Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Every Museum Set contained the same core of ten famous images (Moonrise; Winter Sunrise; Monolith; Clearing Winter Storm; The Tetons and the Snake River; Mount Williamson from Manzanar; Sand Dune, Sunrise; Tenaya Creek, Dogwood, Rain; Aspens, Northern New Mexico [vertical]; and Frozen Lake and Cliffs), plus fifteen variables to be chosen from a list of sixty possibilities. The few who bought all seventy prints received, in addition, Surf Sequence, Ansel’s 1940 five-print masterpiece.

  It has long been standard practice in the commerce of art to sell entire portfolios for substantially less than the various prints would command if sold separately. A twenty-five-print Museum Set could be purchased in 1980 for fifty thousand dollars, far under the market value of its individual photographs.9 By 1981, the price had been raised to seventy-five thousand.10

  On Valentine’s Day 1979, Ansel had had open-heart surgery that included a valve replacement and a triple coronary bypass. Appalled to learn that he had received no instruction for rehabilitation following the surgery, “Nurse Mary” quickly found the patient a new doctor and then ordered Ansel to begin an exercise program. Our enforced afternoon walks together, along the country roads of Monterey County from Big Sur north, gave me an opportunity to ask Ansel about his life and preserve his answers with a small tape recorder that I carried in my hand. Unfortunately, sometimes wind noise overpowered his voice, but he did get some exercise, and at least we had started work on the autobiography.

  In June 1980, we flew to Washington, D.C., where President Carter was to present Ansel with the Medal of Freedom. The ceremony was conducted on a stage erected on the lawn of the White House. It was a hot and sunny day, and the audience of family and friends fanned themselves with programs as they waited for the event to begin. Ansel, sweltering in the heat in his only good suit, British-made of wool, sat facing the audience with the rest of the fourteen honorees, who included Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Admiral Hyman Rickover, and Beverly Sills. Lady Bird Johnson, Muriel Humphrey, and Mrs. John Wayne were there to accept posthumous awards on behalf of their husbands.11 One by one, each was called forward. When his name was announced, Ansel stood and walked slowly to the podium—his head held high, chest slightly puffed out, and bent nose as straight as it ever had been—where President Carter placed the handsome, beribboned gold medal about his neck, proclaiming,12

  After an interminable receiving line, a festive luncheon was served at large round tables that filled more than one White House room. The Johnson family’s table was right next to Ansel’s, and soon after Ansel was seated, former First Daughter Lynda Bird Johnson swooped down on him, her big brown eyes full of admiration and adoration. Ansel loved the attention and autographed her program with extra embellishments. The festivities proceeded with course following course and wineglasses kept constantly replenished. Afterward, the guests were bade welcome to explore the rooms on the main floor, and President Carter obligingly offered a peek at the Oval Office. As everyone slowly gathered momentum to leave, Tennessee Williams, upholding his reputation for inebriation, had to be carried out in a horizontal position on the shoulders of spirited friends. Still, nothing could dampen the day, or Ansel’s spirits, which were sky-high.

  But the month was just beginning. After leaving Ansel’s employ the previous year, Andrea had undertaken to produce a movie on her former boss for public television, along with a coproducer, John Huszar of FilmAmerica, who was also to direct. Shooting was scheduled to occupy much of June.13

  Ansel was not convinced of the importance to history of this movie, but he did want to help Andrea. As with the autobiography, he questioned how interested people would really be in his life as distinct from his art, and he self-consciously fidgeted throughout the filming. It might seem likely that a photographer would be good at posing for the camera, but Ansel rarely relaxed in front of another’s lens; most portraits of him look mannered.

  The crew arrived on June 1 and filming began in Carmel the next day. One scene had Ansel in his darkroom making prints, while another required his old friend Rosario Mazzeo, a retired Boston Symphony Orchestra musician and amateur photographer, to interview him as he sat at his old Mason and Hamlin piano. Unbeknownst to Ansel, Rosie had been directed to get him to play. Time and arthritis had bent Ansel’s fingers; where once he had enlivened every party with his playing, he now only rarely allowed anyone to hear him perform, and only late at night after a number of martinis. He had always been noted for his exquisite touch, but his arthritic fingers could no longer physically produce the quality of sound that his ears still required. Nevertheless, as directed, Rosie cajoled and prodded, and finally Ansel relented. When he saw the finished video, Ansel was greatly pained by that scene. Not only was the music itself flawed, but Huszar also had zoomed in on his gnarled hands; Ansel felt it made him seem old and infirm.

