Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Ansel placed a dark-orange filter (not as strong as a red filter) before the lens to increase the tonal contrasts, heightening the drama of the picture by deepening the dark values while brightening the whites.37 He squeezed the cable release on the last exposure at 4:14 p.m. on December 28, 1960 (another date and time arrived at thanks to a feat of curiosity, persistence, and computer wizardry by Dr. Donald W. Olson and his students).38 The resulting image is almost a tonal reverse of his 1927 Monolith, in which the face of Half Dome is dark, boldly thrusting skyward from its setting of brilliant white snow. In Moon and Half Dome, the cliff is brightly lit, its every detail described by the full rays of the setting sun; Half Dome’s shape is modulated by the dark presence of Washington Column in the left foreground and by the triangular shadow of the Diving Board anchoring its base. The nearly full moon completes the composition. Moon and Half Dome is both visually arresting and popular, if not as soulful as Monolith, made thirty-three years earlier.

  In 1959, Ansel was awarded his third, and final, Guggenheim: a grant of three thousand dollars a year for two years.39 His project was to make prints from the thousands of negatives that he had never found time to print. Whereas his first two Guggenheims, in the 1940s, had funded the making of new images, this last grant reflected Ansel’s continuing feeling that the best use of his time now lay in revealing what he had already accomplished, not in the increasingly futile effort to create new photographs.

  The result of the third Guggenheim was piles of prints from a lifetime’s worth of negatives with no place to go until San Francisco’s M. H. de Young Memorial Museum offered Ansel an exhibition, his first solo show there since 1932.40 Although he had many smaller exhibitions every single year, for Ansel, as for most artists, major installations at the best museums were few and far between.

  The Sierra Club was eager to publish Ansel’s biography that Nancy Newhall had been writing for nearly twenty years. After reading the manuscript, Ansel suggested that she include more about the difficulties he had encountered, including in his personal life. He told Nancy not to worry, that he was strong enough to take the truth, and he believed it would make him seem more human and more real to the reader.41 Nancy, however, remained protective; her narrative provided only slight evidence of his family troubles, and even that was more between the lines than in them.

  Rather than wait any longer, in 1963 the club published The Eloquent Light, the first volume of a proposed two-volume set, covering Ansel’s life from his birth until 1938. It became a classic and remained in print for many years. Its limitations are serious, since it ends with so much more of his amazing life still to come, and is devoid of source notes or index, but these are far outweighed by Nancy’s ability to spin out Ansel’s story in poetic prose. It is an amazingly dense book, chock-full of people and events.

  Ansel loved the book’s title and suggested to Nancy that she curate his 1963 de Young show, which they also called The Eloquent Light. It was the largest exhibition he ever had, and at a phenomenal 530 pieces, simply too big for anyone to absorb in one or even two visits. Throughout the nine galleries, Nancy interspersed artifacts to create a sympathetic environment for Ansel’s images. Arrangements of needled and leafy branches, sugar pine cones, and stones piled in corners joined Indian baskets and pots, sagebrush and cactus, large branches blasted by lightning and slabs of veined granite. For Ansel, “It was probably the best show I’ve ever had or will have.”42

  The second volume of Nancy’s biography, to be titled The Enduring Moment, became mired in the quicksand of personal involvement. Since the lives of the Newhalls and Ansel had been so intertwined from 1939 onward, her text told the tale of the three together, not of Ansel individually, but it stopped in just 1950. Never published, after Nancy’s death it sat locked away in Beaumont’s files. He would not allow such rough text to be printed, although he did use selections in her posthumous book From Adams to Stieglitz, as well as in his own autobiography, Focus.

