Mabel used her Taos estate, named Los Gallos for the painted ceramic cocks perched above its spacious courtyard, as a web to catch artists and writers of consequence.30 She fed off her guests’ energy, both intellectually and sexually, and was said to be insatiable in the latter department. Ansel later termed her “hypersexed,” though he firmly stated that he never fell for her: “I must say that my hyper was very different from her hyper.”31
When Los Gallos’s regular visitor D. H. Lawrence died, his widow, Frieda, fearing that Mabel would take her husband in death as she had done in life, mixed his ashes directly with the concrete that shaped his tomb.32 Una Jeffers, for her part, attempted to kill herself with a shotgun in the bathtub at Los Gallos when she learned of Mabel’s plans for her husband, Robinson. The failed suicide got the Jefferses out of harm’s way in Taos and back to their home in Carmel.33
At Los Gallos, Ansel met key figures from Alfred Stieglitz’s circle in New York, including Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, and Paul Strand, a high-powered group. Struck by the contrast between John Marin’s simplicity of spirit and the conversational convolutions of the Luhan/Lujan household, Ansel found the painter fascinating.34 Marin did not talk about his art; he just did it.
A native of New Jersey, Marin had spent most of the period from 1905 to 1911 in Europe, an obligatory destination for anyone who described himself or herself as a serious artist. In Paris, Marin met Steichen, who in turn presented the thirty-nine-year-old painter to Stieglitz. A few months later, in February 1909, Marin was given his first solo show at Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, and with that event found himself assured of a spot in the inner circle.35
On being introduced to Ansel at Mabel’s in 1930, Marin took an instant dislike to this loud, boisterous man with the black beard, but he completely reversed his assessment when Ansel sat down at the piano and began to play. Marin found the quality of even one note so sublime that he welcomed Ansel as a true friend.36
Ansel noticed that the painter ventured out many mornings without paper, pencils, or paint. He learned that it took Marin two or three weeks of quietly sitting in a place before he was ready to work; then there would be a flurry of production resulting in ten to fifteen watercolors. Ansel spent a morning watching Marin paint, the first time he had ever directly observed another artist working—an artist whose expressions moved him deeply.37 Marin dipped his thumb in the paint and then with utter confidence stroked the paper, creating in three emphatic moves, in brief silhouette, the Taos mountains rising before them.38
When it came to subject matter, Marin, like Ansel, responded most strongly to the landscape.39 Marin borrowed from the Futurists the use of slanting, dynamic lines, and from the Cubists the willingness to float a subject in space, so that unpainted areas were as carefully composed as painted ones.40 Ansel agreed with the others at Mabel’s that Marin’s watercolors placed him in the first rank of American artists.41
Ansel found himself a welcome houseguest wherever he traveled. He exuded high spirits and was always ready with a joke. He loved performing on the piano and was no snob about the instrument: any piano would do. In addition to his elegant Bach, he could be relied on to throw in some musical comedy, sounding the repetitive chords of the Danube Waltz with a strategic plop of his narrow bottom on the keys or, with a devilish grin, producing whole sonatas with an orange clutched in each hand.
Ansel was so much fun that parties seemed to revolve around him. His arrival in town signaled a binge of nightly merrymaking. With just a bit of encouragement and a few sips of bourbon, Ansel would lose whatever strictures his mother had inculcated. Following in Cedric’s footsteps, he believed that marriage did not disallow the appreciation of women. He smoked cigarettes and drank with abandon, though it was rare that he imbibed enough to interfere with his early reveille. As a precaution, he was known to glug quantities of olive oil before an alcoholic evening commenced.42
On this trip in the summer of 1930, Ansel was in particularly great form. In San Francisco, his young wife was ensconced in their newly built dream home/studio; he had landed a major commercial client, Yosemite Park and Curry Company; and his first book was about to be published.
