Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Ansel arrived in New York on February 1, 1945, to quite a welcome. In the basement darkroom he had designed for MoMA based on his own workspace in Yosemite, he found Paul Strand, who had no darkroom of his own, in residence, making prints for his upcoming show. Brett Weston had been assigned by the Signal Corps to photograph New York, so he was headquartered at the museum as well. In addition to the Strand show, Nancy was coordinating a museum-sponsored six-week-long workshop given by Ansel for professionals and advanced amateurs, as well as an extensive evening lecture course.71

  Ansel’s events, not only full but oversubscribed, were a great success and raised a good deal of money for the department.72 Classes ran for nine hours on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with all-day Saturday field trips and night lecture sessions on Mondays and Fridays.73 The publisher Willard Morgan was so impressed that he contracted with Ansel to write a series of books on photographic technique. Nancy had hired a stenographer, Lee Benedict, to record the entire workshop, and when he read her transcription, Ansel decided that even given the many projects to which he was already committed, he could “write” the books by hiring Lee, along with her little machine, to be his ever-present sidekick. She consented to meet him in Yosemite in late May.74

  Ansel had one more goal to achieve on this trip: he had booked a recording studio to make a set of records of him playing the piano. Diligent practice was essential, and although he had a room at the Gotham Hotel, Nancy agreed to let him have a rented Steinway baby grand piano delivered to her apartment. This was accomplished by means of a crane that swung the instrument through her window.

  At the end of each day, Ansel, often accompanied by friends such as Strand or Marin, would return to Nancy’s for an hour or more of practice. Ansel did not know how to make a quiet entrance; at the doorbell, he did not just buzz but beeped the rhythmic opening bars from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Afraid of being taken too seriously, he would purposely finish each evening’s recital before the end of a piece, and always on a wrong note. This was invariably followed by his favorite sound effect, his rascally donkey bray.

  It did not take many repetitions of this performance before residents throughout the entire apartment building became angry. Unbeknownst to Nancy and Ansel, they could hear everything through the thin walls. It turned out that many of them were professional musicians, and they would sit up in bed to listen to Ansel play but would become frustrated when he never finished a composition, ending instead with an unintelligible profanity. To make peace, Ansel promised that henceforth he would always properly complete the music, cut out the donkey embellishment, and keep to a ten o’clock curfew.75

  Ansel completed the recordings on the night of April 3. Of the ten pieces, he was most proud of Mozart’s “Rondo à la Turca” from Sonata no. 9, a Scriabin Prelude, and Bach’s “Arioso,” C Major Prelude, and “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Fifteen sets of records were pressed, three for his family and the others for his best friends: the Newhalls, McAlpins, Wrights, Strands, and Spencers. That night, finally finished, he collapsed from exhaustion. Shocked to see this monument to energy struck so low, Nancy pushed him into a cab and ordered him to go directly back to his hotel and to bed.76 Ansel left for California the next day, with two weeks of meetings, lectures, and workshops—in Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis—standing between him and home.

  At 2:41 a.m. on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.77 Major Beaumont Newhall returned home almost immediately, although he was not officially released from the Army Air Force until September 20. On leave, he picked up Nancy and headed for California, where they were to spend a second honeymoon with Ansel and Virginia in Yosemite. They had a great time photographing and hiking, and Nancy demonstrated her newly acquired mountaineering skills. The Newhalls’ talks with Ansel were intense and, as always, centered on photography.

  Ansel tried to convince them that no creative person should live in the East, which was a constant drain on the soul. Everything could be better accomplished in the West. He longed for Beaumont and Nancy to relocate to California and proposed that together they open an institute for photography or publish a journal to rival Camera Work.

