Ansel’s last selling price for Moonrise had been twelve hundred dollars; after the supply was curtailed at its source, the price of a sixteen-by-twenty-inch print has continued to escalate in the secondary market of auctions and galleries to twenty thousand dollars in 1996 and forty-five thousand in 2014. The most paid for a sixteen-by-twenty-inch Moonrise was $609,600 at an auction at Sotheby’s in 2006, and it was for one of those rare early prints Ansel made in 1948. In 2014, the current total value of all the Moonrise prints that Ansel made is in excess of fifty million dollars.
As is the case for so many of Ansel’s images, the precise dating of Moonrise has been problematic. When collectors and historians demanded to know when he had made the negative, Ansel assigned it dates ranging from 1940 to 1944, with 1944 most often favored. Leading the chorus of plaintiffs was Beaumont Newhall, who was driven crazy by his friend’s inexactitude. To settle the matter, Beaumont contacted David Elmore, a young astronomer, who accepted the challenge, drove to New Mexico, and, using evidence provided by the picture itself (from which he extrapolated the moon’s altitude and azimuth) coupled with data acquired in Hernandez (e.g., the position of Ansel’s camera tripod), returned to his computer and devised a program that eventually determined that Moonrise had been made on October 31, 1941, at 4:03 p.m.33 Ansel was totally delighted with these findings and just wished there were more moons in his other pictures so he could know when they, too, had been made.
The saga continued, however, when another astronomer, Dennis di Cicco of Sky & Telescope magazine, became obsessed with Moonrise.34 He had recently written a computer program based on celestial coordinates that calculated azimuth and altitude for any time or place in the world. His attempts at dating Moonrise did not confirm October 31, 1941, 4:03 p.m. Could the tripod position have been incorrectly determined, he wondered? Di Cicco traveled to Hernandez and noticed an old road behind and above the current modern highway. Elmore’s calculations had been made with the camera placed in the middle of the new highway, which di Cicco guessed had not yet been built in 1941. His hunch was right: when we visited Hernandez together in June 1980, Ansel told me that he had made Moonrise from the old road.
Even after all of this, the correct time was not easy to come by. Di Cicco eventually isolated two dates, one in 1939 and one in 1941, but he was bothered by the fact that the moon in Moonrise appears slightly less full than it should have been on either of those occasions. When he read a description of how Ansel printed Moonrise, however, the lightbulb went on: he realized that when Ansel burned in the sky with such intensity, the margins of the moon must inevitably have been singed, making it appear to be in an earlier phase. Close examination of the negative of Moonrise confirms that the moon was indeed almost full, certainly fuller than it seems to be in the exhibition-quality prints. After another trip to Hernandez and ten years of sleuthing, di Cicco published his conclusion: Moonrise was made on November 1, 1941, at 4:49:20 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. The full moon occurred on November 3.
Dating has not been the only controversy about Moonrise. The question has been posed, if it was made with Mural Project funding, does Moonrise rightfully belong to the American people?35 Letters from the time between Ansel and the Department of the Interior clearly state that Ansel acknowledged the government’s ownership of the negatives.36 Furthermore, in a letter dated August 18, 1942, Ansel indicated that the negatives would remain in his custody for as long as he could personally print them and that he would store them in a government vault. Following his death, the negatives were to be sent to the secretary of the interior.37 The government agreed, reiterating that the negatives “are the property of the United States Government.”38
Due to World War II, the Mural Project was canceled as of June 30, 1942. Ansel delivered 225 small work prints to the Department of the Interior in November of that year, representing the output of his two extended trips; he kept the negatives so that he could make the murals when the project was, he hoped, reactivated following the war. The work prints presented a full array of subjects for the potential murals. In truth, a number of the images had not been made during the past year; some, notably those from the Sierra, came from negatives dating back to the mid-1920s.39
In 1946, Harold Ickes, whose personal project the murals had been, left office, and that spelled their demise. Nothing was done with Ansel’s photographs until 1962, when they were transferred to the National Archives, where they still reside and where anyone can order a copy print. These prints are made from a copy negative that was itself made from Ansel’s original print. The quality of such photographs is poor, not coming anywhere close to that of an original print, and yet anyone can publish them in books, posters, or calendars. Unfortunately, all too many undiscerning souls are willing to plunk down their money on such inferior items.
As to the question of whether Ansel kept negatives that rightfully belonged to the Department of the Interior, the answer is complex. Ansel never delivered any negatives at all to the Interior Department. He knew in what disregard negatives and photographs were held at that time by the National Archives, and he did not want to allow such a fate to befall his treasures. Throughout his lifetime, he stonewalled any inquiry on this matter, providing various excuses as to their whereabouts or suggesting they had been destroyed in his darkroom fire in Yosemite—an impossibility, given that the fire was in 1937 and the negatives in question were made in 1941 and 1942.40
At the beginning of the Mural Project, Ansel labeled all of the Interior Department negatives “NPS,” for National Park Service; the fact that for many years he continued to use that same label on negatives made of the national parks and monuments only serves to confuse the issue. However, Moonrise was never given an NPS classification. The negative number is 1-SW-30, describing an eight-by-ten-inch negative, Southwest subject matter, negative number 30.