  Filming moved next to his birthplace, San Francisco, where during a break he took me to the spot where he had made The Golden Gate Before the Bridge. Almost at once, we were off to Albuquerque, where we rented a car and headed for Santa Fe. As I drove, Ansel grew increasingly restless, until he said resignedly, “I just feel punk.”

  We checked into the La Fonda Hotel for a good night’s sleep before the next day’s shoot in Abiquiu with Georgia O’Keeffe. At six-thirty in the morning, I was awakened by a phone call from Ansel, who said he wasn’t feeling well. I pulled on some clothes and went to his room. His anxiety was evident as I wrapped my blood pressure cuff about his arm, plugged a stethoscope in my ears, and assumed my nurse’s role. Although he was resting in bed, his blood pressure was elevated to 182 over 80 from his normal 134–140 over 58–62, and his pulse was racing at 110 rather than his usual 60. But even more significant to me were his complaints of tightness in his chest, dizziness, and difficulty in breathing.

  When I woke up Ansel’s doctor back home to get a referral in Santa Fe, he agreed with me that he should be seen right away. On rousing Andrea and Huszar to let them know that I was taking Ansel to the emergency room of Saint Vincent’s Hospital they became extremely upset and accused me of encouraging Ansel’s easily stimulated hypochondria, not to mention destroying their shooting schedule and blowing their tight budget. I could understand their immediate reaction, but the film could not be the priority, Ansel was. Only two days of filming had been budgeted for New Mexico, which included a scene with O’Keeffe, one with Beaumont, and a third at the little village of Hernandez, where Ansel had made Moonrise.

  When Ansel and I arrived at the hospital, we were engulfed by a ready staff of Adams fans. An EKG showed no new damage to his heart; the consensus was that Ansel was suffering from the effects of an abrupt change in altitude, from sea level in Carmel and San Francisco to sixty-eight hundred feet in Santa Fe. Doctor’s orders were to return to the hotel and rest in bed. If Ansel felt well enough, he could participate in filming the next day, but only so long as he felt up to it. Always a trouper and conscientious about (most) deadlines, Ansel was showered and ready early the next morning, Stetson and bolo tie in place. With only one day to shoot, the question on everyone’s mind was, could everything be accomplished?

  The first stop was Abiquiu. Ansel and O’Keeffe had maintained a friendship since their first meeting, in 1929. The script called for the two to stroll arm in arm in the courtyard of her home and then to sit down and reminisce about their travels together and about Stieglitz. Ansel’s arm was needed because O’Keeffe was nearly blind, her sight terribly diminished by the decade-long progress of macular degeneration. She had no central vision, only peripheral; whenever she addressed someone, she would look at him or her not directly but rather sideways, in an attempt to see even a bit. Likewise, when painting, she turned her face oblique to the surface of the canvas.

  After all these years, Ansel still held O’Keeffe in awe, and he squirmed throughout their scenes together, scenes that did not seem to reflect the participants’ real personalities. The image of the two longtime friends talking and walking may have made for a sweet vigne
tte, but O’Keeffe was by design not a sweet woman. Directed to sit side by side with Ansel as they reminisced, O’Keeffe stared straight ahead so as to better see him with her peripheral vision, but on film it looked as if she were refusing to make eye contact with him. While it is a treat to view these two great artists together, the film recorded the unreality of the occasion.

  Juan Hamilton, then O’Keeffe’s chief assistant, was very much in evidence throughout our visit; as I watched his “handling” of her, I made a personal vow to be the complete opposite in my work for Ansel. O’Keeffe had hired him as an occasional handyman when he appeared on her Abiquiu doorstep in 1972, handsome, strapping, dark-mustached, and fifty-nine years her junior. He eventually took charge of every aspect of O’Keeffe’s life and business, doing all those things that she did not want to do herself, as Bill Turnage had once done for Ansel. Eventually no one could talk to her without his say-so, a power he wielded with gusto. (In complete contrast, Ansel often beat everyone else to the phone when it rang, although he answered with a disguised voice, often saying that he was the gardener, although why the gardener would be answering Ansel’s phone was a question never answered.)