At Mabel’s, Ansel shared Los Gallos’s two-bedroom gatehouse with Paul and Becky Strand. Georgia O’Keeffe, whom he had met the year before, was also about. But his discussions were mostly with Strand, the first serious photographer with whom he had talked extensively. Ansel knew that Strand’s photographs were exhibited in New York and admired by such notables as Alfred Stieglitz.
Although Ansel had met Edward Weston (who was just as committed to photography as Strand) at Albert Bender’s in 1928, their first meeting had not impressed either man. Weston’s memory of Ansel was of a fine pianist and weak photographer, and in turn, Ansel remembered that he had not responded to Weston’s photographs.43 Soon, however, they would become lifelong comrades.
Having brought no prints with him to Taos in 1930, Strand shared his recent negatives, all four by five inches. Placing him in front of a window and cautioning him to hold them only by their edges, slowly, one by one, Strand passed Ansel his precious sheets of film. Ansel was riveted, finding each exposure perfect and every composition ideal.
In discussing technique, Strand stressed the importance of glossy printing papers. He explained that the matte papers Ansel had always favored absorbed light and thus reduced the intensity of tonal values. Glossy papers, by reflecting light, rendered more fully and clearly the qualities of each photograph. Ansel became an immediate convert; Strand’s rationale was the catalyst that enlisted him fully into the straight-photography camp.44
Ansel later recalled his time with Strand as an eye-opening experience, revealing to him for the first time the full potential of his chosen medium. In his autobiography, Ansel claimed that it was this exchange that caused him finally to commit to photography as a career.45 Written fifty years after the fact, those words probably benefited from the passage of time and a romantic memory, for by this time Ansel—San Francisco studio and all—was already professionally established as a photographer.
But as important as his time with Strand was, Ansel’s contemporaneous writing concentrated on Marin, describing their meeting as the singular event of the trip, and his paintings as revelatory; in 1933, in letters to both Stieglitz and Strand, he would vow that viewing Marin’s watercolors had been his greatest art experience.46 Still, seeing Strand’s negatives served to confirm aesthetic decisions Ansel had already made, while talking with him verified his belief that photography could be a noble and an intellectual occupation.47
As proud as Ansel had been of Taos Pueblo, he was now forced to concede that it was compromised. No matter how straight the vision or how fine the focus, his prints did not have the purity of Strand’s or Stieglitz’s. In a letter to Virginia from New Mexico, Ansel announced that he had discovered a new outlook—one that could not be described in words but would have to be expressed in his photographs.48
Chapter 6: Straight Photography
“His photographs are like portraits of the giant peaks, which seem to be inhabited by mythical gods,” decreed the Washington Post of the Smithsonian Institution’s Pictorial Photographs of the Sierra Nevada Mountains by Ansel Adams.1 On display during January and February 1931, Ansel’s first solo museum exhibition featured sixty prints grouped into three categories: Sierra Nevada, Sierra Nevada Winter, and Canadian Mountains.2
Francis Farquhar, a fan of Ansel’s photographs from his years as editor of the Sierra Club Bulletin (1926–1946), most likely made the arrangements. Farquhar, a real Sierra Club hero, who served on its board from 1924 to 1951, worked as an accountant in his everyday life. An intrepid climber in the Sierra, he had many first ascents to his credit. It was Farquhar who brought Robert L. M. Underhill on the 1931 Outing to teach correct alpine roping techniques to the club for the first time.3 Farquhar had once worked for the National Park Service in Washington and still counted among his friends some of that city’s power
ful.4 Concurrent with the Smithsonian exhibit, Farquhar promoted his young friend in the first serious article written on the art of Ansel Adams.