  In the decades of the fifties and sixties, Ansel pursued a variety of commercial jobs above and beyond his work for Polaroid and Hasselblad and articles for Arizona Highways. Each of these was a sizable project, one seeming to grow from another. With the hundredth anniversary of the University of California looming in 1968, President Clark Kerr engaged Ansel to produce a book describing all the institution’s campuses, with Nancy slated to write the text. Kerr had been impressed with their joint 1954 book, The Pageant of History in Northern California, and believed Ansel was exactly the right person for Fiat Lux, the title taken from the university’s Latin motto, “Let there be light.” Ansel was paid the princely sum of seventy-five thousand dollars, but this enormous task would take him three years and demand six thousand negatives.43

  Ansel walked a fine line between his working life as a commercial photographer and his activity as an environmentalist. Plain and simple, he was a photographer for hire, occasionally accepting jobs from those whom his fellow Sierra Clubbers would designate “mindless developers.” Near Sacramento, he produced a promotional booklet for the Sunset Petroleum Corporation, which built its twelve-thousand-acre namesake community of Sunset, California, on former ranch lands. At Laguna Niguel, another development south of Los Angeles, Ansel was promised that his photographs would provide information to guide the designers toward a more environmentally conscious outcome. “They absolutely ruined the place; it didn’t guide the development at all!” was Ansel’s conclusion.44

  Most of his assignments were for more responsible developers. On California’s north Sonoma Coast, he photographed the dramatic headlands where they met a rough Pacific Ocean at Timber Cove, before the land was split into lots for vacation homes. Together with his former CSFA student Pirkle Jones, he made an extensive document of the building of Paul Masson’s champagne cellars in Saratoga, California; out of their work came an exhibition, Story of a Winery, that traveled around the world under the auspices of the United States Information Service and an illustrated book entitled Gift of the Grape.45 The Redwood Empire Association, a chamber-of-commerce-type group that encouraged tourism in northwestern California, commissioned an extensive portrait of that area with its majestic redwoods.

  In addition, Ansel published two portfolios, Portfolio Three: Yosemite Valley and Portfolio Four: What Majestic Word, which appeared in 1960 and 1963, respectively. These were huge undertakings, requiring him to complete 3,328 fine, signed prints for Portfolio Three and 3,900 for Portfolio Four. Both portfolios were underwritten financially, but the sheer time and physical work involved were awesome.46

  Since the mid-1930s, Ansel had hired help only as he needed it, for a few months here or a few weeks there, but with the combination of his commercial jobs, the third Guggenheim, and the portfolios (and always, another book), Ansel became a business, and full-time employees were essential. Every few years, as the business grew, so did the staff. No one who worked for him found it to be just another job.

  In 1955, like many others before and after him, Don Worth brought a portfolio of photographs to show Ansel, whose technical books had been his guide. In Don’s experience, “With great dignity, Ansel focused his entire attention on what the student showed him. He never put people down but was always supportive and positive.” Ansel’s comments on Don’s work were generous and warm, a welcome incentive for any photographer. The two men also had music in common, since Don, too, was a classically trained pianist. Don suggested that the piano and photography were parallel arts, both requiring clear definition and precision, quite different from the long, singing tones characteristic of the violin. It made sense to Ansel. In Ansel, Don found a friend and teacher who cared deeply about others, a rare trait in an artist.47

  Don was a natural to become Ansel’s full-time photographic assistant. With the occasional assistance of young photographer Gerry Sharpe, who worked primarily at Best’s Studio, from 1956 to 1960, he traveled with Ansel in search of Kodak Coloramas, assembled reproduction prints for books, conducted research for
Polaroid, and finished prints for Portfolio Three.48 Because Ansel stored his negatives in a vault at the Bank of California in downtown San Francisco, a significant portion of Don’s time was spent shuttling them to and fro. He really did it all for Ansel, even writing the musical score for the 1958 documentary Ansel Adams, Photographer. Eventually he moved on to become an excellent photographer in his own right and a professor of art at San Francisco State University for thirty years.

