Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Finding it impossible to dedicate all his time to a full year of nothing but Guggenheim work, he was relieved when the trustees renewed his grant for the year 1948. In a whirlwind of productivity, Ansel published Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, which featured selections from the writings of John Muir accompanied by a portfolio of sixty-four Adams photographs.56 Ansel sequenced his images in a travelogue, literally following his footsteps (or tire tracks) from San Francisco (The Golden Gate Before the Bridge), across the Pacheco Pass (In the Mount Diablo Range) to the San Joaquin Valley (Rain Clouds over the San Joaquin Valley), into the Sierra foothills (Slate Outcroppings, Sierra Foothills, West of Mariposa, and two other pictures), and then, in plate 7, to the amazing spectacle of Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point (Yosemite Valley).

  Kodak commissioned two more projects from Ansel that he easily combined with his continuing Guggenheim trips. Both proved to be financially the best kind of assignment—that is, ongoing. One was a series of landscapes to be taken in the national parks, with each image to include a photogenic couple poised to snap a picture with their Kodak camera. The second project was to make large, colorful panoramic transparencies that the technicians back in Rochester would enlarge to an incredible sixty feet long and eighteen feet high. The Kodak Colorama, as it was named, became a New York City tradition, exhibited continuously at Grand Central Station. Using a seven-by-seventeen-inch banquet camera, Ansel made his first Coloramas in late 1948 and Kodak used about twelve of them.57

  It was Ansel’s intention to photograph every single national park, and most of the monuments. He spent from mid-April to mid-May 1948 by himself in Hawaii, underwriting the trip by making pictures for the Matson Line of passenger ships that cruised from the mainland to Hawaii. He photographed on Oahu and visited Hawaii National Park on the Big Island as well as Maui, Lanai, and Kauai. He hated Hawaii. When his ship was a day away from the islands, he swore he could smell a sweet stench that pervaded the air. Nary a palm tree found its way onto his film; believing that vacations were literally immoral, Ansel saw palm trees as a symbol of indolence, shading people who lay around on beaches when they should be working.58 He found Hawaii just too soft in comparison to the Sierra or the rugged California coast: the water warm as dishwater, the skies hazy, the clouds graceless, the volcanic rock amorphous.59 For all his protests that Hawaii was not his kind of country, he did make some strong images of the crater of Haleakala and views from its heights across to the neighboring volcanoes, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on the Big Island.60

  In late June 1948 it was Michael’s turn again as his companion; Ansel drove them to Seattle and they boarded the S.S. George Washington, bound for a six-week trip to Alaska. It was a grand tour from Skagway to Mount McKinley and then on to Anchorage, Fairbanks, Sitka, Juneau, and Glacier Bay.61 They were even feted by Alaska’s governor. Unfortunately, constant rain, that bane of the photographer, was there to greet them on their arrival and to bid adieu when they left. Most of Ansel’s Alaskan photographs were, by necessity of circumstance, forest details, with the rain’s evidence everywhere, whether in droplets resting on leaves or in heavy mist. Picture after picture from this trip was simply titled Leaves, Alaska, although each negative was exquisitely different and detailed under quiet light.

  When they got to Mount McKinley, they might just as well have been in plain, flat tundra. The clouds were so dense that the mountain itself was invisible, quite a cloud cover considering that McKinley is an atmosphere-busting 20,320 feet high, or nearly three times higher than Half Dome, a fact Ansel found most impressive.62

  Summer was in full swing, for Alaska. The sun set at eleven-thirty at night and rose about two hours later. Mosquitoes were the chief form of animal life; Ansel was thankful that his continuous encounters with them resulted only in welts and not in illness, as might have been the case in tropical countries. If Alaskan mosquitoes carried disease, he mused, Alaska would be uninhabitable.63

  At McKinley, as elsewhere on Ansel’s Guggenheim journeys, the National Park Service, prepped by letters from VIPs in Washington, provided whatever support they could. Ansel and Michael stayed at the ranger cabin on the shores of Wonder Lake, thirty miles from McKinley’s base.

