Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  By year’s end, Szarkowski had offered Ansel a solo show for 1979, to be called Ansel Adams and the West.67 At first, the plan was to assemble the exhibit directly from the museum’s own collection, but the show expanded into a retrospective of 153 photographs after Szarkowski spent a week in Carmel sifting through boxes and boxes of prints and proofs.68

  Ansel found Szarkowski’s curatorial style a bit unnerving. He had become used to having near-total control over which of his works would be shown and reproduced in magazines and books, and also through his virtual monopoly as director—in substance if not in name—of his own exhibitions. Few museums had staff who were familiar with photography, so most gladly handed over the responsibility to him. When it came to Ansel Adams and the West, however, Szarkowski was clearly the boss. Taking the opposite position from McAlpin’s on Ansel’s Met show, Szarkowski resolved that the exhibition should have a single focus: landscapes and natural still lifes. By way of explanation, he stated, “I think [the landscapes] are [Ansel’s] greatest pictures and I think that’s where his most original, most intense work has been done. Ultimately that’s going to be how we remember him.”69

  And Szarkowski was right.

  Since Yosemite and the Range of Light was in production and due to be published at the time of Ansel’s MoMA opening, Bill (at that time still working for him) suggested that a smaller-format version, including appropriate wraparound additions and a text by Szarkowski, might do as the show’s catalog. It was a match.70

  In March 1977, Bill arranged for Ansel and Virginia to establish a quarter-of-a-million-dollar curatorial fellowship at MoMA in honor of Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, with the funds to be used to support the training of young photographic scholars.71 A grateful Szarkowski wrote the Adamses that their endowment was the most important contribution ever made to the Department of Photography.72

  There followed an uneasy period filled with rumors of a quid pro quo. The supposition in some parts of the photographic community was that Ansel’s MoMA exhibit had been bought. After all, he had just had a huge New York exhibition in 1974 at the Met, and it was (and still is) highly unusual for an artist to have major shows at competing museums in the same city within such a short time. But perhaps this long overdue recognition by MoMA of such an important, and aging, artist could no longer be postponed.

  Opening in New York on September 8, 1979, Ansel Adams and the West was a brilliant presentation of Ansel’s photographic best, and it proved to be extremely popular, breaking attendance records at the other museums to which it traveled over the next few years. The show began with a splendid mural of Clearing Winter Storm, followed by a series of other photographs that Ansel had made from the same vantage point over many seasons and years. Throughout the exhibition, examples of recently made prints were hung next to vintage prints from the same negative, demonstrating the change effected in Ansel’s expression, or performance, over forty years or more. (Generally, his prints from the 1930s and 1940s are softer in tone than his later prints, whose increased contrast serves to emphasize the drama of each scene.)

  Some important and common photographic terms do not have clear definitions. One such is “vintage,” an adjective often used erroneously to describe an old photograph, rather than to refer (correctly) to a print made soon after the making of the negative. A vintage print is thus the photographer’s initial interpretation of a negative. Such a print may be but is not necessarily better than one made many years later; Ansel in fact frequently claimed that the most recent print he had made from any negative was the best, because it benefited from his additional years of experience. Today, his vintage prints, much rarer than his later prints, often command the highest prices.

  The reviews for this exhibition were more cheering than those Ansel had suffered in 1974 for his Metropolitan show. In the Village Voice, photography critic Ben Lifson agreed with Szarkowski’s assessment that Ansel’s late style was epic.

  It’s epic . . . in its idea of heroism.

  Adams’s hero is himself, and although his world is vast, as an epic world must be, it stops at the earth and the sky; no heaven, no hell; modern. Adams’s struggle (and this makes it epic, not romantic) is . . . as someone whose feelings don’t shape the world but proceed from his being in it.73

  With a marvelous essay by conservationist and publisher Paul Brooks (former editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin, home to a number of Ansel’s earlier books, and one of the first two non-Californians to serve on the Sierra Club board) and a sensitive design by Lance Hidy, Yosemite and the Range of Light again set new publishing standards. George Waters directed the printing at Pacific Lithograph in San Francisco, with Ansel standing over the presses. All plates were made using laser-scanned negatives and duotone printing; each image sang on the page.

