Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Although depth of field was not a great problem in this instance since the nearest objects—the sagebrush—were many yards away from the camera, Ansel wanted to ensure that the negative was sharply focused throughout, so he chose to use a considerably smaller aperture, progressing four stops past f/8, beyond 11, 16, and 22, to f/32. That, in turn, called for an equivalent, longer exposure of 1/4 of a second.

  Further compounding the difficulties of the situation, Ansel inserted a “G” deep-yellow filter in front of the camera’s shutter, which served to darken the blue sky and lighten all yellow values, including the adobe church, the houses, and the golden, autumnal hues of the changing trees. The filter reduced the amount of light reaching the film by a factor of three, so the exposure time was increased to 3/4 of a second. Since there is no exposure setting for 3/4 of a second, the choice was either 1/2 or one full second; Ansel chose the latter. The final exposure was f/32 at one second. All of these computations were made in his head, and very quickly.

  Ansel removed the dark slide, and then released the shutter. Worried that the exposure was insufficient, he reversed the film holder for a second, safety exposure, but just then the sun sank below the clouds behind him, and the magic essential light evaporated.18 The creation of Moonrise was serendipitous: while a painter or sculptor can work from stored memories and imagination, something must happen in the real world in order for a photographer to make a photograph.

  Sensing that the negative was going to give him trouble because of the extreme contrast of the subject itself, Ansel had to try to contain the dynamic range of the scene within the tonal scale of the film. The scene presented to him had a contrast range of perhaps a thousand to one—that is, the highlights of the crosses and clouds were a thousand times brighter than the shadows in the sage brushes in the foreground. He knew that his film could record a range only of a hundred to one, and the printing paper only fifty to one.

  Back in the darkroom, calling on his virtuosity as a technician, Ansel relied on water-bath development, now considered arcane. He immersed the film first in the developer, then in a tray of plain water. As the negative, its emulsion saturated with molecules of developer, rests in the water bath, the developing action occurs more in the shadows and less in the highlights. After a minute, the molecules of developer in the emulsion become exhausted, and another immersion in developer is necessary to continue the development process. Moving back and forth ten times between the developer and water, Ansel labored to make a printable negative. Near the end, he inspected the developing film under a weak green safelight, relying on his experienced eye to detect when the highlights were becoming overdeveloped. It was then time to stop and fix the negative in a hypo bath.

  Despite this extreme processing finesse, room light revealed a less-than-perfect negative, with a severely underexposed foreground, flat and thin, and an overexposed band of clouds so brilliant that its portion of the negative approached total blackness, or maximum density. Ansel knew instantly that Moonrise would be a challenge to print.

  Soon after that day in the Chama Valley, Cedric gave up on the Southwest and returned home to his beloved California. Father and son (who must have been a great kid to endure this father-centered trip) then proceeded south so Ansel could photograph Carlsbad Caverns for the Mural Project and the commercial job for U.S. Potash. Michael developed appendicitis and had to undergo an emergency appendectomy; he recuperated in the hospital and then at the home of gracious friends while his father continued his assignments.19

  Ansel spent days in the potash mines, grappling to capture the delicate amethyst hue of the ore on color film. Many images depicted the miners poised on scaffolds, wielding heavy tools. When Ansel submitted his photographs to the company, all hell broke loose: the scaffolds in every single picture had been constructed in violation of mining-safety laws. A few months later, after the mine’s superintendent had been fired and the scaffolding made legal, Ansel was asked to begin again. He did, receiving double the pay.20

  Ansel was actually happy to return home after this journey. Shortly after he arrived in San Francisco on November 27, he made his first attempt to print Moonrise. From the beginning, he found the negative so extreme in its contrast as to make it nearly impossible to achieve an acceptable print, and for the rest of his life, it remained his most difficult negative. However, he thought highly enough of that first effort to carry it with him to New York City in late February 1942 to show Beaumont and Nancy. They liked it very much indeed. Three months later, when Ansel left New York, that first Moonrise stayed behind as a gift to MoMA.