  But Beaumont was ready to tackle MoMA once more, to raise funds and build a staff and a collection, and in October, he returned as curator of the Department of Photography. Citing nepotism, the museum refused to allow him to keep Nancy on as his assistant, although she continued to work on Edward’s 1946 retrospective.78

  Beaumont discovered a museum quite different from the one he had left. During the war, MoMA’s trustees had summarily demoted Alfred Barr, the gentle spirit who had been the founding director. No longer a quiet place of scholarly gentlemen, MoMA was now positioning itself in the modern world: the museum as big business.79

  Without consulting the advisory committee (or Beaumont himself), the trustees appointed Edward Steichen director of the Department of Photography over Beaumont, whom they felt should stay on in the number-two post, as curator. Steichen was the most famous living photographer in the world, and his ideas received rapt attention. With the support of his good friend Tom Maloney, Steichen promised to collect a hefty infusion of a hundred thousand dollars from photographic manufacturers to start the department’s postwar years with an economic bang, and he projected a bevy of theme shows guaranteed to pack MoMA’s galleries and fill its coffers. One trustee explained the situation to Beaumont: Steichen’s plans were guaranteed to be popular, like the Harvard football team, while Beaumont’s projects were a lesser attraction, like the rowing crew.80

  Beaumont was astounded. Steichen represented the antithesis of what he, Nancy, and Ansel had been working to achieve at the museum; in their view, Steichen treated photography as a tool by which to manipulate easy emotions, rather than as a unique and profound art. After exchanging a series of anguished letters with Ansel, Beaumont realized there was no way he could work for a man with such goals.81 Ansel advised him to quit.82

  On March 7, 1946, Beaumont resigned. He wrote Ansel, “The Rubicon is passed. The die is cast.”83 The entire photography advisory committee soon quit in protest.84 As a side effect, although Strand and Weston were given their solo retrospectives, Ansel’s was canceled. Not until seventeen years after Steichen’s 1962 retirement would Ansel have his only solo exhibition at the museum to which he had given so much. A place that for some six years took photography as seriously as it did the other arts, MoMA now became the home of the photographic spectacle. Although Steichen would also present such important modern artists as Robert Frank and Aaron Siskind, the dominating example of his tenure must be the biggest blockbuster of all, the undeniably maudlin The Family of Man.85 For Ansel and the Newhalls, the appointment of Edward Steichen was a huge setback to the promotion of photography as a fine art. Steichen’s powerful personality was a singular experience. When he finally exited MoMA, the photography department returned to its original intentions as conceived by Beaumont, Ansel, and David McAlpin back in 1940.

  Chapter 13: Moonrise

  For many, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is the greatest photograph ever made. Step into the picture.1 You are standing on the shoulder of Highway 84, a two-lane blacktop some thirty miles from Santa Fe. Under the last light of day, you see the village of Hernandez, nestled along the tree-lined banks of the Rio Chama, flowing down to meet the Rio Grande. Rough bushes of sage cover the ground. Burning piñon drifts its warm, woodsy aroma from chimneys. Across the river, in the distance, stands the church of neighboring San Juan pueblo.

  It is plain to see that the builders of Hernandez had reverence for God and for the earth. The adobe for the rounded walls of their sanctuary, San Jose del Chama, founded in 1835, and for their homes was extracted from the ground beneath their feet. It is Sunday. In church today, the priest and the congregation prayed for America; they could not know that Pearl Harbor was just a month away.

  Hernandez’s citizens are descendants of a few Spanish-American families with n
ames such as Roybal and Borrego; they tend small farms that yield crops of chile and corn. A horno, or traditional adobe oven, sits in one backyard, waiting for morning. Heaps of golden cobs dry on the flat rooftop of one house, a ladder leaning against its wall. The corn was harvested a month ago, at night, under the light of the harvest moon; the husks are sharp, cutting hands that pick them by day, but their tough fabric softens in the dew of evening.2 Never-forgotten ancestors rest in the cemetery, the promise of life everlasting proclaimed by each white cross.

  The great vault of the sky places Hernandez in appropriate perspective, conveying its relative insignificance. Even the snowcapped Truchas Mountains only serve to punctuate the meeting of heaven and earth. A broad brushstroke of brilliant white clouds spans the horizon, while just above, the waxing moon looks down with wide-open eyes. You realize that the night is velvety-black and yet you can see. Village, graveyard, church, and sagebrush: every object seems to reflect the silvery light of the waxing gibbous moon, two days shy of full. Through Moonrise, the viewer stands beyond mankind to witness humanity’s reach for the stars, for redemption, for the eternal.

