Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Ansel’s musical studies had been getting short shrift. It was difficult for him to keep up the charade of making music his life’s work when it meant spending long hours shackled to a piano in San Francisco. Just as his mind had been drawn to the blue skies, clouds, and fog flowing past the windows when he was in school, so did it wander to the mountains as he sat at the piano, his fingers on the keys. Ansel’s siren and muse were Yosemite and the Sierra, not Bach and Beethoven.

  After days away from the piano, he would experience physical pain each time he returned for three to four hours of practice. He finally concluded that his hands were all wrong: too small to span many keys and, with his thinly padded fingertips, more suited to the violin than the piano.71 Glumly, he commiserated with Cedric, who had a pianist’s large hands, not a violinist’s.

  As the decade of the twenties progressed, Ansel’s future was further shaped by his urge to establish his own home and studio modeled upon Carpenter’s ideals, just as had Cedric, although he lacked his friend’s income. Ansel continued to live with his parents, earning only small sums from the piano teaching that he had begun in 1923, as well as occasional photographic jobs.

  During the late spring of 1926, at a party at his house in Berkeley, Cedric introduced Ansel to Albert Bender, who owned a small insurance agency and devoted his considerable energies to the support of artists and fine books.72 Albert Bender was to change the course of Ansel’s life.

  Born in Dublin in 1866, Albert had arrived penniless in America in 1883 and had gone on to build one of the most respected San Francisco insurance practices of his day. An exemplar of hybrid vigor—his father was a rabbi, his mother Catholic—Albert was a small man of regal bearing, with an aquiline nose and hooded eyes, his suit never complete without a flower in the jacket’s lapel.

  When Ansel met him, Albert was a lonely man, still grieving over the death, three years earlier, of his true love and first cousin, the painter Anne Bremer. Bremer had studied in Paris for more than ten years and returned to the United States committed to the new modern art, which she is credited with having introduced to San Francisco. She became president of the Sketch Club, founded for and by women artists in 1887 and dedicated to providing members with studio space and semiannual exhibitions.73 Bremer brought her cousin Albert into the center of San Francisco’s art scene.

  Scandalously, Bremer and Bender maintained adjoining apartments. After she died, he changed nothing, keeping her rooms as a memorial except during his thrice-yearly blowouts to celebrate his particular trinity of holidays: Yom Kippur, the Chinese New Year, and Saint Patrick’s Day, which he insisted was his birthday and on which he would bestow blessings upon all while dressed as a cardinal, complete with red cap.74

  Albert’s generosity was the stuff of legends. His pockets bulged with an endless supply of trinkets—rings, necklaces, brooches, and small carved figures—that he dispensed to those he met throughout the course of his day, be they building janitors or esteemed authors.75 He kept artists from starving and poets from dying of John Barleycorn thirst. Before meeting Ansel, Albert provided financial support to poets Robinson Jeffers and Ina Coolbrith and photographer Edward Weston, among many others.76

  Cedric had already built up each man to the other before his pivotal introduction. That night, Ansel showed Albert photographs from his high-country trips of the past summers to the Kings River—images of Roaring River Falls, Paradise Valley, and Marion Lake. A confirmed city boy, with all that implies, Albert had no interest in these as illustrations of places, but admired them as art, plain and simple.

  After viewing the photographs, Albert asked Ansel to bring them to his office the next morning, when he would see what he could do about them. With great anticipation, given Albert’s reputation, Ansel pushed open the door to room 412, 311 California Street, at ten o’clock on Monday, April 11, 1926. The office was a mess. Albert’s desk seemed useless, piled as it was under a jumble of papers, although its owner could ferret out what was necessary at its appointed time. Other visitors arrived and were dealt with, and phone calls were taken. Despite the hubbub, Ansel was not offended because Albert acted as if the photographs were more important than anything else in his obviously busy life.77