  Edward Steichen served as “Photo Judge” for the U.S. Camera Annual of 1943. His research extended to MoMA, where he selected Moonrise and used that one print as the actual reproduction print. Although Ansel thought him a philistine, Steichen’s eye for pictures was legendary. Spread across two pages and bled (run to the paper edge) on three sides, preceded by a factory scene patriotically entitled Brawn of a Nation and followed by what was described as an “expressive” portrait of a tortoise, Moonrise was an oasis in the desert of the annual.21

  Inaccurate stories have circulated about Moonrise since its first publication. The U.S. Camera caption read by hundreds of thousands worldwide began the tradition, as the copywriter “quoted” Ansel as stating that the image had been made after sundown, and provided an extensive (and, of course, inaccurate) account of his use of his light meter on this difficult subject. The technical description was also wrong, listing incorrect film, brand of camera, and size of lens.

  Tracking Moonrise’s trail through time, one can catch a glimpse of it in the cover photograph of the Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art for October–November 1943, where a view of the museum’s photography print room, library, and experimental gallery shows the image casually displayed, propped against a wall.

  Moonrise was formally exhibited for the first time, again this same print, in 1944’s Art in Progress show, where it was one of fifteen photographs reproduced in the exhibition catalog.22 MoMA got a lot of mileage out of this one, lonely print, and it is evident in its myriad surface scratches and dings.23

  People saw Moonrise. People wanted Moonrise. Right from the get-go, Ansel knew that it was among the very best images he had ever made.24 But it was extraordinarily difficult to make a good print of it, and in fact he believed he had yet to achieve its best expression. Its physical handicaps were great enough to cause him to want to just forget about it, make no prints at all. With the exception of one print he produced for McAlpin, who ordered it in early 1943 after seeing the reproduction in U.S. Camera, Ansel shelved Moonrise during World War II and made few, if any, new prints from it over the next six years.25

  In 1948, Ansel received at least three orders for Moonrise. Money still was hard to come by, and he knew the photograph could be a good seller if only he could make it easier to print. Sometime before Christmas, he attempted to improve the negative by intensifying its low-density foreground. (A clear negative—that is, one with no density—prints black.) First he refixed and washed the negative to ensure no impermanent silver remained, and then he immersed the bottom quarter of the film, up to the black horizon line beneath the mountains, in a tank of Kodak IN-5 intensifier, a solution that increased the density proportionally to the amount of density already there. Admittedly, the foreground of the image held little information, but Ansel nonetheless believed that the negative was slightly improved by this treatment (although it is difficult to differentiate prints made before from those made after).

  After intensifying the negative, in December 1948 Ansel made at least six prints of Moonrise to give away or sell. One print was a Christmas present for Kodak executive George Waters, and another for Beaumont and Nancy. Writing to the Newhalls on December 17, Ansel joyfully proclaimed that the curse on Moonrise had been lifted: he had finally produced prints that made him happy.26

  Still, he believed he had yet to achieve his strongest interpretation of the negative. Visual inspe
ction of the Newhall print discloses that both the bright bank of clouds and the dark mountains on the horizon are almost detail-free, not normal in an Adams print. The foreground sagebrush and village, even postintensification, remain a heavy gray.

  In 1927, Ansel had discovered visualization with Monolith. Fourteen years later, when he made the Moonrise negative, he lacked the necessary luxury of time to visualize the final print. It would take him years, on a steep learning curve, to settle on his final expression; in the meantime, Ansel firmly believed that his most recent print, possessing the maturity of his expression and craft, was his best.

  Ansel’s interpretation of this negative evolved steadily through the years as he worked to achieve greater detail and drama. He often recited a simile derived from his study of music, saying that the negative was like the score and the print the performance of that score. The sky in the earliest version of Moonrise contains numerous pale streaks of cloud, whereas in Ansel’s last interpretations of the image, made in 1980, no hint of cloud mars the fully blackened heavens, save for the thick layer settled low behind the Truchas Mountains, a ribbon that glows with glorious light, well described by subtleties of tone. (See plate 2, second photograph insert.)