Ansel Adams is emphatically a realist . . . The composition is not a conscious arrangement of the artist; it is inherent in the object itself. It is the artist’s genius which enables him to perceive at once the arrangement of masses, the flow of lines, and the texture of surfaces in the object of vision, whether it be a mountain, a landscape, a building, a cloud, a tree, a human form or face, or anything whatsoever.5
When the photographs came back from the Smithsonian, Ansel placed them on exhibition at his San Francisco home, complete with a beautifully printed list of titles. The negatives, all made between 1921 and 1930, were a summation of everything he had achieved in photography up to that date. With a decade of his work hung about him, Ansel found himself in an excellent position for some self-evaluation, and once more he concluded that he fell short of the standards set by Strand. He was not ashamed of the photographs, but their concentrated presence convinced him that he could go further. Ansel sensed that he was about to experience a momentous breakthrough. He awoke one spring morning fresh from dreams that had revealed photography as it should be, a powerful expression loyal to its innate strengths, to the best qualities of lens, camera, and the photographer’s eye. New subjects, new printing—pure photography was his for the taking!6
With Strand’s advice still ringing in his ears, Ansel began to use glossy papers.7 Deciding he could not reconcile new doctrine with old content, he also changed his subject matter. Perhaps he saw his work of the past few years as primarily illustrative of the Sierra, often for the purposes of others, particularly the Sierra Club; because the intent was not pure, he believed, neither could the subject matter be pure, much less the results. He began photographing commonplace objects found around the docks and beaches of San Francisco, from lichen-encrusted anchors to a beautifully lit, casual pile of ropes on a dock.8 Photographed under natural light, his first close-up detail from nature, entitled Leaves, Mills College, of 1931, revealed the precise magnification provided by a lens, at once an important strength and characteristic of the medium.9
Ansel was not breaking new ground with his sharply focused images of found objects or common scenes; since photography’s beginnings, practitioners from Daguerre to Watkins had celebrated the acute qualities of the lens, though for years at a time this tradition had fallen out of fashion (as witness the long-dominant Pictorialism). With his newly discovered style, Ansel had decided to matriculate in the school of pure, or straight, photography. If his first, albeit lovely, efforts were hardly pioneering, it would not take him long to make his own mark in that tradition.
Ansel’s immersion in serious photography deepened when, in late 1931, he accepted a position as photographic critic for the Fortnightly, a short-lived San Francisco review of literature, music, and the arts.10 This was the first time that the city’s art community had felt a need for a photography critic: the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum’s new young director, Lloyd Rollins, had unhesitatingly launched a revolutionary initiative to include photography within that grand museum’s halls, scheduling exhibitions of work by Eugène Atget, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams.
For the reviews, Ansel challenged himself to write criticism from a photographic point of view. His weak art-historical background was probably a plus because it meant he was not hampered by the analytic vocabulary constructed for painting and sculpture, or the definitions and symbols used by more traditionally grounded critics. Most important, the four reviews he wrote in late 1931 and early 1932 gave him the opportunity to put into words his own photographic philosophy; to judge from this evidence, Ansel’s basic aesthetic of straight photography was now fully determined.11
His first column centered on an exhibition of photographs by the Frenchman Eugène Atget, who had died only four years before. Ansel was impressed by his portraits of his Parisian environment, of the streets, buildings, and gardens of the fabled city. Working just after dawn, Atget had captured a world that was hauntingly unpeopled, with very public spaces transformed into private ones. Ansel’s glaring lack of knowledge of the history of photography was all too evident in his suggestion that Atget’s photographs might be the first example of photography as an art form; apparently he was not yet aware of the contributions made by such artists as Emerson, Timothy O’Sullivan, Gustav Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Watkins, among many others.12 In Ansel’s defense, in 1931 few people in the entire world knew much of anything about the history of the medium.
