Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  When the deadline for orders passed, Ansel issued a form letter to answer the requests for prints that continued to flood his studio. He listed as the reasons for his decision 1) his desire to proof and print the thousands of neglected negatives of his that had yet to see the light of an enlarger; 2) the need to write a new series of technical books; and 3) the obligations of lecturing and teaching his annual Yosemite Workshops.35

  Ansel knew that to fill the orders in hand, he would have to devote all of his time and energy for the next few years to making prints. He hired a second photographic assistant so that the darkroom could be in operation seven days a week and set a daily production goal of forty sixteen-by-twenty-inch prints or sixty eleven-by-fourteens.36 Only such a darkroom virtuoso as Ansel could meet those numbers with no diminution of print quality.

  Continuing to put Ansel’s business house in order, in 1974 Bill presented the idea of an exclusive publishing agreement to Tim Hill, editor in chief of the New York Graphic Society (NYGS) imprint of Little, Brown and Company. The contract would give NYGS the right of first refusal on any of Ansel’s publishing projects. Hill knew immediately that this was an opportunity not to be missed. Recently hired to improve NYGS’s bottom line—its historical emphasis on books about painters and painting had put it on thin ice financially—Hill had presciently switched the imprint’s thrust from painting to photography, which he saw as less elitist and appealing to a much larger market. Eastern and erudite, the hardworking Hill proved his mettle. With a careful analysis in hand, he approached the revered president of Little, Brown, Arthur Thornhill, Jr., and reminded him that the company already had Robert Frost in poetry, Norman Rockwell in illustration, and Andrew Wyeth in painting. Ansel Adams would, he argued, make a fitting and prestigious addition to their distinguished roster. Thornhill readily agreed.37

  With David Vena, the attorney he had hired on Ansel’s behalf, Bill devised a favorable contract that assured his boss a fair royalty share, gave him the power to select the designer, printer, paper, and binding to be used, and allowed him actively to supervise the printing.38 This was an unusual requirement for an author to make of a publisher, and even more unusual for a publisher to accept, but these were extremely important considerations to Ansel, who insisted on the highest-quality reproduction and ensured that he got it by personally checking printed sheets as the presses rolled. From his earliest efforts, Ansel had been committed to producing the best books possible; the association of excellence with the name Ansel Adams had been hard earned.

  Images: 1923–1974, his first volume with NYGS, was published that very year. In full control, Ansel produced his ideal book, comprising his personal choice of pictures, state-of-the-art reproduction, and graceful words. He selected the 115 photographs that he believed best represented the range of his vision, choosing (as he always did when it was up to him) a wide spectrum of portraits, details, abstracts, and occasional quirky subjects, as well as a smattering of his grand landscapes.

  He invited close friends to join with him in the project. Adrian Wilson created a design of expansive white borders and spare, clean typography, all in service to the photographs. The foreword was finely crafted by Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, good friend, and former Sierra Club director Wallace Stegner. George Waters, Ansel’s old comrade from his years working for Kodak, supervised both the making of the plates and the actual printing.

  Physically, Images was ponderously large, nearly a yard long when opened. Good old Imogen complained that she could peruse it only when propped up in bed with pillows supporting both the book and her. Released at sixty-five dollars and soon raised to seventy-five, Images was both a great aesthetic and commercial success, elected as one of the 50 Books of the Year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts and awarded first prize at the World Book Fair in Leipzig, Germany.39

  In the early planning stages for the retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974, David McAlpin warned Ansel that the New York audience was different from that of the West Coast; few Easterners had actually visited a national park.40 He also suggested that portraits were more interesting than empty, if beautiful, landscapes.41 Although Ansel heeded his advice and included more people pictures, the New York critics generally raked him over the “Nature Boy” coals. The critic for the New York Times sniffed, “For myself, the look on the face of Georgia O’Keeffe—in the 1937 photograph included here—is worth all the views of Yosemite Valley ever committed to film.”42

  During the production of the Metropolitan exhibition, Ansel and Bill worked closely with the young assistant to the curator of prints and drawings. Andrea Gray Rawle was intelligent, dynamic, and beautiful. Bill swept Andrea off her feet; by June 15, 1974, she had moved to Carmel, assured of a job with Ansel.