  I spent the morning of Thursday, February 21, 1980, in the darkroom with Ansel as he printed Moonrise for what he hoped would be the last time, a historic occasion that he was generous enough to let me witness. Moonrise was so difficult that the master, at the age of seventy-eight, sometimes took two or three days to make the first good print. His horizontal enlarger had been built from an old view camera and had a Ferrante codelight source that projected the image against a metal wall. With the flip of a toggle switch, both the enlarger and the wall could move electrically on rails, enabling Ansel to increase the distance between them to make very large, mural-size prints, though he normally used printing paper no bigger than sixteen by twenty inches.

  The day before, Ansel had removed the eight-by-ten-inch negative of Moonrise from his storage vault and placed it in the negative carrier.

  After carefully brushing it to remove the inevitable small dust particles, he set the negative, in its carrier, in the enlarger, positioning it between the light source and the lens. In each darkroom session, certain variables affect the length of the exposure of the negative, including the degree of enlargement desired, brightness of the light source, f/stop, particular box of printing paper used, dilution and temperature of the developer, and so on. Ansel tried to control as many of these as he could by using the best equipment and a consistent routine, but variations—however minimal—always existed. Although at first glance they may all look alike, every Moonrise is in fact as unique as a snowflake or a fingerprint.

  On this day John Sexton, Ansel’s photographic assistant, stood at the enlarger and slowly adjusted its focus as Ansel, four feet away, monitored the projected image on the wall with a fifty-power focusing lens, directing, “A little more. Back a bit.” It took them several minutes to get the focusing perfect. Ansel’s house and studio were perched on a granite hill on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, and the vibrations from the waves breaking against the shore would knock the focus out during the night; every printing session had to begin with a focus check. Today’s huge storm surf had put it further out of whack than usual.

  After the focus had been corrected, John left the darkroom. Ansel printed his own photographs and preferred not to have anyone with him in the darkroom because of the distraction. I stayed, sitting out of the way on a stool in a corner, quietly taking notes in the dim yellow safe-light.

  Next, a test exposure was made. This usually took the form of a test strip, or partial sheet of printing paper given several different exposures. The test strip was developed, stopped, and fixed, and then the room light was turned on and the strip inspected. One of the exposures on the strip should look nearly perfect, although a bit light: prints always dry darker than they look when wet, and that critical difference, known as the dry-down effect, must be taken into account in making a final print.

  A decade earlier, Ansel had discovered a quick way to determine what the dry-down effect would be: he used a microwave oven. After taking the test strip out of the fix, he would wash it briefly and then walk out of the darkroom and into the kitchen, where he would bake the strip in the microwave. In a minute or two it would be dry and darker, and a conclusive printing time could be established.

  While this general printing time forms the basic exposure, certain areas of the print will receive exposures that are shorter—occasionally much shorter, as with that underexposed foreground—or longer, as with the overexposed clouds. On this specific day, the general exposure time was to be about thirty seconds.

  Ansel diluted the chosen paper developer, Kodak Dektol, with four parts water to one part developer. He then switched on the electronic metronome, an echo from his musical past, set to broadcast a steady sixty beats a minute. Ansel did not use a clock to time the printing steps because he did not want to remove his eyes from the paper for even a second; the metronome allowed him precisely to calibrate the passage of time. From a light-tight box, he pulled out a sheet of sixteen-by-twenty-inch Ilford Gallerie #3 double-weight gelatin-silver printing paper, which he slipped into the right-angled bracket attached to the metal-surfaced wall, running his hand along the edges of the paper to make sure they were contained and flat, and placing magnets (his favorites looked like chocolate bonbons) on the outer corners to hold them down. Since he would be unable to see Moonrise’s moon during the printing, he had stuck strips of luminescent tape to the wall to point to the area of the paper where the moon would be.

  Ansel began making a general exposure of the entire image, but because he wanted to limit the exposure to the lower foreground, he began to dodge (that is, cover) that section after a few seconds. He used a small handmade dodging tool (a section of coat-hanger wire with a circle of cardboard the size of a fifty-cent piece taped to one end) to block the part of the image that he had attempted to intensify thirty-two years earlier. Holding the tool only inches from the paper, Ansel kept in constant motion: stopping the movement even for a second could result in an area of uneven tone.