  With a smile aimed right at Ansel, Albert declared that the pictures were worthy of a portfolio. He decided there should be 150 copies (plus ten for the artist), each containing eighteen prints and selling for fifty dollars.78 (At project’s end the portfolio would be published with eighteen prints in an edition of 150.) After a quick assent from Ansel, and without any break in the action, Albert announced, “I must see the boys about this; we’ll get up a little subscription,” and on the spot he began telephoning his friends, wealthy patrons of the San Francisco arts.79 Albert first told each person that he was buying ten portfolios. Mrs. Sigmund Stern responded by taking another ten portfolios, as did her son-in-law Walter Haas, both of Levi Strauss riches. By lunchtime, fifty-six portfolios had been sold, although not one print had yet been made.80 Ansel departed with a check for five hundred dollars in his pocket.81

  Albert assured Ansel that his unmannered photographs of nature would be taken seriously by those who mattered.82 Ansel, who had never earned enough money from either performing or teaching piano to afford him independence from his parents, suddenly saw that photography could provide the necessary means.

  Proud of his new protégé, Albert touted Ansel about town, where he became known for his impromptu piano performances at parties. He met influential people who in turn introduced him to more of their kind. The July 1927 issue of the Overland Monthly described him to its readers: “Mr. Adams is a San Franciscan of unusual abilities in several professions. Already he is a musician of acknowledged ability and a great social favorite.”83

  Wealthy San Franciscans soon began to hire Ansel to make their portraits and to photograph their homes. The tony San Francisco store Gump’s engaged his services to produce still lifes of crystal for their catalogs, although his first job for that august establishment was a disaster. His assignment was to make a copy of a lithograph of Jesus; as he positioned his camera, the lens fell out and went straight through Christ’s head. Ansel had to pay Gump’s seventeen dollars, the lithograph’s wholesale price.84 Fortunately, he made few such mistakes, and a thin photography-produced income stream began to flow.

  The great documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, who became a longtime friend of Ansel’s, also knew Albert and believed he ruined her friend:

  His art patronage was a kind of a joke . . . He harmed a few people in this respect. He inoculated Ansel with the idea that an artist had to develop his patrons, and Ansel became a “little brother of the rich,” under Albert’s guidance. Ansel became somewhat their entertainer and it wasn’t good for him.85

  There is some truth in what she said. Ansel would forevermore search for his ideal patron, beyond Albert—an enlightened someone who would lift the burden of finances from the back of this creative artist. It was evident in a certain unbecoming obsequiousness he displayed when he was around the wealthy, whatever their personal achievements (or lack thereof). Albert Bender had, without hesitation, steered Ansel firmly away from the piano and toward photography as a career; it was not only the promise of money, but also Albert’s approbation that fired the young man’s confidence.

  Chapter 4: Monolith

  While Ansel’s photography steadily progressed, his personal life was often a wreck. This perhaps should not be surprising, considering that his most immediate experience with male-female relationships was the example of his parents, a formal and proper couple who usually addressed each other as “Mrs. Adams” or “Mr. Adams.” When they were in the privacy of their own home, and only the family was present, names were softened to Ollie and Charlie. They did not express their feelings with hugs or kisses; emotions were held at bay, kept remote. In the 747-page transcript of his oral-history interview, Ansel mentioned his mother only rarely, and his Aunt Mary, a central figure in his upbringin
g, not at all.

  Although Ollie emotionally oppressed her husband at every turn, Charlie cast her qualities in a positive light, at the same time calling himself a failure.1 It was understood that Charlie had not met her standards, and it was now up to Ansel to achieve them.

  Having no good model for a real-life relationship, Ansel worshipped idealized love, the purest of feelings above the physical plane. When he met Virginia Best in Yosemite in 1921, he saw her as good raw material, and planned to mold her into his perfect woman.

