Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Dr. Olson found the weather in that December allowed for the conditions found in Clearing Winter Storm. While it is not a certainty, after careful analysis he has proposed that the negative was made on December 12, 1935, between noon and two p.m. This was the first day that month of significant rain, and also snow that accumulated to a depth of half an inch. The sunlight and shadows indicate that day’s conditions could possibly produce the image that Ansel made.36

  Happy days with friends continued as Ansel took off on September 14, 1937, to join David McAlpin (as his guest), Georgia O’Keeffe, and Godfrey and Helen Rockefeller (Godfrey was McAlpin’s cousin) in New Mexico.37 Carting three cameras (five-by-seven Juwel, four-by-five Korona, and 35mm Zeiss Contax) and an entire case of film, he soon found himself with the others at the Ghost Ranch in the picturesque Chama Valley, northwest of Santa Fe. A dude ranch might have seemed an unlikely setting for the very private O’Keeffe, but since she first laid eyes on its landscape of brightly striped cliffs, in 1934, she had claimed it as her artistic home. She spent long summers there, faithfully returning each fall to Stieglitz and New York.38

  Ansel responded to the landscape as well, impressed by the vast skies looming over mesas of red and pink, so very different from his Sierra.39 He found the thunderclouds astonishing, piled one upon another, just begging to be photographed. He made forty exposures of them in one day alone.40 He thought he had made his best photographs ever; in fact, they were not his best, although some were very good.

  Although Ansel was immersed in the visual action about the Ghost Ranch, and O’Keeffe regretted having to interrupt work on a number of paintings, the group left on September 27 on a well-planned trip through what they called Indian Country. Their guide, Orville Cox, was the head wrangler at the Ghost Ranch and an authority on the life and culture of the native peoples.41 They visited Canyon de Chelly National Monument, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and Laguna and Zuni pueblos, then continued on up into southwestern Colorado. During these travels, Ansel did make some great photographs.

  Canyon de Chelly is a deep river canyon that wanders into the past. Cliff dwellings of its Anasazi residents, who vanished centuries ago, are chiseled into its perpendicular walls. After a day in the canyon, the six travelers were flushed out by a sudden and violent storm that brought flash flooding. When they arrived at a canyon overlook, Ansel whipped out his 35mm camera and took snapshots of his high-spirited companions lined up at the cliff’s edge to gain a view that included a distant line of Navajo on horseback, singing as they rode. Through a soft wind, the late-afternoon sun shone with a particular radiance.42

  Hearing light banter between O’Keeffe and Cox, Ansel turned his camera horizontally on the pair and made one exposure with Cox bent slightly forward obscuring O’Keeffe’s face. Quickly, Ansel knelt and made a second picture of Cox shyly looking at the ground while O’Keeffe slyly regarded him with a particularly flirtatious-seeming glance. For years, people have assumed that something was going on between them, but the truth is that Ansel was just at the right place at the right time, and by his framing fatefully isolated the two of them in a relationship that never was.43 Henri Cartier-Bresson would later describe this as a “decisive moment,” one of those split seconds when action and composition are stopped by the photographer at exactly the perfect time.

  In the Colorado mountains winter had already arrived. Aspen trees stood naked, white as skeletons without their clothes of leaves. Ansel photographed one grove whose trees’ bare trunks danced lyrically like musical notes up and down the hillside. Aspens, Dawn, Dolores River Canyon was the first photograph by Ansel that Nancy and Beaumont Newhall owned; it was displayed on their living room wall as early as 1940.44

  Ansel, McAlpin, O’Keeffe, and the Rockefellers had such a grand time together that they agreed to meet again the next year for an Ansel-guided trip of Yosemite and the Sierra. Letters among Ansel, O’Keeffe, and McAlpin flew furiously across the country in preparation for the visit.45