It was Ansel’s custom to reserve days for his own personal work in the midst of a commercial assignment. He was scrupulous about accounting for his time. The bill he submitted to the Department of the Interior for the autumn 1941 trip totaled $232.97; he traveled for forty-seven days, yet charged the government for only eight and a half days of work and per diem, and for only forty miles of travel.41 Ansel charged nothing for November 1, the day on which we now know Moonrise was made. Moonrise belonged to Ansel.
That is not the case, however, for a number of other famous negatives by him. In April 1983, Ansel and I went through all of his NPS negatives and concluded that 229 of them were from the Mural Project. Such well-known images as The Tetons and the Snake River, Leaves, Mt. Rainier, White House Ruin, The Grand Canyon, and his great series of Old Faithful are all rightfully the property of the U.S. government. Ansel was uneasy about the subterfuge he had to engage in to hide the negatives, though he believed it was justified. He intended to petition the government to allow them, following his death, to be kept with the rest of his negatives, in his archive at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, where they would be properly cared for and accessible—within severe limits—to the public. Meanwhile, he would be happy to provide the government with prints at its request. But time, and his life, ran out before he found a sympathetic ear in Washington.
Ansel could not make Moonrise again today. The view of the village from U.S. Highway 84 is quite different than it was in 1941. The original church, embellished in the early 1950s with a bell tower and a peaked tin roof, has been largely abandoned on behalf of a new one built in 1972 of steel and concrete; the old church appears uncared-for, forlornly abutting the Rio Arriba County road-equipment storage yard, complete with its metal shed, bulldozers, and road graders. Hernandez, never rich, is now economically depressed. Few bother growing crops that can be easily purchased at markets in nearby Española. The new Highway 84 is heavy with the traffic of bedroom commuters traveling to work in booming Santa Fe. Earthen adobe homes have been replaced by immobile double-wides. On his last visit to Hernandez, in 1980, Ansel remarked, “I woul
d never stop and photograph that mess today. There’s nothing there that I could visualize.”42 Moonrise is a sublime memory of what once was, a reminder that some progress is dubious.
But on the positive side, Ansel discovered that his photograph was a source of pride to the small village; many people had hung reproductions of it on their walls. Ansel sent an original print to the Hernandez Elementary School inscribed, “For the people of Hernandez.”43
Just five weeks after Ansel made Moonrise, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States was finally at war. Ansel reacted with intense patriotism, writing again to Park Service Director Newton Drury to suggest that he himself could best serve by making photographs to motivate Americans, images that would communicate the great and pure beauty of their land, whose freedom was now in serious jeopardy.44 This concept was beyond the consideration of a government more intent, at the moment, on the survival of the country.
Ansel’s intimate and quiet vision of the 1930s gave way to a more expansive one in the 1940s with Moonrise and the Mural Project. Image after dramatic image expressed the grandeur, strength, and purity of the motherland. Mountains tower and extend from horizon to horizon; boulders are monumental. Enriched with a catalog of clouds, the sky is full of promise, the air crisp and clear, the sunlight revelatory. Moonrise, Winter Sunrise, The Tetons and the Snake River, Old Faithful, and Mount Williamson from Manzanar—with these photographs, Ansel bore witness to the country behind the flag. To the question, What are we fighting for? These images were Ansel’s fervent response.
Chapter 14: Guggenheim Years
Under contract to write a series of books on photographic technique, Ansel began work on them when Lee Benedict arrived as scheduled in Yosemite in late May 1945.1 Nancy had well prepared the young woman for her Girl Friday position. Attractive and vivacious, Lee dressed in the Yosemite-appropriate blue jeans and bright shirts and immediately took to Ansel’s rock-climbing lessons. If he hiked up to Vernal Fall, Lee came along and took dictation while he photographed. If he took a trip, she went with him, sitting in the front passenger seat, her stenographer machine on her lap as Ansel spoke the books.2 This rather strange technique worked. The first two slim volumes, Camera and Lens and The Negative, were published in 1948, followed by The Print in 1950.
Six weeks after Lee’s arrival in 1945, Ansel wrote to Nancy that he was in love again: his heart was afire, and the world was fresh and new.3 When he was in love, his energies were at their peak; he could move mountains, at least mountains of work, and he did. In September, in a letter to Edward, Ansel thanked him for his hospitality during his latest visit, when the two men, Lee, and Charis had all danced long into the evening. In what was perhaps a joking aside, Ansel suggested that he and Edward trade women for a month or two.4
Ansel’s portrait of Lee catches her staring straight into his lens, dressed in a pleated skirt and jewel-neck sweater, her feet in sandals, arms crossed against her chest, her right leg casually hooked about her left knee. She seems to be waiting for something—probably for Ansel to get back to work on the text.5 By November, Ansel’s passion had grown, but he quashed it with the sobering reality of his marriage.6 Lee Benedict, like others before and after her, became history.