  Virginia, born on January 18, 1904, was the blond, blue-eyed daughter of Harry Cassie Best, the owner of Best’s Studio, and Anne Rippey Best. Her parents had met in Yosemite in late May 1901, when the then thirty-seven-year-old Harry, on an extended camping trip, fell in love with the twenty-two-year-old woman who ran Lippincott’s photographic tent studio. Within two months of their meeting, Harry and Anne were married at the base of Yosemite’s Bridalveil Fall, called Pohono by the Ahwahneechee.2

  In the year of Ansel’s birth, 1902, Harry Cassie Best established his painting studio in Yosemite, in a simple 720-square-foot, one-story wooden building whose exterior had been painted to resemble stone.3 The self-taught Best was a Western landscape painter in the oversentimentalized tradition, whose paintings lacked the fine technique and atmosphere commanded by artists of Bierstadt’s level. In service to a conventional imagination, Best painted such gems as Ramona Going Through the Wild Mustard and Innocence, mannered portraits of exceptionally large-eyed, pretty young women dressed in tantalizingly diaphanous gowns.4 Best employed a photographer to snap vacationers at Mirror Lake and sold various photographic views, which he called “fotografs,” along with his paintings and the usual variety of Yosemite souvenirs.

  Because of her parents’ migratory behavior—the family spent winters in southern California and summers in Yosemite—Virginia missed months of school and was always struggling to make up work. She, like Ansel, never earned a high school degree. Fragile health afflicted Anne Best, and when she died of tuberculosis, in 1920, sixteen-year-old Virginia assumed her mother’s place as housekeeper and cook, a role she had already in large part shouldered in deference to Anne’s disabilities.5 In 1927, Best built a new weatherized studio that included a sales gallery and a darkroom with living quarters in back so that he and his daughter could live in Yosemite all year long.6

  The summer of 1921, park ranger Ansel Hall presented to the Bests a gangling nineteen-year-old kid from San Francisco who could not be described as handsome, with his crooked nose, hooded brown eyes, and ears at right angles to his head. Still determined to be a classical pianist, Ansel knew he must practice daily but there were only two pianos in all of the valley. Ranger Hall queried, “Could this young man practice on the Best’s Chickering upright?” Harry Cassie Best graciously agreed. This is how Ansel met the seventeen-year-old Virginia, herself a real Yosemite girl, well versed in natural history. It may have been love at first sight for Ansel and first listen for Virginia. Years later she recalled that she did not immediately react to him until she heard him play the piano. Virginia not only adored music but with her rich contralto voice she held hopes of a career as a classical singer. Though his hands were physically too small to become a great pianist, Ansel tried to make up for that handicap by achieving an exquisite touch. After listening to him practice, Virginia opened herself to their friendship. According to Virginia, “It took me quite a while before I realized that it wasn’t only the piano that brought him down to the [studio] . . . Because I just really wasn’t emotionally ready to get interested in anybody, and didn’t believe anybody’d be interested in me.”7

  Ansel fell hard for Virginia, and she, eventually, for him. For the first year it was nothing more than friendship, but after his return to Yosemite the next summer, Ansel was compelled to write to his father that he was in love with a girl who reminded him of his mother.8

  Virginia was unhappy as her father’s helper. Harry kept her busy working from early morning until she flopped exhausted into bed each night, and she ached to be married and to have her own home.

  During their long winter separations, Ansel and Virginia exchanged frequent, detailed letters. Whenever his seemed to dwell too much on photography, Virginia would admonish him to remember that his destiny lay in music. She considered photography an unworthy use of his brilliant talents.9 Ansel reassured her that photography would remain nothing more than a hobby. He shared his dreams of the home and studio they would build, a warm refuge with a fireplace where friends would love to gather.10 While they set no wedding date, by 1923 they considered themselves engaged. When Virginia consulted a Ouija board about their future, however, it prophesied that they would not marry until 1927; consolingly, Ansel replied that it would certainly be sooner than that.11 He applied himself to his musical studies with added vigor.12

  Suddenly, though, Ansel’s ardor for Virginia cooled. In November 1923, he cautioned her that his first allegiance must be to his family; finances were precarious, and duty bound him to assist his father in every way possible.13 Not coincidentally, Ansel had recently begun his friendship with Cedric Wright, and through him, and his Bohemian lifestyle in Berkeley, was meeting many other young artists and musicians, some of them his new friend’s students, some of them female.

