Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Although he was thought a failure at school, in truth Ansel was unusually bright. He began a neighborhood newspaper called the West Clay Park Snooper, which continued to be published for many decades.59 When he was ten, he haunted the offices of the contractor engaged in developing the surrounding lands, Mr. Stephen A. Born, a generous soul who taught him drawing, drafting, and perspective. Born also fed the young boy’s hunger for adventure, once taking him for a hair-raising ride in his REO automobile, applying the pedal to the metal to reach a speed of eighteen miles an hour, and warning that if a wheel came off, they would be crushed to jelly. Ansel shivered with delight.60

  At the age of twelve, Ansel became captivated hearing a neighbor, sixteen-year-old Henry Cowell, practice on the Adamses’ piano, an old upright that turned out to be just a bit better than the one at Cowell’s own house. (Cowell would go on to become a noted composer, teacher, and pianist.) Before this, Ansel had amused himself and his family by concocting an astonishing one-man band, striking chords on the piano with his right hand while depressing the volume pedal with his right foot, thumping a drum with his left foot, and blowing a harmonica held in his left hand.61 But listening to Cowell was life-changing.

  Ollie bought her son a book of piano music, and he immediately sat down at the keyboard and taught himself to read music and to play. His father wrote in 1914 that it happened almost overnight.62 Until he was seventeen or so, Ansel was possessed of a so-called photographic memory: he could look briefly at a page of text, or music, and then recite it. This was of great value in his musical studies. Always convinced that Ansel was special, his father now knew he was a prodigy.

  When he discovered his deep affinity and natural talent for music, Ansel also discovered himself. Perhaps as instinctive as the need to reproduce is the compulsion to find and create patterns, to impose order on the chaos of life.63 Music did just that for Ansel in his youth, as photography would later. Its boundaries described his safe haven, a place where he could feel, for the first time, the huge passions and emotions that surged inside him, and performance became an appropriate means to give those feelings expression. Until then, his life had seemed aimless and confused, but with the realization that he could create beauty through the piano, he found his first unmediated link to the eternal.

  Ansel profited from a slow progression of music teachers: Marie Butler, Frederick Zech, and Benjamin Moore. Each, in turn, insisted on dedication and discipline. Technique was built upon technique; fluid expression could be achieved only through total mastery of craft. His musical study provided Ansel with a structured approach to life. He became determined to make music his career; his goal was to become a classical pianist.

  In 1915, Ansel’s enlightened father, believing, with Emerson, that life experience was the best teacher, presented his unusual son with an equally unusual present: a one-year pass to San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, scheduled to open on Ansel’s thirteenth birthday. This and his musical studies were to constitute his schooling for the year. In the end, the enticements of the former proved more compelling.

  The Exposition celebrated San Francisco’s recovery from the earthquake and fire, proclaiming the city ready to receive at its docks the flood of ships expected with the opening of the Panama Canal. It was a spectacle, boasting not only the latest achievements in industry, science, and the arts but also an amusement park called the Zone, just the thing for a very active thirteen-year-old. There was a roller coaster, a carousel, a huge trampoline, and the Aeroscope, a large car that carried its passengers 285 feet above the ground.64

  Ansel was a daily participant in the fair. No shy flower, he performed his first public, if unscheduled, piano concerts at the Nevada Building, before what his father remembered as being standing-room-only crowds.65

  Ansel attended lectures and thought nothing of rising to ask questions of the learned speakers, one of whom was an East Coast museum curator whose expertise included architecture. Sixty years later, although the curator’s name did not come to mind, Ansel recalled their interaction:

  Ansel: I don’t understand.

  Curator: What is it that bothers you?

  Ansel: There are really no straight lines in nature.

  The curator digested this for quite a while, then responded.

  Curator: I can’t answer you on that—there are straight lines in nature, in some cases.

  Ansel: Yes, I know, there are some straight lines in crystals, and fracture planes, but 99.9 percent of nature is a fluid thing, which isn’t the least bit concerned with a straight line. There isn’t a straight line on the body.

