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Death and legacy

Adams died from cardiovascular disease on April 22, 1984, in the intensive-care unit at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, California, at age 82. He was surrounded by his wife, two children and five grandchildren. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered on Half Dome at Yosemite National Park.

Publishing rights for most of Adams's photographs are handled by the trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. An archive of Adams's work is located at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Numerous works by the artist have been sold at auction, including a mural-sized print of Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, which sold at Sotheby's New York in June 2010 for $722,500, then the highest price ever paid for an original Ansel Adams photograph. This price was surpassed by another mural-sized print of one of his photographs, The Tetons and the Snake River, sold for $988,000 at Sotheby's New York, on December 14, 2020.

John Szarkowski states in the introduction to Ansel Adams: Classic Images (1985, p. 5), "The love that Americans poured out for the work and person of Ansel Adams during his old age, and that they have continued to express with undiminished enthusiasm since his death, is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even unparalleled in our country's response to a visual artist."

Adams' wife, Virginia Rose Best, died on January 29, 2000, aged 96.