  The choice of a cover image can be vital to the success of any book, and even more so for a picture book. When Ansel suggested a closely detailed and textured tree trunk, everyone involved was more than a little taken aback. Certain that putting that picture on the jacket would spell disaster, Tim Hill recommended substituting the quintessential Yosemite photograph Clearing Winter Storm, to which choice Ansel replied with a sigh, “Everyone’s seen that.” It took some doing, but Hill finally convinced Ansel to trust the publishing experts.74

  Yosemite and the Range of Light rode the crest of the Ansel Adams popularity wave, selling approximately a quarter of a million copies in hardcover and softcover editions in its first five years.75 By 1983, Ansel’s books had sold more than a million copies, and now thirty-one years and many new books later, it can only be imagined that the number is far, far larger, the total only eclipsed by the sales of The Family of Man.76 By way of contrast, most photography books have press runs of five thousand copies or fewer, and even then, the remainder table too often beckons.

  With Images, NYGS had offered a deluxe edition that included an original Ansel Adams print, and the same treatment was now applied to Yosemite and the Range of Light, although on a larger scale: the purchaser could choose one of five images, each available in an edition of only fifty. Priced at twenty-five hundred dollars a copy, the deluxe edition of Yosemite and the Range of Light sold out immediately, with the individual prints soon beginning to surface in the secondary market for as much as three times the book’s release price.77

  To top off the year 1979, on September 3, Ansel’s grizzled face, crowned by his crumpled old Stetson, graced the cover of Time, accompanied inside by a substantial profile by art critic Robert Hughes. Other major articles on him appeared almost simultaneously in Newsweek and Esquire. Ed Bradley and a television crew from 60 Minutes visited. Ansel was now well and truly famous.

  By 1979, Andrea needed to leave, and she knew it. Ever since the breakup of her marriage to Bill, she had lost patience with Ansel. Working for him had its enormous benefits, but it also took its toll: assistants burned out regularly. (I was an exception, I suspect, only because Ansel died before I reached that point.)

  As a good friend of Andrea’s, I pleaded with her not to leave, but she was convinced that it was time. It was then that Ansel offered me her position. After Andrea assured me that she was absolutely, positively going, I agreed. I gave notice at the Weston Gallery, where I had been manager, and Andrea moved back to New York.

  I began working full-time for Ansel on December 1, 1979. At thirty-three, I was now chief of staff to one of the great artists of the twentieth century, and my unusual background as a writer/editor and nurse turned out to be the perfect mix for him. But I had no time to wax philosophical: Ansel and I had an autobiography to write and a ton of other projects in the works. While I was bursting with energy, the next few years—truly golden years—would be jam-packed, and both totally exhilarating and utterly draining.

  Chapter 20: Too Little Time

  My first day working for Ansel was a corker. He led me to a stack of fifty prints of Moonrise and told me to check them carefully for defects and destroy any that were less than perfect. Fr
esh from the Weston Gallery, I was well aware that each print had a value of ten thousand dollars, at that time the highest price for any photograph by a living artist. As I stood there, stunned, Ansel quickly reassured me that he would not just throw me into the deep end but would teach me how to swim in these particular waters.

  He picked up the first Moonrise and talked with me in considerable detail about what he wanted to achieve in the finished print, pointing out specific areas of the picture where he often had difficulties. He advised me to look first at the moon and clouds to ascertain that they had both detail and brilliance; next, he suggested that I move to the bottom of the print and work my way up. He required the foreground sagebrush and the space above the church and village to be open: the viewer should be able to see into those places. The sky in each of these prints was uniformly black and unvarying, a characteristic shared by all of his late Moonrises because he had determined that it was essential to the most powerful expression of the negative.