  For that, the curator had no reply. However, two weeks later Ansel ran into him, and he congratulated his young questioner on his perspicacity.66

  Thanks to his regular visits and his enormous curiosity (with its accompanying stream of questions), Ansel became known to many of the exhibitors. Some generous soul invited him to work as a demonstrator at the Dalton Adding Machine display, but it was the Underwood Typewriter presentation that attracted him time and again. The impressive exhibit featured a huge working typewriter that was 1,728 times bigger than the company’s standard machine.67 To Ansel’s amazement, the technician in charge of the Underwood exhibition disclosed to him the secret behind its magical revolving stage show explaining the history of writing.68 Ansel treasured this confidence.

  At the Exposition’s Palace of Fine Arts, Ansel viewed what was said to be the “best and most important collection of modern art that has yet been assembled in America.”69 This proclamation asserted that the West had outdone the famed 1913 Armory Show in New York, acclaimed as the most significant international exhibition of painting and sculpture yet produced.70

  Although not much of the art presented at the Exposition has subsequently proved to be of great consequence, there were some important exceptions. Ansel did see an exhibition of pictorial photography that included three prints by Edward Weston as well as some by Imogen Cunningham, although they had no impact on him at the time.71 He also saw paintings by the Impressionists Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir, as well as work by such masters as Munch, Rodin, Rousseau, Turner, Goya, Tiepolo, Van Dyck, and Tintoretto. The Italian Futurists Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, and Severini, among others, were displayed here for the first time in the United States.72 The Futurists had refused to participate in the Armory Show because they were denied their own separate exhibition space, so their presence in San Francisco was considered to be a coup.73

  Explaining their movement, Umberto Boccioni wrote,

  The simultaneousness of states of mind in the work of art; that is the intoxicating aim of our art . . . In painting a person on a balcony seen from inside the room, we do not limit the scene to what the square frame of the window renders visible; but we try to render the sum total of visual sensations which the person on the balcony has experienced; the sun-bathed throng in the street, the double row of houses which stretch to right and left, the beflowered balconies, etc. This implies the simultaneousness of the ambient, and, therefore, the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic and independent of one another . . . This decomposition is not governed by fixed laws, but it varies according to the characteristic personality of the object and the emotions of the onlooker.74

  Ansel’s imagination had clearly been captured by the Futurists. Back at home, he arrayed a rainbow of crayons before him and made an abstract drawing, Complementary Dynamism of Mr. C. H. Adams, titled and dated 1915 in the thirteen-year-old’s bold, immature script. The Futurist portrait of his father was apparently inspired, in both content and title, by Balla’s Dynamic Decomposition of a Motor in Rapid Movement, then on view at the Exposition. Ansel sent a second drawing to his cousin Margaret in Massachusetts accompanying a proper thank-you note for the sheet music she had sent him for his fourteenth birthday.75 Built on a framework of sharply angled forms outlined in pencil and fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, the shapes w
ere colorfully crayoned in blue and green with one pop of yellow, a splash of black, and two smudges of red. Ansel definitely colored within the lines. His accompanying letter explained that this was a “‘Futurist’ picture called ‘Complete Diagnosis of the Copeland Family.’” He apologized if they saw it as an insult. Young Ansel did not lack self-confidence.

  When asked years later what influence the Futurist exhibition had had on him, Ansel replied, “I can remember . . . reacting very strongly to many of the paintings, and reacting very badly to the sculpture. The paintings were abstract; you could do what you wanted with them in your mind. But in sculpture you had a tangible thing, like a rock or a tree. I had a terrible time with some of the sculpture.”76

  Reading, music, astronomy, Emerson, Ingersoll, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Lobos Creek, and the great Pacific: a rich broth simmered in Ansel’s mind. Charlie took him for a long walk out on the sand dunes, and companionably, they gazed at the Pacific as it entered San Francisco Bay through the Golden Gate. Ansel confessed that as much as he loved music, he was not sure it would be the best choice for his life, or the best thing he could accomplish in this world. With quiet passion, his father urged him to take as long as he needed to find his future, even if it meant twenty-five years. Charlie was determined that Ansel’s life would not be wasted as he believed his own to have been.77

  Chapter 2: Yosemite

  In the spring of 1916, Ansel found himself sentenced to bed to recuperate from a pernicious cold. Aunt Mary tried to keep the fourteen-year-old entertained with a variety of books. One in particular, In the Heart of the Sierras by J. M. Hutchings, struck a resonant chord with her nephew.1 Ansel was riveted by the book’s adventurous tale, set in Yosemite Valley and “profusely illustrated,” as its title page proclaimed, with 152 maps, engravings, and photographs.

