Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Feeling like a boomerang, Ansel returned home to San Francisco on October 1 and then headed to Yosemite for just a few days before leaving on a two-month-long trip to the Southwest for a full slate of commercial assignments. The Newhalls cabled tragic news: their baby had died in utero at eight months’ gestation. Nancy was told that it had drowned inside her in her hemorrhaging blood; an emergency cesarean section had been necessary to save her life.31 As soon as he heard, Ansel telegraphed his deep concern to both of them, following up with a good long, affectionate letter.32

  On December 7, 1941, as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Ansel was photographing a new Ted Spencer–designed building.33 Ansel hoped to be commissioned into the military so that his photographic skills could be directly applied toward winning the war; since he would be turning forty in February 1942 and was seen by the government as the sole support of six people (Virginia, Michael, Anne, Charlie, Ollie, and Mary), he was not considered draft material.

  Around the time of Ansel’s birthday, a phone call from Edward Steichen buoyed his spirits. A director of aerial reconnaissance during World War I, discharged with a bevy of hero’s medals, the sixty-two-year-old Steichen had been commissioned as a lieutenant commander at his own insistence. His mission was to form a special photographic unit to document the Navy’s use of aircraft. Steichen offered Ansel the job of building and directing a state-of-the-art photographic darkroom and laboratory in Washington, D.C., where the unit’s films would be processed and printed. Ansel replied that he would be honored to serve in that capacity, under two conditions: he asked to be commissioned as an officer and advised Steichen that he would not be free until July l.34

  To his increasing consternation, Ansel heard nothing further from Steichen, even after he cabled him in June to request clarification of the situation based on their earlier discussion.35 Ansel did not fully fathom the exigencies of wartime. Steichen waited for no one; he needed his men immediately. All five members of his unit, who came to be known as Steichen’s Chickens since he acted very much the mother hen to his brood, were commissioned as officers and working by early April.36

  The military decided it could find some use for Ansel as a civilian and gave him a variety of assignments that he judged less than central to the winning of the war. Frustrated, he went from job to job, teaching photography to the troops at Fort Ord, making prints of top secret negatives of the Japanese forces in the Aleutian Islands, documenting the Ahwahnee Hotel before it was transformed into a Navy convalescent hospital, and photographing soldiers on maneuvers in Yosemite Valley.37 Artillery guns arrayed before Half Dome provided an eerie subject.38

  Beaumont, meanwhile, knowing that his time as a civilian was limited, curated a string of exhibitions under the banner of the Department of Photography, including a wonderful little show in December 1941 called American Photographs at $10, where original prints by Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, László Moholy-Nagy, Arnold Newman, Charles Sheeler, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston could be purchased for a mere ten bucks.39 (Oh, for a time machine and just a hundred dollars!)

  Ansel returned to New York in later February to oversee Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier. Although Mathew Brady has often received credit for many of the greatest Civil War photographs, Beaumont and other historians knew that Brady himself had made few exposures (for one thing, he was nearly blind). Instead, he employed a brilliant cadre of photographers who went out on assignment, bringing back negatives that Brady copyrighted under his own name. One of these assistants, Alexander Gardner, finally rebelled, leaving Brady in 1863 to become the official photographer for the Army of the Potomac. Gardner in turn hired other photographers, including Timothy O’Sullivan and George Barnard, to create the greatest photographic document of the Civil War, the two-volume Photographic Sketchbook of the War. Each photographer received full credit for his pictures.40

  For much of photography’s history, people have assumed that photographs never lie. Beaumont was no less susceptible than most to this fallacy, vaunting the medium’s inherent ability to tell the truth through the example of Gardner’s famous Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg, 1863. In this image, a young soldier lies dead, sprawled faceup, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open, frozen in the motion of his last breath; his jacket is unbuttoned to reveal white shirttails, his rifle propped against the rocky lair that ineffectively sheltered him. This photograph has long been an icon of war and death, and Beaumont’s reaction to it was heartfelt:

  Gardner’s dead sharpshooter, his long rifle gleaming by his side, is not imagined. This man lived; this is the spot where he fell; this is how he looked in death. There lies the great psychological difference between photography and the other graphic arts; this is the quality which photography can impart more strongly than any other picture making.41

  Is the power of the photograph diminished today by our knowledge that Gardner moved the body, arranging it to better satisfy his sense of composition? The viewer’s perception of an image is completely altered when the possibility of artifice literally enters the picture. The truth about photography is that almost from its inception, photographers have manipulated subject matter, negatives, and prints, whether by moving a soldier’s body, scratching detail into the emulsion, printing clouds from a different negative into a previously cloudless sky, or printing parts of several negatives into a seamless, though far from real, whole. Now, with the technology of digital imaging, no photograph can be trusted to tell the truth about a situation.

  After years of further research and experience, Beaumont became more than wary of any photograph’s veracity. One of his most popular and often repeated lectures was “The Unreality of Photography,” in which he revealed and addressed the medium’s inherent nature.42 Ansel firmly believed in the righteousness of photography to reveal not the obvious truths, but those that lie deeper, and that may be discovered by a photographer with a sensitive eye coupled with a searching mind. For Ansel, it was one thing to increase an image’s power by manipulating tonal values and emphasis through framing and lens choice; he would have thought it quite another to digitally move Half Dome so that it might provide a more “satisfactory” composition.

  William Henry Jackson, born in 1843, had photographed the American West for the Hayden Survey between 1870 and 1878; his images of Yellowstone had been influential in the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872.43 Ansel and Beaumont found the ninety-eight-year-old Jackson living in a New York hotel, very much alive and “full of beans.”44 Again dissatisfied with the quality of older prints, Ansel borrowed a group of Jackson negatives and used them to make “new and improved” prints for the exhibition.

  When Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier opened on March 3, 1942, Jackson was the guest of honor. Making the rounds of the exhibit, he stopped in front of a mammoth eighteen-by-twenty-two-inch plate photograph of an old cart at the Laguna Pueblo and, remarking that it was quite good, asked who had made it. Because Jackson was hard of hearing, Ansel shouted back that he, Jackson, had. With a twinkle in his eye, the old man allowed as how now he remembered.45 When they came to a group of O’Sullivan photographs, Ansel yelled to ask if Mr. Jackson had known him. Jackson nodded sure, adding that he and O’Sullivan had often traded negatives. At that remark, Ansel caught Beaumont’s eye, knowing that this piece of information would forever bedevil his historian’s soul.46

  McAlpin was commissioned as lieutenant commander in the Navy and assigned a desk job in Washington, much to his frustration. His absence from New York was keenly felt. As Beaumont’s draft number came closer to being called, he enlisted, hoping that way to get a better assignment. In August 1942, he left for basic training as a first lieutenant in the Army Air Forces.47 With Beaumont’s abrupt departure, Nancy was appointed assistant in charge of photography by a reluctant museum administration, which would have preferred simply to close the department for the war’s duration.48 Ansel assured Nancy that
as long as he was free to do so, he would help her however he could. Nancy kept the department alive through the war years, although its power as an independent entity, fragile even at the war’s beginning, was steadily eroded.

  From boot camp in Florida, Beaumont was sent to Air Force Intelligence School in Pennsylvania. He called and begged Nancy (who needed no begging) to come down for his graduation on October 31; both had a premonition that he would be shipped out immediately. Nancy asked the museum for a short leave of absence and was berated for even considering taking such a trip when she was so new at the job. Heartsick, she wrote Ansel about her predicament.49 A true friend to both Nancy and Beaumont, he told her to stick by her guns. He affirmed her priorities—Beaumont was number one and photography was number two—and reminded her that she was the center of her husband’s world.50 In the end, Nancy went to Beaumont, and the museum fumed, but nothing more. Ansel held dear Beaumont and Nancy’s relationship, so different from his own marriage.51

