Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Expeditions to remote sites such as Yosemite were added gambles because the glass plates had to be hauled over rough trails and up and down boulders and cliffs as the photographer struggled to obtain the ultimate view. Too often, the plates shattered into shards before the safety of home could be reached.

  Carleton Watkins, who came to the valley in 1861, became a master of the collodion wet plate. He had chanced into photography in 1854 but grew so adept that within ten years he had established his Yosemite Gallery in San Francisco, where he sold his famous views. Not only was Watkins aesthetically and technically up to the severe challenge of Yosemite, but he also had great physical courage. He traveled with some two thousand pounds of equipment, including a mammoth glass-plate camera thirty inches square and a yard deep, which could produce negatives (and therefore contact prints) as large as eighteen by twenty-two inches.1 In these grand photographs, the monumental character of Yosemite was displayed with the impressive dignity and size that previously had been the province only of painters.2 There had been other, even earlier photographers, but Watkins was the first of the greats. Across the country, it was generally agreed that all photographic landscapes must be measured against the standard set by him,3 and few since have matched his accomplishments.

  Watkins’s photographs provided the convincing visual proof that prompted Congress to recognize Yosemite’s importance and the need for its preservation. In consequence, the landmark Yosemite Act of 1864 granted the valley and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees to California.4 The broader concept of creating national parks grew out of the mood of Congress and the American people, and had its roots in this earlier protection of Yosemite.

  Sadly, Watkins himself was stalked by poverty, losing his gallery and most of his negatives to bankruptcy in 1874. Still determined, he returned to the same sights and rephotographed them in an attempt to build a new archive of material. But his tragic misfortunes continued with his blindness in 1903 and the destruction of his glass plates and most of his prints in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.5 His family eventually committed him, a broken man, to a mental hospital, where he died in 1916 and was buried in an unmarked grave.6

  Watkins had a competitor for the title of best nineteenth-century Yosemite photographer. Eadweard Muybridge, also then living in San Francisco, first worked in the valley in 1867, returning to his studio with 260 glass plates.7 When he went back to Yosemite in 1872, he took along a mammoth plate camera. His finished prints, also made from collodion wet plates, were as beautiful as Watkins’s. Muybridge exhibited this work in a rival San Francisco gallery and quickly became the next Yosemite sensation.8

  Muybridge’s life story is almost unbelievable, for his Yosemite success was really only the beginning. In 1872, the then-governor of California, Leland Stanford, bet a friend twenty-five thousand dollars that at some point in time a galloping horse had all four feet off the ground, and he hired Muybridge to prove him right. Muybridge constructed a series of trip shutters that took a sequence of still photographs, which furnished the hard evidence that won Stanford his bet.

  In 1874, Muybridge killed his wife’s lover, was found not guilty by reason of justifiable homicide, and judiciously fled the country for a few months to photograph in Central America. For the rest of his life (he died in 1904), he eschewed landscape photography to concentrate on “stop-motion” studies of people and animals, images that were to become basic subject matter for artists and an influential precursor of the motion picture.9

  The next Yosemite photographer of note was George Fiske, whose prints captured a valley bustling with people and business. Fiske opened a studio in Yosemite and in 1880 became the first photographer to live there year-round.10 He made the initial extensive winter studies of the park, from snow-topped granite domes to traceries of ice on branches.

  Whereas Watkins and Muybridge had scrambled like mountain goats, positioning their huge tripods and cameras under harrowing conditions to obtain views most mortals could never personally experience, Fiske, perhaps because he was older, loaded his cameras and tripods into a wheelbarrow (dubbed Cloudchasing Chariot) and followed the flat valley floor. Photographing from the same trails where tourists hiked, he sold them what they themselves had seen.11 By 1890, however, Kodak made it easy for every tourist to take pictures, and Fiske’s sales began steadily to decline.12

  Painters were slow to arrive in Yosemite; surely this was the first time photographers had co-opted such a great, new subject. Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, William Keith, and Thomas Moran, the last of the great American romantic landscapists, painted Yosemite with vigor coupled with vast imagination. But theirs was a dying vision: landscape had become the province of photography. The public wanted to see how it really was, and it was believed that photography could be trusted where painting could not. The French painter Paul Delaroche, upon viewing a photograph for the first time, is reputed to have pronounced, “From today painting is dead!”13 His prediction was coming true; painting had to reinvent itself.

  For the most part, the painters had been schooled in Europe, while few photographers had any art background at all. The European landscape was tamed by graceful steeples and towers, its hills studded with villages whose shape changed with the contours of the land beneath them, not vice versa, as in America. Rules of composition could be followed by placing the vertical of a building here for emphasis or the curve of a road there for balance.