Although Ansel had convinced Virginia less than four years earlier, in 1941, to withdraw her divorce petition, he never stopped his flirtatious ways, seeking out one object of desire after another. Women loved Ansel, not because he was a particularly handsome specimen—he was not—but because he was so alive.7 This quality attracted men as well as women, and in truth, it is difficult to find anyone who knew Ansel who did not like him.
Most of the women who became romantically linked with him worked for him in some capacity or other, as darkroom assistants or secretaries. (After learning this, I understood why many people wrongly assumed I was Ansel’s mistress.) He craved female attention for himself, not to run Best’s Studio, maintain a home, raise his children, or care for his parents; those were Virginia’s realm. His amours provided energy, compassion, and inspiration, qualities he hungered for.
His liaisons typically stopped just short of intercourse, although observers of the time hold this as a question mark. Repartee and shared experiences of climbing, hiking, and photographing, with some necking thrown in for good measure, seemed to have been enough for him, although the rumor mill worked overtime.8 Times were different then, and although affairs certainly occurred, the 1930s and 1940s were eons distant in terms of social mores from the sexual permissiveness so prevalent later in the century. What seemed adventurous, indeed scandalous, in Ansel’s heyday would probably be considered much less so today.
Ansel’s passions were time and again fired and then damped, whereupon he would return to Virginia’s hearth. In a 1944 letter to Nancy Newhall, who had begun work on his biography, Ansel outlined his life story in a list that included his appreciation of Virginia’s understanding about his other women.9 One of Ansel’s old flames recalled asking, a few months into their developing relationship, if he intended to marry her. He quickly replied that he would always stay with Virginia, whom he defended as a “fine woman.” Her hopes of marriage to Ansel dashed, the young woman wisely concluded that her future lay elsewhere.10 A similar progress of events ended more than one such affair.
Ansel’s amorous pursuits, insofar as they were directed at his employees, were clearly sexual harassment, even though potential conquests’ refusals were accepted and did not negatively affect their working relationship with him. Interviews with many of his assistants, both female and male, confirmed that he was not sexually active during his last twenty years. The Ansel I knew was warm and generous—you knew he cared for you—but made no advances whatsoever. Whether this change in behavior was based on emotional growth or impotence following his 1962 prostate surgery is unanswerable.
Ansel eventually wrote two more books to complete the Basic Photo Series, Natural-Light Photography in 1952 and Artificial-Light Photography in 1956. Through these difficult-to-digest tomes, he became known to a large audience of photographers as THE expert. He realized little in royalties, even though the books sold well. Chronically strapped for cash, the publisher, Morgan & Lester, secured an agreement with each of its authors to delay payment of royalties; eager to have his books published, Ansel agreed to these terms and never did get paid.11
Ansel taught photography not only through books but in person as well. In San Francisco, the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) had assembled an incredible painting faculty that included Elmer Bischoff, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. Richard Diebenkorn was only one among an esteemed group of students. An air of excitement permeated the school, and Ansel decided that it would be just the place to establish an equally distinguished department of photography. In a departure from pedagogic methods practiced at other photographic institutions, which were in essence no more than trade schools, Ansel conceived of teaching students how to express themselves individually through photography by giving them all the technical tools paired with an aesthetic approach.12 With his friend Ted Spencer pulling strings from his power position as president of the San Francisco Art Association, in January 1946 Ansel taught a one-month course to prove to the school’s trustees that serious study of photography was both needed and wanted. They agreed to set up a department of photography on the condition that Ansel raise ten thousand dollars to cover start-up expenses. The Columbia Foundation came through with the funds, and full-time classes were slated to begin that fall.13
Up to his ears in carpenters, Ansel supervised the building of the darkroom he had designed. He immediately began lobbying to expand the department to include the instruction of photographic history, hoping to create a position for the out-of-work Beaumont. But Beaumont and Nancy had other plans, and anyway, they could not conceive of being so far from New York, the center of their universe. Nancy was hard at work on a book with Strand, and Beaumont was churning out articles as a freelance writer and teaching photography workshops fo
r Chicago’s Institute of Design (at Moholy’s behest) and Black Mountain College.14
His students at CSFA (now called the San Francisco Art Institute) found Ansel a tremendous teacher, full of inspiring energy even as he piled on a heavy load of technique.15 Most students dove right in, although Ansel’s presentation could be daunting: he often started his instruction with the conclusion of a subject and slowly meandered back to its beginning.16 His critiques crackled with incisive advice, although since his workshop in Detroit in 1941, he had learned to place more emphasis on what was right about a print, and less on what was wrong.
His students were an unusually dedicated group. The war had forced most of them to put their personal dreams on hold; now they were highly motivated, ready to get on with their lives. A close camaraderie developed between pupils and teacher, cemented by their common commitment to photography. Well aware that theory went only so far, Ansel contracted actual assignments for his classes, which sent them into the field on a commission for Pacific Gas & Electric for an interpretive study of the Feather River power plants.17
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