  After living in San Francisco his entire life, in early 1961 Ansel decided to move to Carmel. Richard (Dick) McGraw, heir to the Chicago-based McGraw Edison fortune, owned several contiguous lots on a hillside overlooking the Pacific in Carmel Highlands, five miles south of Carmel-by-the-Sea and 120 miles south of San Francisco. McGraw planned to build his home there and intended to surround himself with friends to make it a small artists’ enclave. A student from the Art Center School days of 1942–1943, he had become a great admirer of Ansel’s and offered him a large adjoining lot. Still living on the edge of financial desperation despite all his success, Ansel had for years been routinely refinancing the two San Francisco houses, whose sale would thus bring little equity.49 But McGraw wanted Ansel for his next-door neighbor and provided him with a loan of a hundred thousand dollars to build a house/studio, a loan that he generously forgave over time.50 He also set aside a piece of land for the Newhalls, which for Ansel was the icing on the cake.

  Ansel’s photography business had long since outgrown his funky basement darkroom in San Francisco, festooned as it was with spiderwebs and impossible to keep clean.51 The completion of Portfolio Three had proved a severe challenge in such a poor space, and carrying the mountains of obligatory supplies from the car, across the garden, and down the stairs was a considerable chore.52

  Ansel decided that a big change was just what he needed, even though he was a bit concerned about living right in the midst of Edward Weston territory. Weston was dead, but his spirit seemed to be everywhere: his beloved Point Lobos State Reserve would be just a mile north of the new house. Ansel acknowledged that anything that looked like it might make a good picture there had already been used by Edward.53

  Ted Spencer designed a place that had aesthetics similar to those of Ansel’s San Francisco home but was more directly responsive to his work. The building itself settled quietly into the hillside, projecting only a small profile in proportion to its true mass. Ansel was proud that no trace of the house could be seen from the ocean.

  Ansel’s estrangement from Virginia had continued. While Ansel lived in San Francisco, she still resided primarily in Yosemite.54 Ansel’s connection with his children was not much better: from Michael’s point of view, his relationship with Ansel (he never called him Dad) had been emotionally distanced for as long as he could remember.55

  During the 1950s, as Michael and Anne had moved into adulthood, they had both established independent and successful lives. Michael attended Stanford University but left in the midst of his studies to join the Air Force in December 1953, becoming a fighter pilot on an F-86F Sabre. On July 28, 1962, exactly sixty-one years after his Best grandparents were married, Michael wed Jeanne Falk, whom he had met while both worked one summer at Tuolumne Meadows. Although he loved flying, Michael decided to add a medical degree to his education, courtesy of the Air Force. While Jeanne gave birth to their two children—Sarah, in 1965, and Matthew, in 1967—Michael attended Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, graduating in 1967. He returned to the Air Force with the rank of captain and served as one of only twenty-five flight surgeons, the name given to doctors who also fly for the military. When his required time of service was fulfilled in 1971, he and his family settled in Fresno, California, where he served a residency in internal medicine and established a private practice. He maintained his air hours by joining the California Air National Guard.56

  Anne, possessed of both brains and a delicate beauty, attended Dominican Convent High School as a boarding student. She excelled there, and was elected class president for two years and student body president as a senior. Anne then entered Stanford, earning a degree in English in 1956. Shortly before graduation, she married Charles (Chuck) Mayhew, of course in Yosemite. Soon the young couple grew to a family of five, with three daughters, Virginia (Ginny), Alison, and Sylvia, born in 1959, 1960, and 1963. Anne stayed at home with the girls while Chuck held a variety of jobs, including managing Ansel and Virginia’s publishing business, 5 Associates.

  One July afternoon in 1966, Anne’s young husband took a friend’s motorcycle for a spin around the block and never came back: he was killed in a horrible accident. Made of the same stern stuff as her mother, although with a gentler temperament, Anne went to work, taking over the management of 5 Associates, and raising her daughters by herself, while also earning a master’s degree in anthropology. Very happily, Anne fell in love with the minister of her Unitarian church in Redwood City, and he with her. They were married in 1971, bringing together her three daughters and his three sons.57

  Anne has suffered more than her share of heartbreak. When she was a young child, a pan of hot peas was knocked off the stove and severely burned her neck. The wound was treated with radioactive paste (as had been Ansel’s leg). Eventually, she developed a cancer that had to be removed from the right side of her lower face and throat. In the early 1980s, she was diagnosed with cancer once more, this time breast cancer. Anne again fully recovered.