  Andrea proved to be a godsend to Ansel. She was a meticulous organizer and served as an excellent buffer between him and much of the rest of the world, which seemed to want something from him every minute of the day. She had such amazing vitality that just being around her made Ansel feel more alive; she was fun and ready to do anything that needed to be done or to travel anywhere at the drop of a hat. They developed a wonderful relationship, and she was quickly promoted from secretary to chief assistant.

  Ansel did not believe in vacations and proudly declared that he had never taken one (those months spent on Sierra Club Outings, he reckoned, were nothing less than serious work). When Bill learned that his boss had never been to Europe, he came up with an important excuse for a trip: in July 1974, the two went to France for a week so that Ansel could participate in the annual Arles Festival of Photography (Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie). Ansel enjoyed the festival itself—an event unsurpassed by any other in the medium, founded and directed for many years by the engaging photographer Lucien Clergue, who welcomed his American colleague with Gallic kisses on both cheeks and a full itinerary laced with good times—but Ansel did not enjoy much else during these travels, especially his one morning in Paris, when he was flabbergasted at the price of a simple cup of coffee.43

  Two years later, Andrea and Bill, now married, convinced Ansel to give Europe one more try. Ansel and entourage—Andrea, Bill, Virginia, and Anne’s youngest child, the teenage Sylvia—sallied forth. Since this could not smack of the word vacation, their heavy schedule included yet another stint at the Arles Festival and the opening of Ansel’s important solo exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, perceptively curated by Mark Haworth-Booth. Ansel was surprised that the exhibition’s walls had been painted a warm maroon. He found the color to present his prints very effectively, and decided it was refreshing after so many years of gray or white walls. The Turnages were also hoping that Ansel would find some exciting new subjects, so the group did some touring in France, England, and Scotland as well.

  But although he dutifully toted about his Hasselblad, Ansel saw only visual disappointments. Aside from Scotland (which he liked a lot because it reminded him of home), the only places that appealed to him were the Matterhorn (he thought it at least had an interesting shape, but not as fine as Half Dome’s) and Chartres Cathedral, mostly for its windows. The pictures he brought back were good but not especially inspired.44

  Ansel met with photographers Bill Brandt and Brassaï in London and Man Ray in Paris, and looked forward to catching up with Henri Cartier-Bresson in Arles.45 They were both present at a festival reception, but when Ansel tried to make his way across the room, the great French photographer disappeared. Ansel thought it was an intentional snub until he received a letter of apology from Cartier-Bresson, who explained that he had become overwhelmed by the press of people and had fallen to his knees and crawled out of the room.46 Ansel returned home to Carmel breathing a sigh of relief and vowing never again to venture to foreign shores—a promise he would keep.47

  As Bill and Ansel attempted to tie up the details of Ansel’s long and complex life, the question of what should happen to his negatives was paramount. Ansel offered
his archive (comprising negatives, prints, collections of books and photographs, correspondence, awards, and memorabilia) to the University of California, but much to his embarrassment (and their later profound regret), the administration and trustees refused it, excusing themselves for lack of funds.

  Word soon reached John Schaefer, president of the University of Arizona, where Ansel had enjoyed a large solo exhibition in 1973. A chemist by education but a photographer at heart, John caught the next plane to Carmel and eagerly offered to acquire the archive. Ansel agreed, provided that the university establish an archive and research center for creative photography, using his collection as its cornerstone.48 His conditions were met, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona was born. The Center is now home to more than two hundred archival collections and ninety thousand works made by two thousand photographers.49

  It was Ansel’s wish that the Center be just one component of a broader learning program, and inspire not only students in creative photography and its history but also working photographers and the interested public. It was to be not a graveyard of long-departed photographers but a place of lively discourse that would publish and exhibit the work of photographers both living and dead.50

