Deciding that only a sequence of images could provide an adequate equivalent to what he was seeing, he exposed nine sheets of film using a long-focus lens (a 250mm Dagor). Because of the telescoping of visual planes caused by the lens, and because there was no horizon to serve as a reference, each exposure revealed a two-dimensional and nearly abstract pattern of light and shadow. Anticipating the resolution of each wave proved difficult, but back in his darkroom, Ansel concluded that five negatives were suitable for the sequence.44
And what a pain it was to print! This is why there are so few sets of Surf Sequence, probably twenty-five at most. Ansel required that each finished print appear to be graced by the same light, although over the twenty minutes it took to make the negatives, the sun’s intensity and position changed. Ansel had to call on all his darkroom skills of legerdemain to make the values consistent. Each print in the sequence also had to have the same measurements as all the others; Ansel began with the image that needed the most cropping and then cropped the rest to those dimensions, with little compromise to any photograph.45
Surf Sequence (1940) was a continuation of the aesthetic that Ansel had discovered with Monolith (1927) and expressed again in Frozen Lake and Cliffs (1932). With these photographs, he transcended his role as respected conduit of America’s landscape and became the interpretative oracle of a higher dimension.
Ansel would not let Beaumont and Nancy miss Yosemite, although they regarded it as a place of postcard pretensions that they believed they could do without.46 But Yosemite took them by surprise. As the car rounded each new bend, they were staggered by fresh marvels: Half Dome, El Capitan, waterfalls, forests, the Merced River. Nancy found that Virginia had transformed Best’s Studio into an extraordinary shop. Classical music played, a fire burned in the big stone fireplace, and the glass cases held a tempting array of fine Indian silver and turquoise jewelry alongside the expected photographic equipment. Piles of Navajo rugs lay next to cases of fine books all germane to the location, on subjects ranging from Yosemite to the national parks to environmental concerns. Ansel’s folding photographic screen of Fresh Snow concealed the stairway to the family’s simple living quarters behind the studio. Through its windows wafted the deep voice of Yosemite Falls, not far distant, and the perfume of incense cedar.47
After each day’s exploration of Yosemite with Ansel, they returned to long hours of drinks, dinner, and conversation. The main subject became MoMA and photography, as together they constructed a plan for a formal Department of Photography. There was no precedent; it would be the first of its kind in a museum.
Early one evening, soon before the Newhalls were to depart, Ansel drained the last of the bourbon in his glass, rose from his chair on the porch, flung the remaining ice cubes into the bushes, and announced that he was going to telephone McAlpin, who not only was the money man but the man with connections.48 Ansel’s excitement carried without diminution over the transcontinental line to New York, there to catch fire.
Chapter 12: A Department of Photography
Events progressed rapidly following the Newhalls’ return to New York in the late summer of 1940. With the museum’s consent, McAlpin donated money to found a department of photography, with himself as chair of the advisory committee and Beaumont as curator. But McAlpin’s agreement was conditional: he would do it if, and only if, Ansel consented to be his vice chairman and came to New York for six months to get things going.1 McAlpin would pay his expenses, plus a stipend.2 Eager to continue this particular adventure, Ansel accepted, although for only two, not six, months.
Everyone believed that America’s entry into the war was exceedingly close. Ansel, McAlpin, and Newhall were determined to open the department and mount its first exhibition as soon as they could, fearing that if war came it might be quite some time before they would have another opportunity. On short notice, they succeeded in reserving 150 running feet of museum space for two weeks, from December 27, 1940, to January 12, 1941.3
McAlpin asked Ansel how much money he would need to be paid while working on setting up the department. Ansel answered that three hundred dollars a month should suffice; he was hoping just to break even.4 Although he was always near desperation for money, Ansel would accept no more than an equitable sum for the equivalent amount of work.