A month later, highly recommending the Edward Weston exhibition, Ansel counseled that viewers should bring to it a fresh outlook, one unadulterated by preconceptions formed through the experience of other arts. He lavished praise on Weston’s photographs, with one equivocation: he loved the images of rocks but not those of vegetables. A particularly curvaceous green pepper, a fully splayed cabbage leaf, the innards of a halved artichoke: each was made precious by Weston’s closely placed, incisively sharp lens. The rocks asserted themselves, immutable, but the vegetables had been arranged and sometimes shaped by the photographer. Ansel found them contrived.13
In his struggle to establish his own vision in the context of straight photography, Ansel committed his own share of contrivances in the work he produced at this time. To make Scissors and Thread, for example, he dropped the thread time and again over the scissors until their pattern pleased him,14 while for another studio photograph, called Still Life, he placed a hard-boiled egg in an egg slicer and pressed its wires into the white just to the point of penetration.15
Ansel eventually did find his own way in the still life genre: two years after his Weston review, he made Rose and Driftwood, one of his most divinely beautiful images.16 Ollie had brought him a spectacular white rose from her garden; in his studio, Ansel gently laid it upon a piece of driftwood and took its picture, using the available light from a nearby window to capture each finely veined petal contrasted against the striated grain of the darker wood. For all that Ansel had railed against Weston’s vegetables, he soon had a change of heart.
In such photographs as Rose and Driftwood and Still Life, Ansel applied conventional techniques commonly used in still life painting, carefully juxtaposing various objects for the best effects of composition, texture, and form. Weston, in contrast, in posing a single object—one pepper or one shell—against his usual blank, black background, broke from tradition.17
After Ansel’s Fortnightly review appeared, Weston wrote him a brilliant, carefully considered response. Instead of antagonizing his critic, he persuasively defended his still lifes, culminating with the assertion, “Photography as a creative expression . . . must be ‘seeing’ plus.”18 Although Weston claimed to be photographing only the thing itself, strenuously denying other associations, many felt that his photographs were evocative of something beyond the actual subject matter, so that shells became phalluses and peppers the nude female form. O’Keeffe endured the same criticism for her paintings of flower details, with their sexy stamens and pistils.
Ansel’s last published review for the Fortnightly was of Imogen Cunningham’s exhibition. He wrote glowingly of her sense of visualization but had the temerity to criticize her use of light and, with the zeal of the newly converted, chastise her for her choice of matte-finished paper.19
To Imogen, Ansel, sixteen years her junior, was definitely the young upstart. She had been selected by Weston to exhibit at the very important 1929 Film und Foto exhibit in Stuttgart, Germany. The show was based on the idea that pictures made by a camera could “be one of the most effective weapons against . . . the mechanization of spirit,” a worry that haunted the world during the early years of automation.20 Imogen possessed a sharp and ready tongue and took a backseat to no man; her reaction to Ansel’s suggestions for improvement can only be imagined.
Following the birth of her three sons (one in 1915 and a set of twins in 1917), Cunningham found hersel
f tied to hearth and home, with “one hand in the dish pan, the other in the darkroom,” as she recalled.21 Her camera’s subjects had to come from her backyard; they included plant forms and flowers, as well as her rambunctious boys. She built her repertoire on such ordinary material.
In 1920 and 1921, Cunningham photographed the neighboring Mills College amphitheater, producing a strong and very straight composition of curving lines and shadows, an amazingly modern image. Using sharp focus, she framed the striped flank of a zebra, a cypress snag at Point Lobos, and a single morning glory, all before Weston renounced Pictorialism. Although it is Edward Weston who is usually credited with the first major accomplishments in modern straight photography, his earliest Point Lobos cypress negative was not made until 1929.
Cunningham made her famous image Two Callas and the extreme close-up Magnolia Blossom in 1925, a couple of years before Weston zeroed in on his first shell (1927) or vegetables. Georgia O’Keeffe had begun her famous series of flowers in 1919, but Cunningham stated that she did not see these until much later, when she was in New York in 1934.22 Instead, she may have been influenced by two photographic close-ups of flowers reproduced in the pages of Vanity Fair in 1923, one by Charles Sheeler, the other by Edward Steichen.23
If Ansel and Imogen’s friendship would always be somewhat prickly, Ansel and Edward discovered they were worthy comrades and began using each other, through letters and visits, as a sounding board to fine-tune their definitions of photography. They agreed on most photographic matters and began a close friendship that lasted until Edward’s death, in 1958.
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