  Ansel went to bed after an early dinner. Arising again at midnight to clearing skies, he hiked up the hill above the lake. He positioned his eight-by-ten-inch view camera on its big wooden tripod base and attached the twenty-three-inch component of his Cooke Series XV lens, the combination of equipment with which he made most of his greatest images, and after much personal debate added a deep-yellow filter.

  Shifting the camera so that his ground glass, reflecting the scene before him upside-down and backward, defined the strongest composition, he made what would become another of his masterpieces. Fully exposed in the light of sunrise, McKinley appeared as a benign mass, a skin of snow stretched tightly over its lumpy skeleton, every nuance of form revealed in chiaroscuro. The huge mountain filled the sky but not the bottom half of the picture, its scale diminished by Ansel’s choice of a long-focus lens. In the finished print, Wonder Lake seems equal in size to McKinley, although the light on each is totally different. Wonder Lake has an amorphous, pearly glow, its edges defined by dark shoreline; though it is much closer to the camera than McKinley, its surface details are not revealed. Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake is sublime.64

  After spending two months with his son, Ansel found Michael as difficult as he had Anne. Michael remained cool toward him throughout the trip; his inexperienced father had no idea whether it was just because Mike was a teenager or if it truly described his feelings. It dawned on Ansel that his years of neglect might be impossible to erase. He did not know that Virginia had warned her children never to trust their father.65

  When Ansel and Michael returned to the lower forty-eight, Virginia joined them to deliver the fifteen-year-old to boarding school, the Wasatch Academy outside Salt Lake City. His parents hoped that the education and discipline of the military-style institution would ensure a better future for him than would the small, easygoing Yosemite Valley school.

  Ansel dropped Virginia back in Yosemite and was soon off on his annual fall trip to the East Coast. In September 1948, Beaumont moved to Rochester, in upstate New York, to accept a position as curator of the new George Eastman House (GEH), the first museum devoted exclusively to photography. Previously the home of Kodak’s founder, in its new incarnation the building that housed GEH was to serve as a memorial to his life, as well as an institution for the collection and exhibition of photography. In 1958 Beaumont would become its director, a position he held until 1971.

  Nancy stayed behind in the city to pack up their apartment. Good friend Ansel came to her rescue, carrying load after load down to the illegally parked car, filling every nook and cranny, leaving just enough space so that Euripides the cat could be squeezed in under the dome light. Hampered by traffic, then by thick fog, they stopped to call Beaumont every hour and assure him of their safety, until he finally ordered them to let him sleep.66

  Ansel stayed for the opening of the Eastman House on November 19. He brought some of his national-park photographs to show Beaumont, hoping to be given an exhibition at the museum. After much deliberation, Beaumont said no. They had criticized Steichen for his blockbuster theme shows at MoMA, all aimed at the lowest common denominator, pandering to human emotions. Beaumont felt that his exhibitions at GEH must not smack of propaganda of any sort. He believed that showing Ansel’s photographs of the national parks would be pleading a cause, and he would have no part in that.67

  Ansel returned to California, uneasy about Beaumont’s rejection but too busy to pay it much mind. For years he had contemplated showing a small group of his prints that would together represent the scope of his photographic vision—some details from nature, a few portraits, and at least one big thundercloud68—and now he decided to produce just such a portfolio. Before the end of the year, he completed nine hundred small fine prints, enough to fill seventy-five port
folios. He titled it simply Portfolio One, Twelve Photographic Prints by Ansel Adams, and dedicated it to Alfred Stieglitz, whose portrait was the sole one among twelve spectacular images. Priced at a hundred dollars, Portfolio One sold out quickly.69

  There were two architectural studies, one great landscape (Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake), two smaller landscapes (including the nearly abstract Refugio Beach and the haunting Oak Tree, Snowstorm), five details from nature, one portrait (Alfred Stieglitz), and the wispy, white Clouds Above Golden Canyon, Death Valley.70 The quality of the prints was unsurpassed, with each photograph the best interpretation that Ansel ever achieved of that negative; the tones were balanced, not yet betraying the sometimes overly dramatic qualities that began to appear in his work. Some of the special beauty of Portfolio One may be attributable to the recent death of Stieglitz, whose inspiration floated in Ansel’s memory throughout the making of the prints. 71

  Ansel still had not completed his Guggenheim project, and he continued to travel as time allowed, even though two more books were now added to his schedule. One was a reprint of Mary Austin’s text The Land of Little Rain, with a selection of Ansel’s photographs, and the other a large-format, beautifully printed picture book called My Camera in Yosemite Valley, which Ansel dedicated to Edward Weston. Virginia was the publisher of record, with the assurance that the distributor, Houghton Mifflin, would purchase a large number of books.