  Just before Beaumont left for Egypt, and then Italy, where he worked as an analyst of photographic aerial reconnaissance (a role of vital importance in the winning of the war), he, Nancy, and Ansel drew up a five-year plan for the department. They had not yet presented even one solo exhibition. They had long hoped that the first photographer to be so honored would be Stieglitz, but they finally had to conclude that Stieglitz would continue his teasing game of “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t” forever. They decided to offer retrospectives to Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel, in that order.52

  In early 1942, Edward Steichen had begun his move to take over the department. Shortly before Steichen reentered the Navy, McAlpin invited him to direct a major exhibition for MoMA, with the assurance that he would have “carte blanche.”53 Neither the Newhalls nor Ansel had been consulted about this unilateral decision. Steichen took the proffered ball and ran all one hundred yards as impresario of the massive exhibit Road to Victory. Featuring a text by Carl Sandburg, Steichen’s son-in-law, and designed by Herbert Bayer, formerly of the Bauhaus, the exhibit hosted huge crowds from May 21 to October 4, 1942. The museum touted Road to Victory as a “spectacular use of photomurals scaled and planned in space and sequence to arouse an emotional response.”54 Even the art critic of the New York Times responded as intended, finding it all “magnificent and stirring and timely . . . A portrait of a nation, heroic in stature . . . As such needless to say, it is art.”55 Plain and simple, it was propaganda for the good guys.

  In the estimation of Beaumont, Nancy, and Ansel, Road to Victory was awful and did not belong in a museum of art. They could not see the similarities between it and their own Image of Freedom. From their perspective, there were huge differences between the two shows, first in the person of Steichen himself, whose very touch desecrated the medium; and second, in Steichen’s lack of respect for the essential qualities of a photographic print, and his insistence on enlarging many images to such an extreme that the photographic grain took on a pointillist effect.56

  Because of the war, Ansel was unable to travel to New York for nearly two years; in that time, letters had to suffice. After his long absence, he arrived at MoMA in April 1944 loaded with energy and enthusiasm, planning on a two-month stay. Never one to waste a moment, let alone a day, Ansel bounced back and forth between the Delaware Camera Club and MoMA, presenting a total of ten lectures in ten days, all sellouts.

  To celebrate its fifteenth birthday that May, MoMA gave over its entire building to one exhibition that included all the departments, Art in Progress.57 Ansel assisted Nancy with photography’s contribution, 274 prints from the young department’s growing permanent collection of more than two thousand. Their selection reflected the content of the collection itself, which was strongest in the work of contemporary American masters from Stieglitz onward. Stieglitz had fifteen prints in the show, Strand twelve, Weston twenty-five, and Ansel nineteen.

  Over many dinners at the Newhalls’ favorite restaurant, Café St. Denis (also a Stieglitz haunt), just down the block from their apartment, with the sad murmur of homesick French men and women singing nostalgically over their vin rouge in the background, Ansel began to confide to Nancy his life’s story and his hopes for his future. This was the start of their work together on his biography.58

  At dawn on June 6, 1944, the Allied forces began their invasion of the European continent. On tenterhooks, the world awaited the outcome of D-Day. Ansel and Nancy spent the afternoon with Stieglitz, Ansel photographing him in his gallery as Nancy showed him a group of photographs Beaumont had made while stationed in Egypt.59 After dinner, Ansel and Nancy joined the crowds thronging Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Probably for the first time, and perhaps for the last, Ansel lighted candles and prayed.60

  Back in April, when Ansel first arrived in New York, he had known after only one look at Nancy’s tired and pale face that she must come back with him to California in June for a badly needed vacation. He had a tough time convincing her, but she finally acquiesced when he suggested that it could be a working vacation: she could fit in a few days with Edward in Carmel to plan his upcoming retrospective. With the promise of such benefits, the museum consented to give her some time off. Nancy and Ansel wrote to Beaumont in Italy to ask his permission, which he granted without hesitation. Then Ansel phoned Virginia, who agreed to drive down and pick them up on their arrival in Los Angeles.61 Nancy wrote to Beaumont,

  It’s really touching and flattering that Ansel seems to prefer to be with me, just as he loved living our quiet life two years ago. I think we really are his dearest friends, and even with just me instead of both of us, he gets a feeling of being sustained. He said the other day that the three of us could never really fight, however much we might disagree.62

  Ansel had a few appointments in Chicago, so Nancy agreed to meet him there, at the station, just before train time late in the day on June 8. Emotionally tattered by the growing pressures of the museum, she was full of misgivings about the trip and sure that she should remain at her post in New York. The museum’s funding had grown so tight that the department could no longer afford an assistant; Nancy was it, and with her away, there was no one at all.