  The landscape of the American West, in contrast, was sheer chaos; it was not called “wild” for nothing.14 Famous for his detailed and dramatic oils, Albert Bierstadt saw his popularity dwindle with the ascent of photography during the late nineteenth century. The public had thought that Bierstadt’s canvases depicted a real world, and viewers and critics alike became angry when his paintings’ unfaithfulness to reality was revealed.15 In 1879, one writer complained of a particular work, “Setting aside the question of its artistic qualities, it represents a scene that is physically impossible.”16

  Later, Ansel’s photographs would be likened to Bierstadt’s paintings, a comparison that would confound and anger the photographer, who believed that the painter had tarted up the supremely beautiful natural world with inaccurate geography and scale, in some instances literally moving mountains to better fit his canvas, and that he had imposed overly dramatic lighting.17 The grown-up Ansel could not stand Bierstadt’s work.18

  Efforts by the painters who followed paled next to those early and energetic, if largely unsuccessful, attempts. Landscape has not been the subject of most twentieth-century American painting and is commonly dismissed as a nineteenth-century romantic concern.

  From his first days with a camera, fourteen-year-old Ansel approached photography seriously. As a young child, he had watched his father train his Kodak Bullseye camera on wildflowers so that Ollie could paint them back into life’s colors on china. Lying in bed, Ansel had witnessed the phenomenon of the camera obscura as a tiny opening between the window shade and the window projected upside-down pictures of the outside world on his ceiling, the opening acting as a lens and his unlit bedroom as the camera. When Ansel asked his father about this image in his bedroom, Charlie opened up the Bullseye and demonstrated how it worked.19 Ansel grew familiar with photography through his father’s approach to it—as a useful tool—but when he decided to make an exposure, a passion not unlike Charlie’s for astronomy blossomed in him.

  Soon after his arrival in Yosemite in 1916, Ansel sent two photographs that he had made with his Box Brownie to his Aunt Mary, telling her that he would go broke at the pace he was snapping pictures.20 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Kodak had introduced and marketed the Box Brownie as a child’s camera, with six exposures on each roll of film. That children could make photographs was part of the Kodak revolution. Just twenty-eight years before Ansel came to Yosemite, George Eastman had invented the handheld camera and standardized film and processing equipment. Photographs could now be made by anyone; even a child could press the button and
let Kodak do the rest. After a month in the photographic treasure trove of Yosemite, Ansel had taken a great many pictures.

  On their return home to San Francisco, Ollie assembled Ansel’s photographs into an album as a souvenir of the family’s vacation. In a flowing script, she titled each in white ink on the dark pages. It is clear from these initial images that even then Ansel did not just snap away, but instead attempted to arrange what he wanted to capture within the space of his viewfinder. These photographs show an awareness of composition and an understanding of near-far relationships, with many containing a close foreground subject posed against Yosemite’s majestic cliffs.

  Two images are particularly interesting to consider.21 One is Ansel’s first photograph of the entire valley from Inspiration Point, a location he would return to again and again. The day was clear and bright, and he made a straightforward image of El Capitan, with Bridalveil Fall and a sliver of Half Dome to the east—all in all, the same photograph snapped by thousands before him and millions since.

  However, Ansel’s portrait of El Capitan is amazing. Framed by the leafy branches of foreground trees, its face rises to fill the image with pale-gray granite; there is nothing to indicate the outsize scale that is the dominant trait of the mountain. This is not a simple snapshot recording El Capitan, but something more. Here contrasting form, texture, and tone have been considered. Ansel had no formal training in art or composition, but this one photograph provides an indication of his innate visual abilities, giving credence to the theory that great artists are born, not made.

  Following his first summer in Yosemite, Ansel found part-time employment with a photo finisher in San Francisco, from whom he learned rudimentary darkroom technique. His work there over the winters of 1917 and 1918 constituted most of his early photographic schooling.22

  Until the late 1920s, his piano studies continued to form the center of his education. Photography was largely relegated to his summers in Yosemite; the other months of the year were consumed by hours of daily practice, frequent lessons, and attendance at all the classical concerts of note given in San Francisco.

  Ansel was told, and came to believe, that he must acquire the impeccable technique that was possible only through complete mastery of his instrument. He also learned not to confuse technique with art, which was an expression above and beyond. Intuitively, Ansel applied these lessons to his photography as well. Music demanded rigorous, regular practice, and fluency on the instrument. Adapting the same discipline to photography eventually earned Ansel an unmatched knowledge of its technique; he approached both media with the attitude that constant hard work was essential for success.

  A typical day for Ansel in San Francisco began with breakfast with Charlie, Ollie, Grandfather Bray, and Aunt Mary. After Charlie left for work, at about eight-thirty, he would sit down at the piano in the living room and practice until ten-thirty or so, when he would make tea for himself and the others. He then returned to the piano until lunch, at noon, after which he was back at the keyboard again until about four, when he generally escaped to the outdoors for a couple of hours before dinner.23

  In 1917, Ansel satisfied enough requirements to earn his one and only nonhonorary degree, graduating from the Kate M. Wilkins Grammar School at age fifteen. After this, Charlie abandoned all further efforts to fit his square peg of a son into the round holes of formal schooling.

  When Ansel returned to Yosemite in June 1917, he took with him his first serious photographic equipment: a tripod and two cameras, one of which used glass plates (most likely a four-by-five-inch view camera), and the other a Vest Pocket Kodak Autographic Special, a small folding camera suitable for snapshots.24 The fifteen-year-old was beginning to establish personal standards for his photographs, writing to his aunt that the quality of print finishing available in the valley was not good enough, so he would have to do it himself when he returned to the city.25 The following year, he packed the basic chemistry he would need to develop films himself in Yosemite.