Ansel’s train pulled into New York just past dawn on October 14, 1940, after three nights of cross-country travel. A taxi dropped him and his considerable luggage at the curb in front of the Newhalls’ apartment, where he was to stay. Glancing at his watch and glumly deciding it was too early to wake them, he sat down on his suitcase to wait, his overcoat, typewriter, briefcase, tripod, flash equipment, and four cases full of cameras and film piled about him. Meanwhile, the Newhalls were wide awake inside and wondering where Ansel could be. One look down from their window told the story.5 They ran down the stairs, greeted him with hearty hugs, and trudged back up with his accoutrements.
Ansel settled in comfortably with the Newhalls. For one thing, they were all three “cat people.” Ansel’s San Francisco domicile was ruled by the imperious Bill and the unruly Thunderpot, while the Newhalls shared their quarters with a feline genius named Euripides, who preferred to use the toilet, not a litter box, completing each visit with a futile paw-thrust toward the toilet paper.
Ansel plunged into a rush of activity. One of his responsibilities was to woo the support of the photographic community for the fledgling department. Tom Maloney hosted a grand cocktail party in his honor, attended by two hundred photographers, where Ansel pressed the flesh and spread the gospel. He spoke at the Clarence White School of Photography and at the Photo League, the vanguard photography “club” in New York. Beaumont and Ansel also visited with executives at Eastman Kodak to garner support, both moral and financial. Finally, Ansel was expected to keep Stieglitz informed and involve him in any way possible.6
Ansel took charge of readying the gallery they had been given for the first exhibition. He had the walls painted gray, and floating panels built to hang the pictures on, painted a shade lighter than the walls. In a nod to the Newhalls’ penchant for color, the ceiling was cobalt, and one small alcove a pale blue.7
Cocurated by Beaumont and Ansel, the inaugural offering, Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Esthetics, was a historical overview exploring the potential of creative photography.8 The process of selecting the photographs, all from the museum’s burgeoning collection, strained Beaumont and Ansel’s friendship, but each relented enough to allow for the other’s differing opinion.9 Time and Ansel’s influence had eroded Beaumont’s Harvard-instilled European bias: of the thirty-one photographers whose work was chosen for this show, twenty-two were living Americans, though three of this number, Moholy-Nagy, Lisette Model, and Henwar Rodakiewicz, were recent émigrés from Europe. Eight deceased photographers, five European and three American, were shown: Eugène Atget, Mathew Brady, Peter Henry Emerson, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Henri Le Secq, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Clarence White.
Even from a perspective more than half a century distant, the list of photographers remains impressive. In addition to those mentioned above, it included Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Ruth Bernhard, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harold Edgerton, Walker Evans, Arnold Genthe, Dorothea Lange, Helen Levitt, Dorothy Norman, Eliot Porter, Man Ray, Charles Sheeler, Peter Stackpole, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Luke Swank, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston.10
Every time, the eye stops at Luke Swank. Luke who? Swank was an architectural photographer whose prints of the famous Kaufmann House, known as Fallingwater, were already on exhibit at the museum as part of a Frank Lloyd Wright show. Of all thirty-one names, his is the only one that has not become world famous, although at the time he was held in high esteem. But like Ansel, Swank made his living as a commercial photographer to support his creative work. In 1932 his five-piece mural, Steel Plant, was exhibited at MoMA in Murals by American Painters and Photographers. The Julien Levy Gallery in New York presented S
wank’s photographs in a solo show in 1933, and in 1934’s First Salon of Pure Photography, a Group f.64 project produced by Willard Van Dyke and judged by him, Edward Weston, and Ansel, they selected more prints by Swank than by any other entrant. Out of the fifty-seven prints exhibited (out of six hundred submitted), Luke Swank had five. There are two most likely reasons why he has not been adequately recognized. He died young, in 1944 at the age of fifty-four, after which his work was rarely shown. He had no identifiable concentration of vision; rather, he photographed (cleanly and beautifully) the circus, factories, the Amish, city streets, found still lifes, children—black children, white children, black and white children together. It is difficult to grasp his oeuvre because of its eclecticism.11
Ansel himself made the prints exhibited for the elderly Arnold Genthe, who admitted that he had no good existing examples, and for Dorothea Lange, represented by her great Pea Picker Family, now known as Migrant Mother.12 Beaumont insisted on including Moholy’s From the Radio Tower, Berlin, of 1928, although Ansel argued that it was an abysmal print. Moholy graciously acceded to their request for the negative, and Ansel turned his full darkroom powers on it, only to find that his version revealed details in the shadows and highlights that distracted from the impact of the image. He tore up his effort and grudgingly agreed to exhibit the original print.13
Ansel took little credit for the exhibition, stepping aside so the spotlight could shine on Beaumont. The exhibit and new department were described in the catalog in an article signed by Beaumont alone, and since he had to be in Yosemite to direct the Bracebridge, Ansel was not even present at the opening brouhaha with its attendant press coverage.
