho­to archive Adams left behind still makes an excel­lent case for the fed­er­al preser­va­tion of these land­scapes (or what’s left of them today). This is the kind of pro­pa­gan­da I can get behind.

The image above is 79-AAB‑1 in the archive, or more pro­saical­ly, “Boul­der Dam, 1941.” Adams pho­tographed grand land- and desertscapes all over the West and South­west, includ­ing the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Death Val­ley, Yel­low­stone, Yosemite, Carls­bad Cav­erns, and land belong­ing to Nava­jo and Pueblo Indians—such as image #79-AAA‑6 (below), or “Church, Aco­ma Pueblo,” tak­en in Aco­ma Pueblo, New Mex­i­co.

Like most of Adams’ work, these images are mon­u­men­tal­ly breath­tak­ing in all their high-con­trast vast­ness. Most of them are signed or cap­tioned by Adams. You can browse the archives, view all of the pho­tos, and order prints through the Nation­al Archives web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Extreme Pho­tog­ra­phy: Shoot­ing Big Climbs at Yosemite

Alfred Stieglitz: The Elo­quent Eye, a Reveal­ing Look at “The Father of Mod­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy”

Watch as Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Steve McCur­ry Shoots the Very Last Roll of Kodachrome

Josh Jones is a writer, edi­tor, and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

We don’t need to tell you, an Open Cul­ture read­er, about the rich­ness of David Lynch’s con­tri­bu­tion to motion pic­tures. But the auteur also has an ongo­ing rela­tion­ship with still pho­tog­ra­phy which the past decade has seen emerge into pub­lic light. Years ago, I attend­ed an open­ing in Los Angeles—the city so thor­ough­ly cap­tured by Lynch’s surrealism—of an exhi­bi­tion of his own shots. Now, the Los Ange­les Review of Books presents Lynch’s com­men­tary, in the video above, on 99 pic­tures tak­en by oth­ers. Lis­ten to him describe his view­ing approach—that of a voyeuris­tic, all-feel­ing detective—and you’ll nev­er look the same way at cur­tains, wom­en’s shoes, stone Bud­dhas, and fes­ter­ing sores again.

Lynch select­ed these favorite 99 pho­tos from the thou­sand pre­sent­ed at 2012’s Paris Pho­to, the inter­na­tion­al pho­tog­ra­phy fair that hap­pens each Novem­ber dur­ing the Euro­pean Month of Pho­tog­ra­phy. He arrived as the inau­gur­al selec­tion of “Paris Pho­to vu par…,” a new tra­di­tion that will each year com­pile a book of images, their selec­tion “entrust­ed to a dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ty each year.” Die-hard fans will sure­ly need to own their idol­’s edi­tion, and in late April they can make a pil­grim­age to Lynch’s town for the launch of Paris Pho­to Los Ange­les. Its loca­tion? The lot of Para­mount Pic­tures, dis­trib­u­tor of Lynch’s pho­to­graph­i­cal­ly strik­ing The Ele­phant Man.

Relat­ed con­tent:

David Lynch’s Sur­re­al Com­mer­cials

What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Cam­era and 52 Sec­onds of Film

David Lynch Teach­es Louis C.K. How to Host The David Let­ter­man Show

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

It took Marsel van Oost­en two years and 16,000 images to cre­ate a time­lapse video that cap­tures the inef­fa­ble beau­ty of Namib­ian Nights. Shot with Nikon D3, D3s and D4 cam­eras, the film high­lights van Oost­en’s favorite sites in Namib­ia — “the fairy­tale-like quiv­ertrees and the eery, dead camelthorn trees in Dead­vlei.” For each sec­ond of video, 30 pho­tographs were tak­en. Namib­ian Nights won First Prize in the 2012 Trav­el Pho­tog­ra­ph­er of The Year Awards.