  By the late 1970s, it was widely rumored that O’Keeffe and Juan were married. At a 1978 dinner at Ansel’s, O’Keeffe had clung to Juan’s arm, her face beaming with adoration. When someone asked if they were husband and wife, they both dodged the question just coyly enough to make us continue to wonder.

  Physically, Juan treated O’Keeffe with great brusqueness. During the filming in 1980, he pulled her clothes into straighter lines with rough tugs, chastising her for her appearance as she, a woman of well-known and revolutionary independence, sat meekly without saying a word.

  Later that year, it was revealed that far from having married his employer, Juan had in fact been secretly wed to a young woman named Anna Marie. At first furiously jealous, O’Keeffe eventually mellowed. In 1981, in celebration of her ninety-fourth birthday, we gave a dinner at our house attended by O’Keeffe, Ansel and Virginia, Juan, his bride, and their baby, Albert (not Alfred, as in Stieglitz). That night I learned a new respect for Juan. With O’Keeffe settled into our rocking chair by the fireplace before dinner, young Albert crawled about, finally seizing on her leg to pull himself up to a standing position. Such delight appeared on O’Keeffe’s face as she enjoyed the child or grandchild she had never had! She and Juan were family, and he brought her a measure of happiness in her last years.

  Following the morning of filming with O’Keeffe, we moved on to Hernandez, New Mexico, where, in one of the movie’s strongest sequences, Ansel is shown once again driving the same route he had taken nearly forty years earlier, when he made Moonrise. Through the eyes of this movie, we can imagine what it was like that darkening autumn afternoon, and it becomes clear how truly remarkable Ansel’s vision was, because the actual landscape (even discounting the changes wrought by the passage of time) bears little resemblance to the completed photograph.

  The Saint Francis Church at Ranchos de Taos provided the backdrop for the scene with Beaumont. Close comrades for four decades, Ansel and Beaumont were warm and relaxed, both reflecting on their lives, so much of which they had shared. Their moments together are one of the highlights of Ansel Adams, Photographer.

  The scare over Ansel’s health in New Mexico may have caused all of us some anxious moments, but the seventy-eight-year-old refused to let it disrupt his typical whirlwind schedule. From Santa Fe, we decamped for Yosemite, where he would teach his annual workshop and continue to participate in filming.

  The movie’s Yosemite scenes capture Ansel at his best. In one of these, he stands before his view camera among the boulders and trees near the Ahwahnee Hotel, surrounded by attentive students whom he patiently instructs on the subtleties of framing an image; another shows him sitting at the base of a granite cliff and nostalgically paging through a photo album filled with his earliest Yosemite pictures, made when he was fourteen years old. Only in these shots does Ansel finally seem genuinely at ease. We left the valley three weeks later; the film and workshops had together consumed one month of his time.

  For Ansel, the weeks set aside annually for his Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshops, in operation since 1955, were inviolable. He loved all aspects, from teaching and interacting with the students and fellow faculty, to just being in his cherished Yosemite. Each year, as a bellman trundled in his trunks full of equipment and his one small suitcase, Ansel would move through the lobby and halls of the Ahwahnee Hotel greeting the many people whom he had known for years and who now ran up to welcome him home with a hug, a warm handshake, a slap on the back, or an old chestnut of a joke hoarded in the teller’s memory in anticipation of his next appearance.

  Ansel was never pretentious about himself or his art. One employee of Best’s Studio cooked up such great chocolate fudge (a real Ansel weakness) that he offered to trade his photographs for them, square inch for square inch; when she brought him an eleven-by-fourteen-inch pan of the candy he would give her a print of the same size. No fool, one summer she presented him with a whopping sixteen-by-twenty-inch extravaganza of fudge and received a Moonrise print in the same size. Ansel thought it a fair trade.14

  Ansel enjoyed the routine of each workshop and led sessions most mornings, after consuming a sizable breakfast in the Ahwahnee dining room at a table filled with students and faculty. One day was always reserved for a road trip, usually up to Tuolumne Meadows and then down to Mono Lake, with the return journey to Yosemite by moonlight. At Tenaya Lake, while an assistant set up Ansel’s camera and tripod so that he could conduct a demonstration by the side of the road, Virginia would climb up a smooth-surfaced dome, dotted with twisted junipers, to get the best view she could, outdoing many of her younger companions.