  Ansel quickly picked up a large piece of cardboard—the side of an ordinary corrugated box—in which he had cut a three-inch slit. For the rest of the exposure, he shielded the printing paper with the cardboard, selectively burning (or giving more exposure to) specific areas of the image. Ansel counted to ten under his breath, his lips moving, counted to twelve, then five, then seventeen. His hands flew about the picture, stopping to burn for precise second counts while varying the cardboard’s distance from one to three feet from the paper. There was nothing static about the making of a Moonrise; the total printing time for each print was about two minutes.

  He exposed six prints before placing them in the developer. It took twelve and a half minutes to print this batch and then another twelve and a half to develop, stop, and fix them, then gently slide them into a holding tray of plain water. His concentration was focused totally on each print as he carefully inspected it, destroying any that revealed a less-than-perfect dodge or burn exposure or any other flaw.

  These last prints of Moonrise were being made for his Museum Set project. The decision to include the image in every such set meant that during 1979 and 1980, Ansel was required to make more than one hundred perfect prints, a daunting number at his age.

  I badgered Ansel to make a straight print from the Moonrise negative—to print the negative without any darkroom manipulation. It took a while to convince him that this would be a great teaching tool to demonstrate how far he transformed the negative to achieve his final expressive equivalent. He finally obliged, and I immediately put the resulting print on Ansel’s workroom wall side by side with a fine print. The comparison clearly showed that the circumstances in Hernandez had been in the daylight, but he emphatically chose nighttime to complete his visualization.27 (See plate 3, second photograph insert.)

  In
all, Ansel produced approximately one thousand original prints from this negative during his lifetime, more than from any of his others. The reason was simple: he printed on demand, and he received more orders for Moonrise than for any other image. Most of these prints were about sixteen by twenty inches, with a few larger, including some murals, and a few smaller. The great majority were made after 1970.

  But more than either its historical or its technical details, the most discussed aspect of Moonrise is its price. At one time, former Boston photo­graphy dealer Carl Siembab quipped, “Ansel’s pictures are a new form of currency; instead of dealing in gold, we deal in Moonrises.”28 More dollars, pounds, marks, and yen have been spent on Moonrise than on any other image in the history of photography. A rough estimate puts Ansel’s receipts in the neighborhood of four hundred thousand dollars for the sale of fine prints of Moonrise alone, most of that amount from 1975 onward.29 This is but a fraction of the profit realized by collectors and dealers in the later resale market. Once a photographer sells a fine print, he or she never sees another penny from its further sales, even if the original price is fifty dollars and ten years later it is sold for fifty thousand.

  In fact, in 1948, fifty dollars was Ansel’s normal price for a sixteen-by-twenty-inch Moonrise, including shipping. This was double the price of his other prints of similar size. Ansel’s fee for a Moonrise was raised only slowly, to sixty dollars in 1962, seventy-five dollars in 1967, and then $150 in 1970.30

  As the decade of the seventies unfolded and photography grew more and more popular as a “collectible,” Ansel was swamped by requests for Moonrise. He stopped taking all print orders as of December 31, 1975, his decision having been spurred by the increased demand. The negative had never become any easier to print, and it took him three years to fill the orders in hand. At this time, the late 1970s and early 1980s, significant numbers of investors began entering the photography market for the first time. Business magazines took notice. One article reported that in December 1979, the sale of a Moonrise for twenty-two thousand dollars at the Sotheby Parke Bernet auction house had set three sales records: it was the most ever paid for a photograph by a living photographer; the most for a twentieth-century print; and the most for a photographic work on paper. Up to that time, only a daguerreotype self-portrait by nineteenth-century photographer Albert Sands Southworth, on a silver-plated copper sheet, had brought more, selling for thirty-six thousand dollars.31 The Wall Street Journal even published a bar chart that allowed its investment-minded audience to compare the selling prices of Moonrise for the years 1977 through 1981.32