  The sleek train City of Los Angeles seemed to strain with eagerness to begin the journey. Lights blazed from every window, and the air was mysterious with steam. Ansel spotted a bedraggled Nancy staggering along with suitcase, typewriter, briefcase, camera, and tripod, and welcomed her with a huge bear hug that almost knocked off her designer hat. Already an old hand on the train, he showed her to her compartment, and then they walked back to the bar for a drink. Ansel had a smaller compartment in what he considered to be an ideal location, immediately past the bar. They spent three days on the train, working at their respective typewriters, stopping to enjoy cocktails, dinner, cigarettes, and conversation long into the evening.63

  Virginia met them in Los Angeles and insisted that Nancy sit in the front seat for their drive to Yosemite via the Owens Valley, which would give her her first view of the great eastern wall of the Sierra. Nancy stayed with Ansel and Virginia in Yosemite for almost a month, setting up her typewriter on a little table under the incense-cedar trees and spending many hours photographing and working in the darkroom with Ansel as he taught her basic technique.64

  Ansel was convinced that Nancy needed strengthening, both in mind and in body, to help her better contend with the machinations of the men at the museum. His program for her could be described as an early version of Outward Bound. Daily she would sit down at her typewriter, only to be pulled away by the insistent Ansel. First he took her on hikes, crossing tumbling creeks on fallen logs that seemed to her as narrow as tightropes; then he made her climb steep talus slopes from which she could only manage to descend on her seat. She protested that life in Manhattan had not equipped her for this.65

  Not long after their return one day to the valley floor, Ansel shanghaied her to a practice cliff that he scrambled up in five minutes. He lowered a rope to her and coached her up from handh
old to foothold while she swore under her breath.66 She wanted to give up, but Ansel praised each upward advance until she pulled herself safely onto the small granite ledge, where she was rewarded by the sight of streaks of crystalline quartz and alpine flowers, ferns and moss tucked into its corners. Nancy was hooked. When Ansel informed her that the only way down was to rappel, she was a little less dumbstruck than she would have been when this adventure began. Successfully back on terra firma, she felt that now she was the master of her fears.67

  After spending a few days with Edward and Charis Weston in Carmel and meeting with Imogen Cunningham in San Francisco and Dorothea Lange in Berkeley, Nancy returned to New York with a new confidence and an updated three-year plan that she and Ansel had devised for the department. Its highlights included the Strand retrospective, blocked out for April 1945, followed by Edward’s in 1946 and then Ansel’s own in 1947.68

  The challenges that Ansel had put before Nancy in Yosemite had been great learning lessons. Like the Cowardly Lion, she had persevered and found her own courage. She had previously been petrified of heights, but no longer: while visiting Stieglitz shortly after her return to New York, she flung open a window during a violent thunderstorm, boldly stuck out her head, and looked straight down to the street far below, as rain and lightning coursed through the air. She chuckled, thinking how relatively easy it would be to rappel down the seventeen stories.69

  Ansel left California on January 15, 1945, for a full three months of work back east. A major assignment to picture the uses of gas in industry for the Columbia Gas Corporation in Columbus, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh more than covered the expenses for the entire trip, yielding a fat paycheck of twelve hundred dollars. Using color film and his five-by-seven-inch view camera, he photographed in factories producing such diverse products, through the benefit of gas, as crackers, crankshafts, and propellers. In Columbus, he was so intent on making a picture of newly made, nearly molten anchor chains that in the intense heat his pants caught fire.70 The nasty burn he suffered was treated with radioactive paste, a poultice that would have later consequences.