New Yorkers were definitely interested in photography. Five hundred people, considered a big turnout, came to the exhibition’s opening.14 But although Time heralded the importance of the new department, which put the medium on equal footing with painting and sculpture, praise was not forthcoming from the entrenched photographic press.15 In an indication that the road for the first-ever department of photography would not be smooth, Tom Maloney authored a scorching article on Sixty Photographs. Noting that Beaumont had to continue his duties as librarian in addition to serving as curator of photography, Maloney questioned the museum’s commitment and warned that in reality, photography got no respect at MoMA.16 And as to the selection of the sixty photographs, he complained about the bias toward the “ultramodern.”17
To understand how photographically conservative was the influential Maloney, a close friend of the powerful Edward Steichen (who had become the most successful commercial photographer in America), one must take a closer look at what it was that he condemned. The offending photographs were by Cartier-Bresson (a prime example of one of his “decisive moments,” Children Playing in Ruins), Man Ray (a cameraless photogram, or, as Man Ray egotistically preferred to call it, a Rayograph), Moholy-Nagy (From the Radio Tower, Berlin), and Edward Weston (Tide Pool, Point Lobos), all long since acknowledged as masterpieces of photography.
Just before it was time for Ansel to return home, he and Beaumont agreed that it was high time for Nancy to meet Stieglitz, although she protested mightily, calling the old man a “sadist, a Svengali . . . a charlatan!”18 Each taking an arm, they pulled her along to the encounter she had long dreaded. Confounding her expectations, Stieglitz was not simply cordial, but charming.19 Stieglitz loved the attention of pretty and intelligent women, and Nancy fit right in. She visited Stieglitz at An American Place almost daily for the next two years and soon decided to write his biography, a project that she unfortunately never completed.
In Yosemite, on March 4, 1941, Ansel received a telegram informing him of the death earlier that morning of Albert Bender.20 Ansel was deeply saddened and full of guilt because all his recent activity had left little time for Albert. He had not even known that he was sick.
Ansel returned to San Francisco at once. Albert had left instructions for his friends to hold a true Irish wake, complete with rivers of Scotch and piles of sandwiches, before the funeral at Temple Emmanuel. Ansel manned the last, early-morning hours of the vigil as nameless people of the night—watchmen, police, and elevator operators, all given a hand up at some time by Albert—came by to pay their respects. Even Ansel, who felt he had known Albert very well, was surprised by the multitude of people, of every race and creed, that his friend had helped. Five thousand mourners attended Albert’s funeral.21
In April 1941, Ansel returned to New York and to the ecstatic Newhalls: Nancy was newly pregnant, the baby due in November. New York City was now gripped by fear. It appeared that Hitler’s blitzkrieg might conquer England, and many were convinced that New York, an island of skyscrapers especially vulnerable to aerial bombardment, would be next. But still, Ansel sensed that most Easterners hoped America could stay out of the war.