  He also showed me how properly to check for physical damage by scanning each print in a bright, glancing light, searching for print-emulsion breaks, scratches, or paper flaws. Because the black areas of a gelatin-silver print retain evidence of everything that has ever touched them, just the necessary processing and finishing of a print ensured that all of the black skies would have surface mars. Usually, however, these were very minor—almost imperceivable—and thus acceptable.

  I pulled on a pair of clean white cotton gloves and stood at the big gray table under the skylights in Ansel’s gallery, next to the living room. I scrutinized each of the prints with reverence, unable to bring myself to tear up even one; I couldn’t help prosaically thinking that the income from the sale of even one print could feed a starving family for a year. Ruefully, I confessed to AA, the staff’s nickname for him, that I was a failure. Wasn’t there something that could be done with Moonrise seconds? I wondered. Putting his hand on my shoulder, Ansel chuckled and looked me straight in the eye. He said he was entrusting me with his reputation for producing only the most beautiful prints; he needed an objective someone to make that decision because, he, too, could barely stand to destroy a print.

  Buoyed by his confidence in me, I returned to the gray table and stood for fifteen minutes holding one print in my hand, trying to gather up my courage. This particular one bore a pattern of circular indentations in its surface, as if a pencil point had been repeatedly pressed into it. The first rip was the toughest. Final print inspector remained one of my jobs throughout my time with Ansel.

  My worst quality-control experience came one day in late 1980 when I began to inspect Winter Sunrise. It had taken Ansel two weeks to produce the prints in front of me, but I found that nearly all were afflicted with blisters bubbling through the emulsion from multiple flaws in this particular batch of paper. With his permission, I tore up nearly a hundred prints. In all the years I knew Ansel, that was the angriest I ever saw him. Not directed toward me, his anger instead seemed to move inward and implode. The situation was extremely depressing, and it was a few weeks before Ansel regained the spirit to print Winter Sunrise again, this time on entirely different paper, with excellent results.

  Ansel had yet to pen one sentence of his planned autobiography. Most definitely fecund of word, by 1979 he had written and published thirty-six other books, but the autobiography’s 1978 deadline had come and gone. By the time I was hired, there was a feeling of desperation surrounding the project. When I asked him why he was at such an impasse, he groaned that he did not think anyone would be interested in such a book; he had kept the personal separate from the professional his whole life long and now found it impossible to conceive a volume that would marry these two (allegedly) disparate aspects.

  Ansel thrived on multiplicity. The autobiography was not the only book to which he was committed; he was also in the midst of writing a new series of technical books and kept saying yes to lectures and book signings across the country. Within the first two weeks of my employ, I accompanied him to the opening of the traveling exhibition of Ansel Adams and the West at the Oakland Museum (where he had a quiet conniption fit when he discovered that there was an exhibition of Pictorialist works by the hated William Mortensen on the next floor) and flew with him to Tucson for his lecture at the University of Arizona.

  I soon concluded that Ansel had consented to so many projects at least in part to avoid having to think about the autobiography. He (and, by extrapolation, I) had too much work and too little time; I could see the memoir vanishing into the vague and distant future.

  What had sent Ansel back to the darkroom at this juncture was the Museum Sets, the most demanding photographic printmaking enterprise of his life. I had been working at the Weston Gallery when the project was devised, and from the get-go it had perplexed me. I wondered how it could be in Ansel’s best interest, given that for years, his fondest wish had been to move on in his photography: to have the time either to go out into the world to make new images or to print from his tens of thousands of unknown existing negatives. At seventy-seven, he probably no longer had the physical strength to fulfill the first wish—it takes tremendous energy to create new work of consequence—but he was certainly up to the second.1 Instead, the Museum Set project sentenced him to hard labor in the darkroom, making prints of many of the same images that had caused him to stop taking print orders some years before.