  O’Keeffe never spared Ansel the scourge of her wit. When he sent proof prints of their Southwest trip to the other participants, O’Keeffe reprimanded him for giving away work to people who could very well afford to pay for it.46 Like Stieglitz, she constantly criticized him for not concentrating on what was most important: his art.47 In addition, she counseled that he should make but one great, defining print from each negative, and no more.48

  Ansel was taken aback by her charges and suggestions. Perhaps O’Keeffe did not know that McAlpin had paid for his portion of the Southwest trip. With McAlpin, Ansel thought of the big picture: he was much more interested in McAlpin’s potential as a complete benefactor than as a source of relatively small amounts of income from the sale of a few pictures. In his letters to McAlpin over many years of correspondence, beginning in 1938, Ansel made it perfectly clear that he was more than ready to follow the holy path of Stieglitz if only he could be freed from the necessity of earning a living.49

  In the meantime, Ansel determined that if Best’s Studio could move into the profit column, Virginia and the children would be taken care of, and he could then pursue his “assignments from within,” as he termed his creative work, rather than “assignments from without,” or commercial jobs. Throughout the winter and spring of 1938, he remained in Yosemite, dedicating himself, with a few exceptions, to making a success of their business.

  Edward and Charis showed up on February 9, although Ansel had warned them that the valley was not a pretty sight: there was no snow. That night it began snowing and did not let up for two and a half days. They were all snowbound in Ansel and Virginia’s snug and well-provisioned home. Edward and Charis were happy as clams, but Ansel was driven to distraction with no electricity, no darkroom, no telephone, no mail. As soon as the road was plowed, he took off for San Francisco, leaving Edward to run wild alone in that absolute winter wonderland.50 Weston made a wonderful photograph of Ansel’s darkroom peeping out of not a blanket but a fat down comforter of snow.

  Awaiting Ansel in San Francisco was a fun but inconsequential project, just the kind that perturbed O’Keeffe. He had been asked by the Spencers, organizers of the Parillia, the artist’s ball, to compose a few bars of music for a dance performance at the event.51 A benefit for the Department of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Parillia had earned a reputation as a wild night justified by charity. Its theme for 1938 was “Europa and the Bull.”52 Clothing was of the costume and optional variety; naked male and female chests abounded.53

  Inspired by an immense old Chinese temple drum of William Colby’s, whose bass voice might have challenged Yosemite’s thunderstorms, Ansel previewed his composition for the Spencers, who liked it so much that they insisted he write an entire score.54 Pianist though he was, Ansel composed the music for performance by percussion only, including timpani parts that were too demanding for all but two musicians in the entire city.55 For the actual performance, Ansel wore a toga to direct the bands of dancers who stepped through the rooms, including a naked woman carried upon a litter: Europa en route to her meeting with the bull.56 Certainly, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were right that Ansel frittered away too much of his time, but then Ansel would no longer be Ansel.

  By mid-July 1938, Ansel was yearning for the arrival of O’Keeffe, McAlpin, and the Rockefellers, all due in early September, and confided to Stieglitz that he was lonely for the kind of friendship that he found with people of the quality of O’Keeffe.57 He was most anxious to see her response to his landscape, sure that its beauty would compel her to paint.58

  Ansel himself longed desperately for inspiration for his photography. He hoped that some would rub off on him from O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, as happened when he was with Edward. Although he kept on with his life and its multifarious projects, he continued in a profound depression. Nothing had filled the hole in his heart left by Patsy. He had made many negatives since his show at An American Place, but few prints; he associated the darkroom with Patsy. Thos
e prints that he did make seemed to him dull and lifeless.59

  The group rendezvoused in Carmel, and Ansel took them to spend an evening with Edward, Charis, and their twenty-six cats.60 By the sixth of September, they arrived in Yosemite, where Ansel had reserved the best rooms at the Ahwahnee. Their first full day in the park, they drove to the sequoia grove in Mariposa for lunch and then up to Glacier Point for dinner. Under a full moon, Ansel lay the expanse of the High Sierra at their feet. This was the best present he could give such friends.