As usual, Ansel larded his time on behalf of MoMA with lucrative commercial jobs. On assignment for Fortune to photograph Union Carbide’s carbon arc furnaces in Alloy, West Virginia, he found huge tracts desecrated by man’s ravenous appetite for resources, consequences to the land be damned.22
His months in the East left him appalled at the natives’ general apathy toward the world’s condition. He believed it had something to do with the blighted landscape, paved as it was with concrete, scarred by factories and mines, clouded by pollution, and coated with a dense population. Ansel reasoned that Easterners held the American earth in contempt. All he had to do was look out any window in New York City to see the perpetration of ugliness, and therefore the wanton destruction of natural beauty. He held the abiding conviction that the American people would become empowered if they could experience the vast wealth of beauty west of Chicago, still boasting clean air and great open spaces with an array of untouched landscapes. Photography could show them the way.23
Ansel proposed two exhibitions to Beaumont, Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier, to illustrate a necessary American war and the expansionism that had followed, and Image of Freedom, a photographic competition centering on the question, “What, to you, most deeply signifies America?” Both ideas were greeted enthusiastically.24
Ansel journeyed back to Yosemite for the early summer but returned to New York in August. Beaumont and Nancy, now bulging proudly with their baby, welcomed him with great joy. Projects for the department progressed along with her pregnancy.
Ansel continued to act as the department’s outreach teacher. When the Detroit Miniature Camera Club invited him to lead a workshop in late August, he and Beaumont felt it would be righteous work.25 That members of such clubs, some of the last remaining bastions of Pictorialism, were willing to pay the mouthpiece of straight photography to learn at his knee struck both men as evidence of significant movement.
The Detroit workshop had a radical effect on the life of one Harry Callahan, a young clerk at Chrysler and amateur photographer who took Ansel’s counsel seriously. Previously cognizant only of Pictorialist traditions, Callahan felt freed by Ansel’s call to straight photography: view-camera negatives exposed into unmanipulated contact prints of superb technique, on glossy paper, of subjects from the life and earth about him. Shyly and wisely, Callahan declined to share his photographs at the class critique. Instead, he took copious notes and during the next year adopted the master’s technique as faithfully as possible.26 Others in the workshop became so upset that one man said it took him ten years to recover from Ansel’s “merciless” comments.27
Ansel showed them his newly made Surf Sequence, and its impact on Callahan was enormous. He reacted to Ansel’s sequence from nature by applying the principle to his own urban world. In Highland Park, a factory town just north of Detroit, Callahan set up his camera to frame a stairway running up the side of a particularly geometric wall, and made a series of exposures as people ebbed and flowed.28
The writer John Pultz has observed that where Ansel had photographed a closely viewed near-abstract of bright grasses emerging from a dark, still pond, Callahan respo
nded by making an image of even higher contrast and completely reversed values, with dark weeds set against a field of absolute whiteness: snow. Years later, when Ansel saw this print, he insisted on buying Weeds in Snow from Callahan, whose work was expanding into his own unique style. He became one of the greatest photographers of the mid-century as well as one of the medium’s most significant teachers, from the Institute of Design in Chicago to the Rhode Island School of Design.
In early September, Ansel returned to New York to assist with the judging for Image of Freedom, although he excused himself as an actual jury member. One hundred prints were selected and purchased for twenty-five dollars apiece for the museum’s permanent collection. Each print competed anonymously, but at the end it was discovered that all four photographs submitted by an unknown photographer named Minor White had been chosen. The Newhalls and Ansel were struck by the name, which they thought particularly appropriate for a photographer.29
Image of Freedom was not the first photographic theme show at MoMA, and it certainly would not be the last. In 1940, the museum had sponsored War Comes to the People, a photographic document, by Thérèse Bonney, of the war’s effects on Finland, Belgium, and France. Bonney’s exhibition was widely regarded as bad photography in the name of a good cause.30 That Ansel and Beaumont would use their new department to promote photography whose purpose was primarily propaganda, and not art, shows that even these good souls could be overcome by the cry to patriotism.
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