It has now been five years since the global economic system nearly collapsed into ruin, and the ensuing half-decade has been difficult for most — apart from the infamous 1 percent — including professional photographers. The ease and accessibility of digital technology combined with the rise of the mostly free Internet have eliminated many of the ways photographers eked out a middle-class living. Even university jobs — once a stable and comfortable perch — have been replaced by cheap and benefits-free adjuncts.

What’s a struggling photographer to do?

The burgeoning model requires a Malcolm X “By Any Means Necessary” attitude. Photographers are encouraged to write, blog, teach workshops, engage in social media, secure sponsorships, develop exterior passions and basically do anything and everything to put food on the table. One blogger has called the phenomenon the “21st century hustle.” (O.K., that blogger is me.) But as much as this feels new and different, we can trace the Renaissance-man lineage back to the most famous American photographer in history: Ansel Adams.

Mr. Adams, ever the optimist, once proclaimed: “The best picture is around the corner. Like prosperity.” That sums up his future-embracing outlook, because when Mr. Adams committed himself to his career, there were few examples of successful professional photographic artists whom he could emulate. Ansel Adams’s career provides a road map to potential success while also serving as a reminder that everything old will be new again.

Over the course of 60-plus years, he built community wherever possible and partnered with other talented people like Alfred Stieglitz and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. These collective efforts gave rise to such institutions as f/64, the photo department at the Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson and Aperture Magazine.

The various ways Mr. Adams plied his trade and the diversity of styles within his work, are now on display in a semipermanent installation at the Andrew Smith Gallery in Santa Fe, N.M. A major force in the fine art photography print market for many years, Mr. Smith ran up against the same economic misery that befell so many photographers.

“In the ’90s and the last decade, there was a popular, mass consumption going on in the market,” he said. “That stopped during the last recession for a lot of reasons: the economy, age, the Internet and the ubiquity of photographs that people can look at. The market is centered around the major collectors, and not so much the regular buyers. The competition is much more fierce. You can look on the Internet and find 10,000 things.”

Mr. Smith responded by stealing a page from Mr. Adams’s playbook: If you want to build an audience, grow it organically, and let as many people as possible come to appreciate it. He turned two floors of his gallery into a showcase for Ansel Adams’s work with countless prints on display, as well as posters, artifacts, books, magazines, and a film from the 1950s. It’s all intended to shake up the traditional gallery model, while paying homage to Mr. Adams’s remarkable skills.

Originally a pianist, Mr. Adams learned photography and mountaineering in his late teens. He befriended the prominent Bay Area collector Albert Bender, who prodded him to produce his first published portfolio. Then Mr. Bender sold half the edition for him before a single photo was made. Mr. Bender also introduced him to patrons like Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, N.M., and other art world luminaries: Paul Strand and Georgia O’Keeffe.

His musical skills helped prod his photo career. According to Mr. Adams’s friend and colleague Jim Alinder, “This musical ability provided him entrance into social circles that might have been much less open to him had he been known only for his photography.”

He later photographed in the Yosemite Valley and surrounding Sierra Nevada mountains, and developed a relationship with the Sierra Club, whose members became a natural audience. Mr. Adams offered his landscape photos to them, inexpensively, through the Sierra Club bulletin, for which he wrote.

When he wanted to help popularize fine art photography in San Francisco, he began writing criticism for a local publication, The Fortnightly. His first article was a review of Edward Weston’s exhibit at the de Young museum, which led to a lifelong friendship with Mr. Weston, and an exhibition at the museum for his new collective, f/64.

Mr. Adams also worked commercially to pay the bills, first developing a long-term relationship with the Yosemite Park and Curry Company (his photographs even adorned restaurant menus). He used Yosemite Valley as a base, as his wife’s family owned a gallery, Best’s Studio, which the Adamses eventually inherited. He was quite the raconteur and performed plays and musical arrangements for Sierra Club outings in the summer and at Christmas dinners at the Valley’s resort.