  McAlpin dismissed the scene as bleak, a reaction that bewildered Ansel.61 Then, to his even keener disappointment, Ansel discovered that O’Keeffe had not brought any painting or sketching materials. She saw this as a vacation, pure and simple.62

  On September 11, they headed out on horseback along the Tenaya Creek Canyon, then zigzagged up the steep trail to Snow Creek Valley and pressed on to their first campsite, at Tuolumne Meadows.63 Ansel had taken care of everything, hiring a crew of four men, including a good cook and guide, plus fourteen mules to haul the food, gear, and photography equipment they would need for the seventeen-day trip.

  Ansel’s itinerary traced out what he considered to be the best possible route. From Tuolumne, they went on to Cathedral Lake and Fletcher Lake, crossed Vogelsang Pass, and continued along the Maclure Fork of the Merced River to the Isberg Pass Trail. The centerpiece of the trip was their campsite at the Lyell Fork of the Merced. When Ansel let it slip that the mountain above them would someday be named Mount Ansel Adams, O’Keeffe would not let him live it down, ribbing him mercilessly that now she knew why he had really brought them there.64

  Too soon for Ansel, time was up. Horses and riders threaded their way down past Washburn Lake, Nevada Fall, and Vernal Fall, then along Happy Isles to the valley floor. The next day Ansel drove them to San Francisco for a farewell dinner and overnight at the Fairmont Hotel, and then they were gone.65

  With their departure, Ansel had to face his real financial life worries. He received a commission to make some huge murals (a total area of two thousand square feet) of other photographers’ negatives for the upcoming San Francisco 1939 World’s Fair.66 Although this was not what he really wanted to do with his time, the money it paid allowed him to purchase a mercury-argon enlarger with a twenty-thousand-volt transformer, which made a great difference in his prints, investing them with a quality previously unequaled in terms of their increased tonal range and contrast.67 In future years, Ansel would progress to a tungsten light source and then a Ferrante codelight. Today, enlargers are largely relics of the past. The artists who continue to use film make high-resolution scans of their negatives and print them with archival pigmented inks using sophisticated ink jet printers.

  Almost at the same time, he switched from the Agfa Brovira (silver-bromide) paper he had used since the Stieglitz exhibition to higher-contrast silver-chloride papers. In addition, he began toning his prints with both selenium and gold to increase their permanence and add a hint of warm color, arguing that subtle toning brought greater force to the image.68 Untoned prints became anathema to him, and from this time on he found it difficult to enjoy Edward’s work, which was always untoned and whose blacks, Ansel complained, possessed a greenish cast that struck him as ghoulish.69

  Ansel had felt that without the inspiration of Patsy in the darkroom, his prints no longer sang with light, but the new enlarger, silver-chloride paper, and toning changed all that, as did the passage of time and with it his acceptance of his situation. He was able to move on, buoyed by the total change of equipment from what he had used when they worked together. Giddy with delight, he trumpeted in letters to Edward, McAlpin, and O’Keeffe the good news that his new prints were a thousand percent better than before.70

  While studying piano twenty years earlier with his teacher Marie Butler, he had learned how important was the relationship of each note to the one before it and the one after. Now he applied the same concept to his photography. In Group f.64 he had pushed himself to perform all eighty-eight notes, in photographic tonal terms; at that time, it had been his goal that every print should move from bright white to deep black, with as many intermediate shades as possible joining the display. He now concluded that a bravura performance was not necessarily consistent with the best expression of all prints; the relationships between the tones was imperative, not their range.