  Shortly before Ansel completed his new Carmel house in May 1962, Virginia announced that she would move in with him. This was a definite surprise; in fact, no bedroom had even been built for her, so she took what would have been a small downstairs study, without a bath, while Ansel had the main, large bedroom with bath. Farther down the hall were two guest rooms with a shared bath. The Carmel house became the site of their marital truce, where they lived together for twenty-two years. They were almost always civil to each other in public, but in private they endured a life of quiet antagonism, each only barely tolerating the presence of the other.

  Virginia confined herself for most of the day to her little room, devoting herself to reading. She would climb the stairs at eight in the morning to prepare a simple breakfast of oatmeal mush, toast, juice, and coffee for them both as they studied the paper, then would descend to her room again until she returned upstairs to make lunch. Afternoons saw a quick return to reading, fully dressed, propped up in bed. Then back upstairs to set out the drinks for cocktail time.

  The Carmel house was Ansel’s dream home, a place intended to potentiate the future business of his photography. The entrance was pure Ansel, eclectic as all get-out. Inside the front door, made of simple frosted sliding glass, hung a mobile with fingers pointing in all directions. Bookshelves lined the long entry, holding volumes on architecture and artists’ monographs. Smack-dab in the middle of these books sat a hologram of a pretty young brunette blowing you a kiss. The Adams family’s old grandfather clock, whose wooden works the four-year-old Ansel had played with after the “oh-six” earthquake left it in pieces, steadfastly ticked away next to a Piranesi engraving of an aqueduct. Much to Virginia’s chagrin, the guest bath, just inside the front door, sported Ansel’s diploma from grammar school—“Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School, San Francisco, Grammar School, June 8, 1917”—grandly framed in beveled gilt splendor next to his Kentucky Colonel certificate. Virginia did not think her husband should flaunt the fact that this was the sum total of his formal education.

  To great benefit, Virginia presided over almost all the rest of the interior decoration. For years, she acquired fine Native American pots, baskets, and Navajo rugs in natural colors of brown, gray, and black; her personal favorites were of a pale yellow. The new house profited immensely by Virginia’s collections, with her handsome rugs punctuating the dark wood floors and her pots and baskets lining shelves and mantle. Downstairs, one guest-room wall was filled with Virginia’s marvelous group of miniature ceremonial baskets, beaded, feathered, and plain.

  Teal
was Virginia’s color. The living-room drapes and sofas were of that vibrant hue, set off by black tables on which pink camellias floated in small crystal bowls. Most of the furniture had been given to them years before by Ansel’s parents or Albert Bender. A carnival of mismatched chairs lined the walls of the gallery, including Ansel’s high chair from when he was a child.

  The windowsill below the large north-facing window displayed Virginia’s phalaenopsis orchids, most of them white, that seemed perpetually in bloom. In later years, the blossoms hid a bronze bust of Ansel that, although less than becoming or true, had been a thoughtful gift from a friend. Occasionally a hat would appear on the poor thing’s head, or a bandanna or bolo tie about its neck, just to humanize it a little.

  Besides contributing to the basic design of the house, Ansel chose the varying shades of gray for the walls and ceiling, whose light-gray slats were spanned by massive old bridge beams painted Zone V (or medium gray), the color of the walls that Alfred Stieglitz had selected for Ansel’s 1936 An American Place exhibition. In a contrarian touch, the long, west-facing wall with its potentially great view of the ocean held but one window on either end and a huge stone fireplace with a twenty-four-foot-long mantel. At the mantel’s center presided Ansel’s mammoth Chinese temple drum, nearly six feet in diameter, years earlier acquired from William Colby. This drum, the same one he had played at the Parillia in 1938, was the heart of the house. Its rim, now hundreds of years old, had originally been in the drum tower of the Black Pagoda in Beijing, and its stretched skin bore a colorfully painted, ornate dragon set against a red background. When Ansel decided that the evening was over, he would bang the drum, sounding a huge bass thump that would cause both floors and, by that time of night, bibulous livers to tremble. Without question, everyone would know it was time to go.