  Moonrise was made on a typical Adams shooting expedition in the autumn of 1941. He had contracted to make photographs for the Department of the Interior, and piggybacked that task onto assignments for the U.S. Potash Company near Carlsbad, New Mexico, and a commission to make a dozen color images for a Standard Oil promotion.3

  In 1935, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes secured $110,000 for the decoration of the department’s new building in Washington, D.C.4 At first he thought of painted murals, but in 1936, when he first met Ansel, Ickes learned that besides the small, lovely prints the photographer brought with him, he could also make large photographic murals.

  In his exhibition at the Katharine Kuh Gallery in Chicago the same year, Ansel displayed a single-sided folding screen composed of three six-foot-tall photographic panels, the whole entitled Leaves, Mills College. It seemed like an unusual subject choice: a close-up thicket of greenery enlarged many times its actual size. But Ansel had thought a great deal about what would work and believed the intricacies of the foliage would provide the necessary decorative element. Ansel came to call this image Leaves, Screen Subject. In 1940 he wrote an article for U.S. Camera to explain his approach, describing his thought process as

  photo-murals being enlargements with a vengeance . . . The first consideration in planning a good photo-mural is to determine an appropriate subject—one that will remain decorative at all times. An obvious landscape can become utterly exhausting: few literal statements bear constant repetition. Something must exist on the wall that always will be fluent, transitory in a literal sense, but profound in abstract design and content.5

  The screen of Leaves, Mills College did not sell and was returned to Ansel. Ickes bought the screen for his office, paying Ansel’s special government price of $250, a fifty-dollar discount. Sometime later, the screen was damaged, and Ickes requested a second one from Ansel, who sent as a replacement a very beautiful image of snow-laden branches, Fresh Snow.6

  In late August 1941, Ickes hired Ansel as a “Photographic Muralist, Grade FCS-19,” for daily compensation of $22.22 (the highest rate then paid to a consultant), plus four cents a mile and five dollars per diem to cover room and board.7 The contract, specifying that he was to work no more than 180 days, was in effect from October 14, 1941, to July 2, 1942. Offering the possibility of nearly four thousand dollars’ pay for half a year’s work (not including the money he would earn when he actually made the murals), the Mural Project looked to be an enormous financial windfall for Ansel.

  His assignment was to photograph the lands and Native Americans under the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction. He planned to make some thirty-six murals, which would hang in an emotionally progressive sequence intended to positively influence the congressmen, lobbyists, and government officials who would walk past them daily.8

  Ansel had barely returned to California after six weeks in the East, but he was eager to be off again, and quickly. The continuing years of neglect by her husband had drained Virginia of her huge reservoir of love and patience, and she had now established her own life and friends apart from him.9 Although Ansel wanted to remain in the marriage, Virginia filed for divorce while he was in New York during that late summer of 1941.10 Ansel was devastated.

  Through his agonizing, Ansel finally realized how important it was for him to have the assurance of a wife, home, and family. The letters he wrote in an attempt to persuade Virginia to stay in the marriage resounded with his love for her and the children, but there were no words for her alone, separate from the children. Ineptly thinking she would find it reassuring, Ansel explained that she must understand that it was not her fault, that no one person could be the only answer for him. She replied that though she still cared for him, it was more as a friend. Because he was never home, the responsibility of Best’s Studio had fallen to her, just when she most longed to devote her energies to home and family. She hoped for a marriage partner who would share her life at least eleven months out of the year. She dreaded Ansel’s coming home: each time it was a major disruption of the calm pattern she had established for herself and her children.11

  Rather than stay and work on their relationship, Ansel once more abandoned the situation, convinced he must leave to work on the Mural Project. To demonstrate his commitment to his family, however, he offered to take eight-year-old Michael along with him and Cedric—small comfort for Virginia.