  It was important to Ansel to know that after his death, his negatives would be used to teach young photographers. In this respect and others, the university setting was perfect. Although the Center now cares for Ansel’s negatives, and selected students under careful supervision may study them, no one is allowed to sell prints made from them, ensuring that no more “original” Ansel Adams photographs will show up.51

  Together, Bill Turnage and Dave Vena structured the future for then and forever for Ansel, his family, his art, and his finances.52 In 1975, the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust (AAPRT) and the Ansel Adams Family Trust were formed. Ansel himself described the former as the director of future publishing projects and reproduction rights, and the latter as the recipient of the funds generated.53 Ansel, Bill, Dave, and Arthur Thornhill, Jr., served as the first trustees of the AAPRT. Thornhill would resign shortly before Ansel’s death, to be replaced by John Schaefer.

  In addition to everything else he was engaged in, Ansel published his last three portfolios during the 1970s. Portfolio Five (1970), Portfolio Six (1974), and Portfolio Seven (1976) appeared in editions of 110, 110, and 115, respectively. His only portfolios of large-scale prints, each image measuring about sixteen by twenty inches, they were all accompanied by a statement proclaiming that no further prints would be made from the negatives represented therein. Ansel was as good as his word: in what he later saw as an ill-considered gesture, he ran each of the Portfolio Six negatives through a Wells Fargo Bank check canceler to effectively destroy them and absolutely guarantee that no more prints could be made from them. He regretted this act almost immediately, deciding that he had usurped a basic photographic property: the ability of a negative theoretically to produce an infinite number of prints. Using electronic retouching, the AAPRT has resurrected those negatives, pixel by pixel, so that new reproduction prints can be made.54

  After he came on board in 1971, in the short span of five years Bill reordered Ansel’s entire life. By 1976, Ansel was a millionaire, an achievement that he credited to Bill.55 There had been a confluence of propitious events, and probably any good financial manager could have done as well in the same situation, given a client who was a great artist with no history of personal management, and given the coincident photography boom. Ansel may have felt overmanaged; on one occasion, he told an interviewer, “Turnage is really doing extremely well by me, but he’s doing a little more than I can handle. I have to watch things very carefully.”56 In fact, the last years of Ansel’s life were to be a grueling treadmill of moneymaking projects, what with the huge Museum Set project, a series of finely reproduced posters, annual calendars, and a new book almost yearly.57 Ansel Adams had become the golden goose.

  The moment Ansel stopped accepting print orders was the same time that museums began serious photography collections, too late to normally order prints from him. The Museum Sets were created so that people could buy them with the express purpose of donating them to a museum or similar nonprofit. He wanted his work to be seen by many, not by a few. There would be a total of one hundred of these “super” portfolios. Each Museum Set would contain what we called the “Basic Ten,” Moonrise, Monolith, Mount Williamson, and so on, and the purchaser could choose fifteen more prints from the full list, or could buy all seventy-five prints. This meant Ansel had to make almost three thousand prints. It was an onerous final burden. He began working on the Museum Sets when he was seventy-seven years old.

  Bill brought out both the best and the worst in Ansel. Money had always been Ansel’s Achilles’ heel, and he had had to scramble for it most of his life. Ansel’s old friend and sometime harshest critic, Dorothea Lange, once mused, “Ansel . . . has always been able to attract, to magnetize, money and people with money . . . I’m sure, I swear, that Ansel doesn’t know that he goes where the money is. Just like a homing pigeon.”58 And now here was Bill, devising project after moneymaking project for him. The rewards were so high that it proved nearly impossible for Ansel to admit that the demands on him were just too great.