  The spring of 1949 was dominated by trips to make photographs for The Land of Little Rain, but come summer Ansel went back to Alaska, this time alone. He hoped for better weather than they had had the year before, but he was out of luck: again it rained, day after day. To escape the wet, he eagerly accepted an invitation to take a nine-hundred-mile flight in a Grumman amphibious airplane that was to drop supplies from the U.S. Geological Survey for the Juneau Ice Field Expedition. Ansel insisted that the cargo door be removed for the flight so that he could better photograph; the result was that he almost froze to death. To make amends for that misadventure, the same crew offered to fly him to Glacier Bay and helicopter him out in a couple of days, but once they got there, bad weather socked in the airstrip, making flying impossible and stranding him for nearly a week. Damp but undaunted, Ansel returned home three weeks later with another raft of fine negatives of forest details reflecting the dismal weather conditions.72

  Technically, Ansel was to have completed his Guggenheim national-park project by the end of 1948, but he stretched it across 1949 to bag Maine’s Acadia National Park; that he was unable to make it to the Everglades in Florida became a lifelong regret. Ansel purposely chose to travel to Maine in November: he wanted stormy weather with surging seas, and he got it, although he found the form of the Maine coastline less striking than that of California’s, so he focused on the ocean, not the land.

  The Newhalls acted as his guides on this trip. Since they adored lobster, many meals were centered on that delicacy. But after a visit to a lobster pound, where the surface of the water was thick with green algae, Ansel could no longer enjoy the crustacean, claiming its predominant flavor was penicillin.

  The effects of decades of loneliness on Virginia are hard to gauge, since she was rather quiet by nature. But years later, seated at a table at Old Bookbinder’s restaurant in Philadelphia, she recalled how Ansel had talked of his lobster dinners with the Newhalls. Since then, any reference to lobsters had served as a keen personal reminder of just how much she had missed while she stayed at home to parent their children and keep the doors of Best’s Studio open. Thirty-three years later, she was finally eating her first, live Maine lobster. Ansel sat across the table and ordered chowder, warning her that she was making a mistake: the lobster would taste like medicine.

  By August 1949, Ansel estimated he had made 2,250 negatives specifically for the Guggenheim project, over and above the 229 he had taken in 1941 and 1942 for the Department of the Interior.73 Nearly twenty-five hundred negatives is an amazing number and accomplishment, all the more so because they were all large format; none was in the convenient and quick 35mm format.

  It had been ten years since Ansel’s retrospective at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. A sixty-print show, mostly of work made since that exhibition, opened at that museum in June 1949. Ansel exhibited Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake for the first time; a price list stated that all five prints of Surf Sequence could be purchased directly from the artist for a hundred dollars.74 The public attended in droves, and the critics ran out of synonyms for “superlative.”

  Ansel’s Guggenheim odyssey had taken him some seventy-five thousand miles,to twenty-three different national parks and monuments, the preponderance of which were Western.75 His definitive photographic statements on the national parks finally appeared in 1950 with the publication of My Camera in the National Parks and Portfolio Two: The National Parks and Monuments. The book was another beauty, identical in presentation to both My Camera in Yosemite Valley and Edward’s My Camera on Point Lobos: on heavy paper stock, with special varnish coating each photographic reproduction, the images of large size, the best printing possible, and the whole spiral bound so that the pages could lie completely flat. Ansel dedicated the book to Virginia, acknowledging her patience with his wandering ways in pursuit of his art.76

  After Virginia published the three My Camera books, the Park Service informed her that it did not approve of this expansion into the publishing business on the part of its concessionaire Best’s Studio. In 1952, Ansel and Virginia formed a separate company, 5 Associates, to act as an independent publishing house. This entity was the publisher of some of Ansel’s books during the 1950s and 1960s, and also printed a whole line of postcards and notecards.77