  In the summers of 1925 and 1926, Ansel was invited to join Professor Joseph LeConte II, son of the famed geologist (he proved that Yosemite Valley is the result of glaciation) and Sierra Club leader, and his family on six-week pack trips into the Kings River Sierra. Following the death of John Muir in 1915, Professor LeConte had been elected the second president of the Sierra Club. He assumed Ansel’s expenses in exchange for an album of his photographs of their sojourn.14

  On that 1925 expedition, Ansel made a straightforward picture of East Vidette with his four-by-five-inch camera. When he returned home to San Francisco, he printed the negative and realized he could have “seen” the subject better. With that informing experience, Ansel returned to again photograph East Vidette during the summer of 1926. The difference in the vision of a year is astounding. The subject is still one mountain, but rather than the routine framing of uninteresting and flat foreground that he had chosen in 1925, he set up his tripod on a rise, drawing the strongly angled hillside into the foreground. Both compositionally and tonally, the two prints are worlds apart and clearly display Ansel’s artistic growth in a single year.15

  Little Joe, as Professor LeConte was known, had been a childhood friend of Charlie’s. His son, Joe Junior, and daughter, Helen, would also be going on the trip. Helen was told by her father that she could invite one girlfriend. When Virginia discovered that it was not to be she, she asked Helen, “Why didn’t you ask me, too?” Helen later remembered, “Well, they [Ansel and Virginia] were supposedly engaged. But at the same time, Ansel was madly in love with a lot of Cedric’s pupils. We couldn’t tell if he was engaged to them or to her or what, and my father didn’t want any other women along, anyhow.”16

  The campers woke each morning at five and hit the trail by seven, all looking forward to Professor LeConte’s famous lunch. His reputation for serving up the best trailside vittles was no small part of Ansel’s decision to sign on: though skinny, he always loved to eat. These lunches were hardly the usual Sierra fare to be consumed during a short rest period. The mules were loaded with an entire side of bacon, a huge Edam cheese, a big ham and lots of hardtack, canned fruits and vegetables, and a variety of Knorr’s dried soups. At noon every day, Professor LeConte would produce fluffy hot biscuits courtesy of his reflector oven, along with such tasty items as corned beef, boiled potatoes, and fried onions.17

  In his spare moments, Ansel pored over his pocket-size edition of Carpenter’s Towards Democracy. Upon his return to San Francisco that fall, he wrote Virginia a letter embellished with such Carpenterian platitudes as, “The path that God would send me shining fair.” Ansel informed her that he had spent the nest egg he had been accumulating for their marriage on a ne
w Mason and Hamlin grand piano. At the end of this letter, Ansel, a pagan by his own description, had the temerity to announce that he intended to throw himself upon the mercy of God to determine his future.18 Virginia must have seen this split coming, but it was terrible for her anyway.

  In fact, Ansel had given his life not to God but to a pretty violinist named Mildred Johnson. His infatuations with Mildred, Dorothy Minty, Margaret Colf, and a few others never lasted long, so great was the pressure of his intense adulation. Each young woman in turn simply got worn out by his attempts to control most aspects of her life.19

  Ansel seemed able to assume only one of two roles when relating to another: he was either the teacher or the student. He found no one but Virginia who was willing to put up with his endless lecturing on education, conduct, and discipline. For her part, Virginia coped in a passive-aggressive way, listening thoughtfully to everything he said and then doing pretty much as she wanted.

  Somehow, despite and throughout his wanderings, Virginia remained determined to marry Ansel, and sent him her poems and snips of aromatic pine boughs to remind him of what she was fond of describing as “my world.” That world, of course, was Yosemite, the key to her eventual success with him.

  But in San Francisco during the winter of 1925–1926, following his breakup with Virginia, Ansel toiled at his piano lessons and earned some money as a music teacher, offering ten lessons for ten dollars.20 He formed the Milanvi Trio, composed of violinist Mildred, pianist Ansel, and dancer Vivienne, whence the name. Announcements were printed, and they were booked for a smattering of engagements, but Ansel was a failure as an accompanist, inevitably drowning out the violin and racing ahead of the dancer.21 He had an elegant calling card printed with the inscription “Ansel Easton Adams, Piano,” in a serifed font. But in the end, he felt dismally stalled at a local level of mild musical recognition. No one ever “discovered” him, and the future lost its promise. As the string of women evaporated, his disenchantment with the music scene increased, until he finally dismissed it as tawdry and unworthy of his involvement.22