  After loading the station wagon with boxes of camera equipment and camping supplies, Cedric, Ansel, and Michael departed on October 10, 1941. From Yosemite, they followed a route that took them through Death Valley, Boulder Dam, Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon, Walpi Mesa, and Canyon de Chelly. Just seven miles out of Bluff, Utah, they were beset by huge storms that flooded the roads.12 After surviving more perils than Pauline (and with the benefit of a new clutch in the car), they made it to Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park and then to Santa Fe, a safe harbor with a borrowed darkroom.13

  In a funk, Ansel wrote Virginia that he hoped his distress over the condition of their relationship would not be reflected in his photographs.14 Later, he asked her to buy her own Christmas present from him, suggesting a new icebox. After thirteen years of real-life experience, Ansel still needed to enroll in remedial Marriage 101.

  But the grand spirit of the landscape soon overpowered Ansel’s depression. In a letter to Newton Drury, the director of the National Park Service, he proclaimed that all it would take to unite the waffling American public in patriotism was manifesting the staggering resources possessed by their country, in terms of both aesthetics and materials.15 Ansel believed the photographs he was making on that very trip expressed all of that. His mission was to make murals for the Department of the Interior, but the scope of possibilities extended before him.

  One Sunday, Ansel, Michael, and Cedric left their motel, the Orchard Court, drove north out of Santa Fe, and spent a day off in the Chama River Valley, near the Ghost Ranch. When Ansel had stayed there in 1937, he had found the landscape both challenging and photographically productive, but not so today. The sky held no promise, only the photographer’s nightmare of bright, empty, blue expanses (almost as bad as steady rain).

  By this point in the trip, Cedric was dragging. He thrived in the Sierra but found deserts discouraging, and he was having little success with his camera. He moped about the periphery of Ansel’s vision. For quite some time, Ansel wrestled, photographically speaking, with a recalcitrant tree stump that refused visualization. He finally surrendered, writing off the day as a total loss.16

  Dusty, weary, and hungry, they piled into the car and headed back to Santa Fe. They had not traveled far when Ansel glanced over his left shoulder to witness an ordinary miracle. Before him, the nearly full moon rose above Hernandez; the small cemetery with its simple white crosses reflected the last rays of the sun that was setting behind the clouds and mou
ntains at Ansel’s back. The scene provided what Ansel called an “inevitable photograph.” He simultaneously steered the car into a ditch and slammed on the brakes, yelling all the while for Cedric and Michael to help him set up his eight-by-ten view camera. Nearly frantic, he knew he had only seconds to act before the sun’s light vanished.

  Tripod. Camera secured. Twenty-three-inch component of his Cooke Triple-Convertible lens attached (providing a mild two-power telephoto effect). Isopan ISO 64 sheet film inserted. But in all the rush, no one was able to find the Weston exposure meter. Perhaps only Ansel Adams could have recalled under such pressure that the luminance of the full moon is 250 candles per square foot, and then calculated the exposure formula; his years of hard work and technical mastery of photography had readied him for this moment. (Ansel’s favorite aphorism paraphrased Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”) He mentally inserted the moon’s luminance into the exposure formula, whereby the approximate square root of the film’s ISO number (that is, its relative sensitivity) becomes the key stop. The ISO of the film Ansel was using was 64, so f/8 would be the stop.

  At around this time, Ansel was trying to devise various photographic teaching tools that would enable students to develop their own vision, independent of the teacher. He codified a method that he called the Zone System, which assigned visible light to eleven zones numbered from zero (absolute black) to Roman numeral ten (absolute white).17 Now, with the light on Hernandez tenuous and his exposure meter nowhere to be found, Ansel visually estimated that the moon’s value was equivalent to Zone VII, a pale white with gray details. The quantity of foot-candles determined the shutter speed, so in this case, the exposure for Zone VII would be 1/250 at f/8. But overall exposure is based not on the extremes but on the middle zone, Zone V, requiring two stops more exposure. At the predetermined f/8, then, the necessary shutter speed would be 1/60 of a second.