  The students hung on Ansel’s every word and followed his advice to walk to the base of Yosemite Falls during the full moon to witness a moonbow, like a rainbow but composed of shades of gray. Throughout the park, photographers stumbled about with gray viewing cards in front of their faces, peering through simple cardboard windows, another Ansel invention that helped students learn to frame an image by seeing in terms of a rectangle.

  Traditionally, Ansel and Virginia hosted the entire population of each workshop, including significant others, at a grand cocktail party held in the yard of their old Yosemite home, behind the Ansel Adams Gallery. Fumiye Kodani, their cook in Carmel, would arrive with a carload of food and drink and commence preparations for a crowd of 150. The spread inevitably included a great variety of cheeses, fresh vegetables with a dill dip, water chestnuts wrapped and baked in bacon, and thin slices of buttered toast. Ansel especially savored Fumiye’s cheese puffs, though a review of the ingredients therein (white bread, mayonnaise, green onions, and Parmesan cheese baked until golden) might cause the sensitive to shudder.

  Returning to Carmel from Yosemite in 1980, Ansel sought the comforting refuge of his bed. His lifetime pattern was to work with extreme intensity and then to collapse for a few days’ recovery. He liked being in bed, and for years balanced a typewriter on his lap to maintain his voluminous correspondence. An insomniac, he spent his nights alternately dozing and reading, his bedroom light always left on. He was usually into at least three books at any given time, one a humor or joke book, one a scientific tome, and (near the end of his life, and under my influence) one a detective novel. Piles of magazines shared space and time with the books, among them Scientific American, the New Yorker, and both Newsweek and Time. Ray Taliaferro’s late-night talk show on San Francisco’s KGO radio claimed him as a regular listener and caller.

  Sitting at my desk that July, I calculated that I had been working for Ansel for 213 days (weekends did not mean days off) and that we had been out of town for sixty-two of those days. It was clear to me that he needed someone else to say, “No more travel,” since he himself seemed unable to refuse any invitation.

  Ansel was in constant demand as a lecturer, but with his stamina in declin
e, he had begun to find it difficult to give the combination slide show–lecture presentation on his life and work; a few minutes into the talk, his voice would weaken and his words become a mumble. His schedule had been planned well into the future by the departed Andrea, who loved traveling, but when we discussed the situation, he realized that unless he stayed at home, he would never be able to write his autobiography or complete the Museum Sets. He gave me the green light to turn on the stoplight, and I immediately canceled a two-week lecture tour booked for October, as well as a trip to Brazil. There were many calls of complaint (which I fielded), but Ansel was hugely relieved.

  All too painfully aware that everything else was taking precedence over the autobiography, I decided that the book’s best chance lay in Ansel’s getting those Museum Sets and technical books completed and not allowing some new project to cut in. But there were always special circumstances and obligations, and I came to see that as much as he complained of being overwhelmed by so many responsibilities, Ansel thrived on variety. With this in mind, I began to look for any opportunity to insinuate work on the autobiography into his life.

  Ansel had an extraordinary ability to take on a number of difficult tasks simultaneously, but in this he was also assisted by a hardworking, professional staff. We all used to marvel at how busy he kept us, like a circus juggler with ten balls in the air at once. Two of his most important employees at this time were John Sexton and Phyllis Donohue.

  John had attended the 1973 Yosemite Workshop and impressed Ansel with his already keen photographic eye and technique as well as his confident manner. After assisting at subsequent workshops, he joined the staff (not long before I came aboard) as Ansel’s photographic assistant, responsible for ordering supplies, schlepping and setting up the heavy equipment, prepping the darkroom, washing and toning prints, and carrying out many of the tests for the technical books. John found a great mentor in Ansel, who left him a memo on his first day stating, “The place is yours. Organize it yourself, then tell me where things are.”15 Under Ansel’s tutelage, John became a more masterful photographer and brilliant printer. He grew so proficient at explaining the Zone System that Ansel turned over that lecture at his workshops to him, the ultimate compliment. John continues to make and sell beautiful photographs and books, the negatives often taken during what he calls “quiet light,” the time after sunset but before true darkness. His John Sexton Photography Workshops are held annually in spring and fall, most often at his studio in Carmel Valley. They are highly regarded and very popular for a good reason: John learned well from Ansel to become one of the best teachers of landscape photography in the world.16