  For the publication of Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, which finally appeared in late 1938, Ansel employed everything he had learned about fine printing from Albert Bender. When the picture proofs arrived in Yosemite that summer, Ansel laid a trimmed proof next to one of his original trimmed photographs and dared all who visited to tell which was which.71 He proved such a stickler that the book was delayed seven months to allow for the reprinting of those images that were not of the quality he sought. All fifty photographic plates were tipped in to each copy, as in Making a Photograph.72

  It was a big book, weighing ten and a half pounds and measuring seventeen by twelve-and-a-half inches. The reproductions were nearly eight by ten inches, or contact size for most. Only five hundred copies were printed, at a price of just fifteen dollars. Today the book is difficult to find and can command nearly ten thousand dollars. A finely printed, smaller-size edition was published by Little, Brown in 2006.73

  Although some of their cohorts in the Eastern intelligentsia remained unmoved by these photographs of the natural world, skewering them with such musings as Where are the people?74 Stieglitz proclaimed them perfect, and the toughest audience of all, O’Keeffe, sent warm compliments.75 (Given their responses, it seems a conundrum that Ansel’s “perfect” photography did not rate another American Place show.) Expressing the opinion of a man at home in those mountains, who authored The History of the Sierra (first published in 1946 and still in print), Francis Farquhar wrote, “Here, in bright light and in rare clarity, is to be found the very essence of the Sierra.”76 With the publication of Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, Ansel was roused from his depression for good.

  Chapter 11: Progress

  Spurred on by his photographic trips with Ansel and the almost constant stream of letters between them, David McAlpin had been badly bitten by the photography bug. In February 1939, he sent a thousand dollars each to MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stipulating that it be used for the purchase of photographs.1 Keeping his intentions to himself, he cast his bread upon the two ponds and watched to see what would happen. The reactions spoke directly of the very different personality of each museum.

  The Metropolitan held a meeting of its trustees to decide if photography was worthy of its august walls. Perhaps the board’s conservative scale was tipped by the gift, for it conferred upon photography the title of “Art.” The money was carefully parceled out over the next few years for important purchases of historical consequence (that is, Photographs by Dead Photographers).2

  At MoMA, meanwhile, the money burned a hole in Beaumont’s pocket. He walked out the museum’s doors, crossed Fifth Avenue, and strode four blocks north to the Delphic Studios, where he bought out the entire fifty-print show of László Moholy-Nagy for five hundred dollars, the museum’s first major acquisition of photography.3

  Newhall’s purchase appalled Ansel, who had every right to feel second midwife to the McAlpin/Photography relation. (Alfred Stieglitz had been the first.) For Ansel, Moholy’s vision was ugly, and so was its expression in his prints: weak tonal range, unspotted, overenlarged, cut-and-pasted (precursor of the Starn Twins).4 These photographs represented the degeneration of photography and were the opposite of everything Ansel stood for.5

  A highly influential artist and educator, Moholy had taught at the Bauhaus in Germany during the 1920s, left Germany to escape Hitler in 1934, and finally settled in America, where he founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, followed by the School of Design in 1939.6

  Moholy worked in most media, but photography was his focus. Compared to many of the other arts, photography was new and unencumbere
d by stultifying tradition. He exulted in that freedom and declared open season on all existing convention.7 Moholy challenged what a photograph could be, making photograms, or cameraless pictures, by exposing a sheet of printing paper, covered with various objects, to light in the darkroom. He positioned his camera to capture unusual viewpoints, shooting from the ground, from high above, even sideways, but rarely from the typical straight-on vantage.8

  Of the true avant-garde, Moholy believed that art should be used for social change.9 Ansel, in contrast, felt that art must be created free from any intention other than the creation of beauty. On one thing they would agree, however: Moholy’s statement that “art is the most complex, vitalizing, and civilizing of human actions. Thus it is of biological necessity.”10

  Ansel had never come face to face with Beaumont Newhall. Now, with what he saw as the Moholy fiasco, he deemed it time for a showdown. For their part, Beaumont and Nancy were just as curious about Ansel, and they agreed to meet him for lunch in front of the museum in May 1939. As they approached, both Newhalls were startled to see a tall, thin man dressed in black performing a juggling act with a shiny silver tripod. Thrilled with his new gadget and oblivious to the spectacle he made, Ansel put the tripod through its paces, tilting the head every which way, shooting it up to its full height and then collapsing it to tabletop size.11