  Clearly, although for the sake of outward appearances he gave it a positive spin, Ansel felt ambivalent about the making of new photographs. When he went out with his camera now, it was almost always with the goal of illustrating some specific aspect of a new volume of his technical series—what he termed an assignment from without. Of course, it was a matter of priorities, as well, with the making of fresh work having slipped lower and lower on his list throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies. During Ansel’s most brilliant and productive years as an artist, the decades of the thirties and forties, picture making had been a full-time job for him.2 Few artists enjoy more than a decade of true creativity; Ansel had at least two.

  By the late 1970s, photographs that Ansel had once sold for a few hundred dollars were commanding thousands in the resale market.3 In 1979 alone, it was estimated that combined sales of his photographs amounted to half the total of all fine art photographs sold that year.4 Museums had been slow to get on the bandwagon—a number were just beginning to form photographic collections in the late seventies—and Ansel was concerned that he would not be represented in the permanent collections of many since his photographs had become priced out of their market.5

  In the form letter that he sent out in 1976 to those who tried in vain to order photographs from him, Ansel mentioned that he intended to print sets of up to three hundred of his most important images specifically for museums and similar institutions.6 Maggi Weston, owner of the Weston Gallery, proposed that her gallery represent this project, but Bill Turnage insisted that Harry Lunn must be included in any such arrangement. Maggi and Harry were thus appointed the sole agents for the Museum Sets, although before long Harry bowed out.7

  Margaret Woodward Weston is just as much a legend as Harry in the world of photography dealing. She is a Weston by marriage: her first husband, and the father of her son, Matt, born in 1964, was Cole Weston, Edward’s youngest son. Although a native of England, she was sent to live in South Africa for safety’s sake during World War II. After enduring a nightmarish childhood, like some fairy tale princess, she became a popular singer in South Africa, arriving back home in England to perform at such venues as London’s Palladium. Her next stop was the United States, where she appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in New York. She also performed in Las Vegas and Los Angeles and was hired to play the lead in a Monterey production of Pipe Dream, directed by one Cole Weston. With love and marriage to Cole, Maggi placed her singing career on permanent hold.

  Later, following their divorce, Maggi debated whether to return to show business, and turned to family friend Ansel for advice.
Instead, he persuaded her to open a serious photography gallery in Carmel, promising to consign a broad selection of his own prints. Using her life’s savings of two thousand dollars, Maggi opened the doors of the Weston Gallery in 1975 with photographs not only by Ansel but by other friends as well, including Imogen Cunningham, Wynn Bullock, and Brett Weston.

  In addition to her other qualities, Maggi is gorgeous, with a tumbling mane of red hair, and always beautifully dressed. It is advised to enter a museum opening or restaurant behind her, because she sweeps into a room with dramatic flair; heads swivel, and everyone knows she is someone. In the photography business, Maggi is most respected for her unerring eye. When her bidding paddle goes up at an auction, competitors have been seen to break out in an unbecoming sweat because they know she will not stop until she gets what she wants. In 1979, she made the pages of Newsweek when she bought her former father-in-law’s Shell, 1 S, 1927, for ten thousand dollars, the most ever paid for a single photograph at auction at that time. (Edward Weston had originally sold the print for ten dollars.) Soon after, Moonrise broke that record. A vintage print of Shell, 1 S, sold at an auction at Christie’s New York in 2010 for $1,082,500.

  As the deadline for final print orders from Ansel drew near at the end of 1975, Maggi decided that she must buy a substantial inventory, bravely mortgaging her house to raise the necessary funds.8 Ansel was impressed by her willingness to place her financial future on the line because of her belief in his work, and he never forgot it. She earned a very special place in his heart. The Weston Gallery has flourished, becoming one of the most successful photography galleries in the world, known for its collection of rare nineteenth-century prints as well as its exceptional selection of images by Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and Ansel Adams.