Stanford was once characterized as a rich, sleepy school aiming to become the "Harvard of the West." The university launched PACE (Plan of Action for a Challenging Era) to achieve greater prominence and rival East Coast Ivy League institutions. Stanford hired Ansel Adams to create promotional campus photographs; Adams was an established landscape photographer who accepted a $3,000 contract with a team to shoot over two months in early 1961. PACE raised $114 million (about $1.1 billion today), which helped establish Stanford's ultra-elite status. Adams later became a celebrated American photographer, while his Stanford series fell into obscurity and was omitted from his photo log.
When it came to PACE's promotional materials for wooing donors, Stanford's planning department hired Ansel Adams to produce the visuals. Adams was already well known and highly accomplished at the time, having shot the majority of his masterpiece landscapes depicting the natural grandeur of the American West. But in the early 1960s, he was also still a for-hire photographer trying to make a living in the Bay Area.
The PACE program ultimately proved to be a resounding success, to the tune of $114 million in fundraising (nearly $1.1 billion today), which became foundational to Stanford's present-day status as an ultra-elite university. In parallel fashion, Adams would eventually be considered the great American photographer of his era, an exceedingly rare household name in the world of photography, and a visual artist still highly celebrated in museums and pricey galleries around the world.
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