  Ansel’s very active imagination was held captive by Yosemite, with Hutchings’s book confirming for him the tantalizing prospect revealed in a diorama featured in the Southern Pacific’s exhibition at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Although the walk-through stage sets had merely hinted at the true grandeur to be personally experienced at the giant redwoods, Mount Shasta, Lake Tahoe, and Yosemite Valley, they were truly impressive.2

  Yosemite’s national reputation as a place like no other had begun nearly seventy years earlier, when rumors of a spectacular cleft in the Sierra Nevada circulated about California. Two gold miners, sidetracked by bear hunting, stumbled upon a valley overlook in October 1849. One kept a diary that described the valley below as being “enclosed by stupendous cliffs rising perhaps 3,000 feet from their base which gave us cause for wonder.” To them, the immense mound of granite that was Half Dome looked like a loaf of bread neatly sliced in half.3

  Yosemite Valley had been home to Native Americans for some four thousand years, and to the Ahwahneechee for at least the last eight hundred. They called themselves the people of the Ahwahnee, or place of an open mouth, their name for their grand home hidden in the mountains.4

  In the mid–nineteenth century, settlers came in waves to California, drawn by tales of prosperity. Native Americans, trying to protect their ancestral lands, proved troublesome to the interlopers, and the federal government gave notice to the tribes of the central Sierra that they were to report for relocation to a reservation on the Fresno River. When this arrogant offer was ignored by the Ahwahneechee, the Mariposa Battalion was formed and authorized by the state to make the tribe comply. A company of men entered Yosemite Valley on or around March 27, 1851.5 Describing the experience, Dr. Lafayette Bunnell, the battalion’s medic, wrote, “None but those who have visited this most wonderful Valley, can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view that was there presented . . . and, as I looked a peculiarly exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being.”6

  How Yosemite got its name is a matter of conjecture. Perhaps Bunnell, in his attempts to communicate with the Ahwahneechees, erroneously concluded that the valley was called Uzamati (actually their name for grizzly bear) and through that mistake, and a small twist of tongue, it became known as Yosemite.7 Other theories posit that the name was selected as an ursine metaphor for the belligerent Ahwahneechee, or, alternatively, that the vain white soldiers appropriated the word to refer to their own grizzly-bear-like bravery.8 A fourth version is the most interesting. To the Ahwahneechee, the phrase “Yo-che-ma-te” meant “some among them are killers.” The name Yosemite may thus have been the Ahwahneechee’s chilling description of the Mariposa Battalion, a reminder even today of the violent usurpation of the valley.9

  No sooner had most of the Ahwahneechee been removed from the valley than curiosity seekers appeared. Writers produced adulatory tomes, and if they did not do full justice to Yosemite, they nevertheless made this much clear: a great religious experience awaited the visitor. By the time the first stagecoach road was completed in 1874, 2,656 tourists had visited the valley, now engraved with newly blazed trails and simple inns. Only fifty Native Americans remained, most employed as maids or trail laborers. The author of the book that so excited Ansel, J. M. Hutchings, wrote and published many promotional articles about Yosemite’s glories in his position as editor of California Magazine. He became the valley’s major hotel proprietor and was acknowledged as the impresario of Yosemite.10