Courtesy of the Andrew Smith Gallery, New Mexico

Ultimately, he worked for major photographic institutions like Kodak and Polaroid. At one point, he photographed Carlsbad Caverns for the Department of the Interior, while also photographing nearby potash mines for a mining corporation. According to Mary Street Alinder, his biographer, it is worth remembering that his family’s squandered fortune came from the timber industry and that mining was not seen then in negative terms.

In addition to the writing, music, commercial work, institution building, curatorial projects and environmental activism, Ansel Adams also found time to make the creative, transcendent landscape photographs that formed the basis of his legacy. He received three Guggenheim Fellowships, which gave him some time to concentrate on his art alone, but he otherwise fit his fine art practice in around everything else.

It all came at a cost: Mr. Adams was a hyperactive workaholic who routinely worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week. He traveled often and lived apart from his wife and children, who were based in the Yosemite Valley, while he remained in San Francisco.

Yet the colleagues who knew him well in the latter phase of his life insist he was a remarkably generous, warm and kind person. Chris Rainier, his final assistant, stressed that Mr. Adams fervently believed in the Western frontier tradition of passing his knowledge along to the next generation. He taught students through workshops in Yosemite and later in Carmel, Calif., where he reunited with his wife, Virginia, in a new home, late in life. It was in that phase where he finally found the financial freedom he craved throughout his years. He hired Bill Turnage, a Yale graduate, to run his business affairs, and they soon devised a strategy to stop making fine art prints.

Mr. Adams had printed his work in open editions up until then and sold the work for very little money. With the landmark decision to cease printing, they created a limited supply, which eventually gave rise to a multidecade hot market. As of Dec. 31, 1975, the only prints they would make were destined for museum collections, sold as contiguous portfolios. (Aside from the special edition prints, which were made by assistants in Yosemite and are sold there to this day. They were originally sold for $3 and are now available for $295.) According to Mr. Turnage, this was not a part of a master plan, though. Mr. Adams was by then in his 70s and had grown weary of the difficult darkroom toil.

“I said: ‘Ansel, why don’t you stop making prints? No more sales,’ ” Mr. Turnage said. “I think he dropped whatever he was holding. ‘What would I do for income?’

“And I said: ‘You could continue to concentrate on books. They’ve been very successful. Your needs aren’t huge. You don’t need to make $3 million a year. You’ll free yourself from the darkroom.’

“He thought about that for a little while, and he said, ‘You know, I think that’s a pretty good idea.’ ”

They ended up working with Little, Brown, which still puts out Ansel Adams books. His 60th publication, “Ansel Adams in the Canadian Rockies,” will be released this year.

Mr. Turnage insists the publications held the key to Mr. Adams’s fortune, which is now represented by the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, of which he is a trustee. He said Little, Brown sold more than 250,000 copies of several of the books. They were expensive: priced at $50 or $60 each, which Mr. Turnage suggests would be the equivalent to $200 today.

Courtesy of the Andrew Smith Gallery, New Mexico

Looking at the model provided by Ansel Adams, it is clear that passion, energy and generosity all played a large part in his success. Mrs. Alinder even said he had a “superhuman ability to work on many different projects at the same time. When you talk about him hustling, that’s the way he was his whole life.”

But he also had sponsorship agreements with camera companies, a boot maker, a coffee company (above) and even a car manufacturer. Toward the end of his life, Ansel Adams agreed to be featured in a television advertisement for Datsun (now Nissan) because it agreed to plant a tree every time someone came in for a test drive.

Today we live in a world in which exhibits of photographers like Sebastião Salgado are sponsored by mining conglomerates and Mercedes-Benz hires photographers based upon the size of their Instagram following. In that light, Mr. Adams’s path seems prescient. His long road to success is also a reminder that despite our ever-viral present, the slow struggle is battle-tested.

“It is not quite satisfying to be told that growth comes in tiny increments, during long days of plain work,” the former MoMA curator John Szarkowski said of Adams’s legacy. “We prefer to think of it arriving as a series of epiphanies, each opening a door onto a world that had previously been hidden.”

Jonathan Blaustein is an artist and writer based in New Mexico. He contributes regularly to the blog A Photo Editor, and two of his photo projects have been shown on Lens: “The Value of a Dollar” in 2010 and “MINE” in 2012. Follow him @jblauphoto and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.