  Portfolio Two: The National Parks and Monuments was issued in an edition of 105, each comprising fifteen prints from negatives made throughout the 1940s. Ansel dedicated the portfolio to the memory of Albert Bender, who had believed in “Ansel the Photographer” right from the beginning.78

  Those first years after the end of World War II were the most measurably productive of Ansel’s life, with a parade of excellent books, articles, and portfolios that earned him national recognition and high regard from both the larger world of art and the smaller one of photography. Art critic Alfred Frankenstein proclaimed that Ansel’s 1949 San Francisco exhibition “could easily fill the whole museum without repetition or satiety, for the photographer in question is Ansel Adams.”79 A more deeply personal reaction to his work came to Ansel in a letter from Imogen Cunningham, who wrote, “If anyone admired only one of my prints with the intent interest and appreciation I put on every print except one [photograph not identified] in your present exhibition, I should feel a big reward had come my way. You make us all feel so inadequate and futile. What shall I do.”80

  Chapter 15: A Documentary Approach

  Ansel wanted to believe he could do it all. He could not be satisfied with becoming merely the most celebrated landscape photographer of all time so long as the whispering voice of Stieglitz in his subconscious argued that it was a time not to photograph rocks and trees but to turn his camera, instead, on the most important subject: man.1 Ansel longed to make his mark in the great documentary tradition with true and revealing photographs of people and their lives. He reasoned that the subject should be his for the taking.

  One of the most committed documentary photographers, Dorothea Lange, worked closely with Ansel over many years, although their relationship followed a bumpy road. Born in 1895, Dorothea was seven years older than Ansel. After working for photographer Arnold Genthe and studying at the Clarence White School of Photography in New York, she had stopped in San Francisco in 1918 on her way to the Far East, but found herself stranded when all her money was stolen. She was hired by a photo-finisher and soon met many Bay Area photographers, including Imogen Cunningham and Consuelo Kanaga. Within a year she had opened her own commercial studio and was in demand as a portrait photographer of the city’s well-to-do. She married Maynard Dixon, an illustrator an
d painter, and had two sons, keeping her portrait business alive all the while.2

  One day in 1933, with the Depression at its nadir, Dorothea glanced down from her studio window and noticed a young unemployed laborer standing at the corner, looking about in every direction as if to find a way out of his personal predicament. Moved by the scene, Dorothea picked up her Graflex camera and walked down the steps, out the door, and into her new life as a documentary photographer, later stating, “I was compelled to photograph as a direct response to what was around me.”3

  Ansel became Dorothea’s third champion, and maybe her most important, mentioning her name at every opportunity in print as well as in person.4 Her first had been Albert Bender, who encouraged her creative works during the 1920s and was the first person to purchase her photographs based on their artistic merit. Young East Bay photographer and Group f.64 leader Willard Van Dyke was her second promoter, writing a glowing, in-depth profile for Camera Craft published in 1934.5 Ansel reproduced White Angel Breadline in his 1935 book Making a Photograph, the only image by someone other than himself and the first time one of Dorothea’s photographs was published for its intrinsic value, not to illustrate a government report or article. When this image was made, the year was 1933, and fourteen million Americans were out of work.6 A dejected old man stands at the picture’s center, his back turned away from a sea of others who wait for the food being handed out by a woman dubbed the White Angel. The old man’s stained and crushed hat is pulled down low on his forehead; a dark, shapeless coat hangs from his shoulders, which droop with resignation. He hugs an empty tin cup. Here was a picture truly worth a thousand words.

  Dorothea was recruited in 1935 onto the first team of photographers for the Resettlement Administration to document the effects of the Depression on America. Joining her were photographers Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and, eventually, Marion Post Wolcott. Their unit, led by Roy Stryker, was renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937. In 1936, Dorothea made the photograph that became an icon for both the Depression and the efforts of the FSA, the deeply poignant Migrant Mother. By the project’s end, in 1942, over 270,000 negatives documenting the Depression’s effects had been made, all of which are now archived at the Library of Congress, owned by the American people.7