  On June 30, 1864, at a time when the country was torn asunder by the cataclysm of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Yosemite Grant Act placing Yosemite Valley under the protection of the state of California in the very first instance of preservation of scenic lands for the nation.11 This affirmation of the future was accomplished with the stroke of a pen, not with a sword. California was mandated to “accept this grant upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation [and] shall be inalienable for all time.”12 Mankind’s prevailing attitude for eons had been that land that was not used—be it for hunting, tilling, or building—had no value; perhaps America had to finally run out of land, the entire country conquered clear to the Pacific, before there could be an awareness that some places must be saved.13

  By 1916, Yosemite had been transformed into a vacation spot, with all the necessary comforts. His imagination fired by Hutchings’s book, Ansel realized that the park was only two days’ journey from San Francisco. His father had been promising a real vacation, and Ansel now insisted it must be Yosemite. Reservations were made and on June 1, 1916, Charlie, Ollie, and Ansel boarded the train in Oakland. Aunt Mary stayed at home with Grandpa Bray because she couldn’t bear to leave Blinkers, the cat.14

  The train trip was a grand event for Ansel. The changing scenery enchanted him, from the grimy sections of the city to the rolling, grass-covered hills from which the train emerged into the great San Joaquin Valley. They disembarked in Merced and enjoyed a proper lunch at a hotel before boarding the Yosemite Valley Railroad, nicknamed the Shortline to Paradise, bound for El Portal, the gateway to Yosemite.

  Heat rippled off the earth. The Adamses were wearing conventional traveling attire, covered in layers from head to toe to protect them from dust, but they also had to contend with one-hundred-degree-plus temperatures. Ollie relented just a bit, permitting outer appearances to slip somewhat by agreeing that Ansel and Charlie could remove their jackets. She herself, however, maintained propriety in a long skirt, bloomers, high-necked blouse, jacket, and all. Decorously, she allowed that she felt a little damp.15

  The night they spent at the luxurious four-story Del Portal Hotel, with its two dining rooms, pool room, music room, bar, and barber shop, seemed endless to Ansel, who awoke at dawn, bursting with impatience to board the large and completely open touring bus that would take them into the valley proper.16 The rough gravel road climbed two thousand feet in ten miles, joining the old Coulterville Road (completed in 1874 as the first route into the valley for wheeled vehicles) for the final leg.17 Hats tied firmly to heads and heavy clothes were obligatory protection against the
clouds of dust that swirled about them, which even the park’s administrators warned against, acknowledging, “The one great drawback to the visitor’s pleasure is the fact that he is driven over rough roads so dusty that when he arrives at his destination his dearest friend could not recognize him.”18 But this same air also held the sweet fragrance of pine.19 Ansel delighted in it all.

  The bus rumbled along the banks of the Merced River, revealing little until they found themselves on the valley floor, turned a bend, pulled into a scenic turnout, and beheld Valley View. Ansel’s first vantage point set his very small self into humbling perspective, as he saw everything not from the grand heights of Inspiration Point—the most dramatic and popular entrance into Yosemite, where the great natural stone monuments appear at eye level—but instead from the base of the valley itself, looking up and up and up. El Capitan loomed above him on the left, and Bridalveil Fall tumbled down the precipitous cliff on his right. Between these two landmarks, the vertical granite walls of Yosemite Valley marched in recession, punctuated by occasional domes and spires and capped at their very end by a glimpse of the top of Half Dome. Ansel’s bright eyes flitted from wonder to wonder, but the impression that would last his lifetime was that of soaring gray granite cliffs. An early guest at Hutchings’s hotel in 1871 had recorded his own view of the scene, noting, “It seemed to me as though we were in a huge Sarcophagus for the almost perpendicular wall of granite seemed to shut us in, their crests varying from two to five thousand feet.”20 Those same confining walls seemed to hold nothing but promise for Ansel.

  The Adams family arrived at Camp Curry and alighted upon a platform, where they were feather-dusted by the young staff and greeted by the owner, David Curry, whose thunderous proclamation “Welcome to Camp Curry!” echoed off the close-by cliffs and proved him worthy of his title, “The Stentor of Yosemite.” (Upon their departure, Curry provided a theatrical sendoff by shouting “Farewell!” likewise at a decibel level well above that of mere mortal man.)21