  His initial exposure to photography as a creative art, beyond what was on display at the 1915 Exposition, came from the prints he saw each summer in Yosemite’s artists’ studios. Four of these—Boysen’s, Pillsbury’s, Jorgensen’s, and Best’s—exhibited and sold photographs, but for the most part, they offered technically proficient popular views.26 Ansel read all the photographic magazines he could lay his hands on and attended two camera-club meetings, which he found impossibly boring.27 It was at one of these, however, that he met William Dassonville, known in the Bay Area for his line of hand-coated photographic papers known as Charcoal Black, producing prints on a variety of textured and toned papers that looked quite like charcoal drawings. Dassonville was also a well-respected Pictorialist who specialized in soft-focus landscapes. When he discovered that Dassonville was a San Francisco neighbor, Ansel occasionally visited, finding the older man (twenty-three years his senior) kind, welcoming, and willing to share his much greater technical expertise. Ansel once credited Dassonville with teaching him that photography could be art.28

  Ansel’s photography quickly progressed from simple shots for the family album to images in which he took artistic pride. In 1918, the sixteen-year-old entered a print in Photo-Era’s advanced competition for architectural subjects and was awarded an honorable mention (one of fifteen given) for A San Francisco Residence.29 Like the majority of photography magazines published in the first years of this century, Photo-Era had a Pictorialist orientation and was aimed at the hobbyist.

  Pictorialism—that is, photography that evoked the qualities of painting—was then the predominant fashion in photography, prized by magazines, competitions, and salons. This was the style that Ansel first tried to emulate. A recurrent criticism of photography was that it was mechanical, produced by a machine and not by the artist; by the turn of the century, some photographers had concluded that their prints must imitate already sanctioned art forms, such as painting, drawing, or etching.

  Pictorialism had no truck with reality but instead muted the truth of hard lines with soft focus, diffused light, and textured papers. Some Pictorialists even applied brushstrokes or an etching stylus to wet emulsion, so that the effects created by the photographer’s hand sometimes overshadowed those achieved by the lens.

  In an attempt to make photographs of “serious” subjects, photographers composed images based on grand themes. These prints often bore titles such as Motherhood, or reenacted historic or mythic moments such as the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, as in Imogen Cunningham’s Eve Repentant, of 1910.30

  Ansel’s energies had been focused on the technical mastery of photography, but as he achieved that, he began thinking about the medium’s expressive potential from the Pictorialist point of view. In 1920, he wrote to his father from Yosemite to tell of his plan to photograph the Diamond Cascade. Using classical art-composition lingo, he described his intentions in terms of “line,” “tone,” “form,” and “texture,” his superficial understanding picked up in his readings of the Pictorialist-oriented press.31

  Remaining completely within the Pictorialist tradition, Ansel chose a soft-focus lens to achieve his desired image of the rushing Merced River corseted by narrow, rocky borders.32 The finished photograph depicts a bright arrow of water penetrating the surrounding dark banks; the soft focus renders the subject so abstract that it cannot be identified without a caption. Diamond Cascade is the extreme example of Ansel’s short period of experimentation with photographic impressionism.33

  Over the next four years, Ansel would make use of such other Pictorial­ist conventions as the bromoil process, in which an oily ink is applied to the paper by roller or brush to produce prints with marked painterly, as well as charcoal, qualities.34 Ansel experimented with many aspects of photography, including making photographs through microscopes and telescopes. He tried out a variety of printing stock, from parchmentlike sheets to matte-surfaced, golden-toned papers, and attached his photographs to textured, colored mounts rangi
ng in hue from buff to deep chocolate. He began signing his prints, at first just “Adams,” but soon “Ansel Easton Adams” or “Ansel E. Adams,” with a curlicue-ending flourish.

  Visually, the great majority of these images were unremarkable and lacked a consistent style. In 1922, two of his photographs were reproduced in the Sierra Club Bulletin, one a completely lackluster picture of two deer with the photographer’s empty sleeping bag in the foreground, and the other a traditional landscape, View from Lyell Meadows, Lyell Fork of the Merced River, with the requisite foreground (river), middle ground (forest and mountains), and background (sky) divided into neat thirds.35

  This was the second time Ansel’s work was published.36 The first publication of one of his images occurred in 1921, when his straightforward architectural record, LeConte Memorial Lodge—Yosemite Valley, appeared in the San Francisco magazine Overland Monthly in unharmonious partnership with an overwrought poem by one R. R. Greenwood (“His were the bird notes of the crystal morn, / The Son of winds that frolic on the height / Was blended with the forest’s call forlorn”).37

  Also in 1922, Best’s Studio in Yosemite began selling Ansel’s landscapes, and in so doing became the first public space in which his photographs were exhibited. Most of the images were quiet studies that gave little indication of the drama Ansel would soon coax from the same scenery. Taken with a Zeiss Miroflex camera, these photographs were contact prints measuring approximately three and a quarter by four and a quarter inches, made on Kodak Parchmyn paper that produced dull prints of limited tonal range.