  Besides money, Ansel and Bill also shared another passion: conservation of the natural environment, and in this area, too, Bill potentiated Ansel. In late 1974, Harry Lunn presented President Gerald Ford a copy of Images, which prompted an invitation for Ansel to visit the White House. On January 27, 1975, Ansel and Bill arrived bearing a gift print of Clearing Winter Storm. Realizing that this was an opportunity for more than mere small talk, however, they also brought an itemized memorandum headed “New Initiatives for the National Parks.”59

  The national parks had suffered years of neglect under the Nixon administration, but Ansel wanted to give the new Republican, Ford, the benefit of the doubt especially since he was obviously an Adams fan. Ansel was impressed with the president’s willingness to listen, but although they seemed to agree on most of the issues, nothing much came out of their meeting other than First Daughter Susan Ford’s attending Ansel’s Yosemite Workshop that summer.60

  By late 1977, Bill was well and truly bored. He believed that his work for Ansel was essentially over; the rest would be just “bean counting.” Then, too, he had broken up with Andrea. Bill left Ansel’s full-time employ on December 1, 1977, skedaddling off to the mountains of Wyoming with the Garboesque announcement that he wanted some time alone to plan his future.

  The next year, championed by Ansel and California’s Senator Alan Cranston, Bill was selected to be the executive director of the Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C. Ansel was so proud that he was popping buttons on his nonexistent vest. Ansel had been a supporter of the Wilderness Society for many years, but Bill now drew him into its inner circle. His photographs were used promotionally, to increase membership and as gifts for major donors. Ansel and his images brought added prestige to an already respected environmental group, albeit one that was nominally in the shade of the giant Sierra Club.

  In the early 1980s, Ansel would be a leading figure in the society’s “Stop Watt” campaign, aimed at removing from office Reagan’s destructive Secretary of the Interior James Watt. Ansel was appalled by what he saw as Watt’s fundamentalist conviction that we might as well use up all our natural resources now since the apocalypse could come at any time.61 The wall just outside Ansel’s darkroom door in Carmel sported a dartboard with Watt as the target.

  While Ansel had had the ears of politicians for many years, Bill now brought him even greater access. At the behest of the Wilderness Society, senators came calling in Carmel and responded with genuine warmth when Ansel visited Washington; one, California’s Alan Cranston, a congressional environmental hero, became a personal friend. For Ansel, such associations were incredibly satisfying.

  The 1970s ended with a bang. Images had proved such a success that in 1976 another large-
format volume, Yosemite and the Range of Light, was added to Ansel’s NYGS schedule. Slated for 1979 publication, the book provided a view into the heart of Ansel’s work, his wellspring: Yosemite and the Sierra.62

  The Metropolitan Museum exhibition had not satisfied his craving for acceptance by the East Coast art establishment. The Met was seen as the old guard; more energy seemed to emanate from MoMA, where Ansel still had never had a solo exhibition (discounting Born Free and Equal in the museum’s basement in 1944). John Szarkowski, the director of photography at MoMA since Steichen’s retirement in 1972, had never pretended that he admired Ansel’s photographs. On the contrary, he had championed a series of then-contemporary photographers whose works were about as different from Ansel’s as they could be while still being in the same medium—from Diane Arbus’s disturbing portraits to Garry Winogrand’s quickly grabbed street shots. Szarkowski declared of the enlarged color “snapshots” of William Eggleston, “As pictures . . . these seem to me perfect: irreducible surrogates for the experience they pretend to record.”63 Ansel was well aware that his own, very different aesthetic was not held in high regard at MoMA.

  In 1976, when he dedicated Portfolio Seven to David McAlpin, Ansel knew that McAlpin had been busy divesting himself of his art collection through gifts.64 Ansel had already donated his one original photograph by Stieglitz, given to him by O’Keeffe after Stieglitz’s death, to McAlpin’s primary beneficiary, Princeton University; now, spreading the wealth, he sent a copy of the portfolio to MoMA in McAlpin’s name.65 In return, he received a surprisingly cordial letter of thanks from Szarkowski, who spoke in glowing terms of El Capitan, Winter Sunrise and referred to the horizontal Aspens as an “old friend.”66