Phyllis worked for Ansel for years. She was our print technician and probably the best spotter in the world; she also had a knack for finding the unfindable negative or reproduction print. Ever serene, Phyllis would tackle impossible piles of SEPs or Museum Sets with the patience of Job, sitting for hours each day on a stool placed in front of an easel propped on the gray worktable, spotting photograph after photograph.
As careful and fastidious as Ansel was, he could not change the fact that all negatives attract dust and are easily scratched, small imperfections that usually find their way onto the finished print as tiny white spots. Like other spotters, Phyllis had a variety of permanent inks that she carefully diluted and used to cover over, or “spot,” the white dots (or the “LP” in Winter Sunrise) so they would match the surrounding area. On rare occasions, she might also etch out a black scratch with a very sharp blade and then spot the space. She was absolutely the best at what she did, and fast!
Miscellaneous projects were forever popping up, but some of these were less taxing than others. In 1980, Little, Brown’s sister company Time-Life Books (both were owned by Time Inc.) requested that Ansel authorize the mail-order sale of twenty thousand autographed copies of Yosemite and the Range of Light. The initial plan called for him to actually sign each copy himself, but we quickly discovered that there was no way we could physically cope, either personnel-wise or space-wise, with so many large books. Ansel spent the better part of his non-darkroom time for two months signing labels that would then be stuck onto the appropriate page. Since he preferred working at every moment, even when he was “flu’ed up” in bed, Ansel adored this do-anywhere assignment.
For the first few months I got along just fine with the trustees, my reputation as an “uppity” woman having somehow not preceded me. I do not think it began intentionally, but over time, things seemed naturally to evolve to a point where Bill was invariably on one side of an issue and I was on the other, with Ansel in the middle. As I saw it, Bill was urging Ansel to agree to a number of potentially lucrative projects not unlike the Museum Sets, which seemed to have little else to recommend them besides profit; Ansel really did not need the money, and his time and energy were increasingly limited. But my questioning any one of Bill’s decisions did not endear me to him one whit.
Then, too, Bill also made significant demands on Ansel’s time in his role as executive director of the Wilderness Society, insisting that he meet with influential members of Congress, give interviews, hold press conferences, and travel, all to a greater extent than Ansel wanted. Under such pressures, his old robust and sure strength was crumbling. Sometimes, in a small but urgent voice, Ansel would whisper to me, “Help!”
It was at around this time that Bill booked Ansel on the PBS television show Crossfire. Ansel’s side of the discussion was taped in a San Francisco studio, while his inquisitors were recorded in the home studio in Washington. They could see him, but he could see nothing except the television camera in his face; with no one to react to directly, Ansel grew disoriented and struggled with the series of pointed questions piped in through his earpiece. As much as he wanted to accomplish good things on behalf of the cause, his weakening health, combined with his contracted photographic responsibilities, left him feeling beleaguered.
Ansel did not give up all of his travels. He continued to insist on hovering over the presses during the first printing of each of his books, which meant encamping in San Francisco or southern California for a few weeks at a time. In 1981, Ansel and I went to Gardner Lithograph in Buena Park, California, for the printing of the new edition of The Portfolios of Ansel Adams. Since the battle to save Mineral King, Ansel had held all things Disney in contempt; he had never even set foot in Disneyland, though it was within shouting distance of the printing plant. I thought that the little boy in Ansel, who took up a healthy portion of the man, might enjoy a few hours there as we waited usually for hours between press checks. Ansel cautiously agreed, while expressing concern that he might not be up to walking very far.
I called to arrange for a wheelchair, and when we arrived, Mickey Mouse himself was there to greet us. After the de rigueur publicity photos were taken (by now I was feeling terrible about what I had done: Ansel forced to pose with Mickey was not a pretty sight), we scooted off. Because he had been recognized, Ansel refused the wheelchair, only adding to my guilt.
We trooped through the Haunted House and experienced the Pirates of the Caribbean. Ansel adored the holograms in the former, and as we swooped down a water chute in the latter venue, he laughed so hard that he caught a mouthful of water. I could only pray that he wouldn’t have a heart attack. Months later, when asked about this visit, Ansel was scornful of Disneyland, but while we were on those rides, he loved it.
Other legitimate excuses for a needed break or a change of scenery were provided by offers of honorary degrees (requiring a personal appearance) or book signings—events that gave Ansel the maximum pleasure with the minimum physical strain. How wonderful it was for him when at Harvard on June 4, 1981, although wearing a mortarboard rather than a Stetson, Ansel was instantly recognized by the students, who rose to their feet and began clapping, stomping, and cheering. Ansel’s eyes, unaccustomed throughout his entire life to emotional expression, reddened with the effort needed to fight back tears. At the luncheon following the awards, the great diva Leontyne Price, likewise the recipient of an honorary degree, got up on her chair and sang “America the Beautiful” a cappella, with such conviction and perfection as to make the hair on the nape of Ansel’s neck stand on end. So many great artists are unable to enjoy fame in their lifetime; happily, this was not the case for Ansel Adams.
Ansel was unfailingly kind to everyone who showed up at his book signings. Often there would be hundreds of people in line, winding around blocks and up and down stairs, always to the astonishment of the bookstore or museum, which usually ran out of books early even though we had done our best to prepare the staff. Although most signings were scheduled to run for only two hours, we often stayed four to get to the end of the line, and even then it was not always possible to accommodate everyone. In 1982, at San Francisco’s Academy of Sciences, a group of young people camped out all night in sleeping bags in front of the door just to be first in line. Ansel basked in this rock star–style popularity.
I coordinated the signings and then stood at Ansel’s side as he sat at a table, a special pen filled with permanent ink in hand. After first advising each autographee that Ansel could not personalize the inscription—information that was met with crestfallen faces and more than a little protest—I would open each book to the particular page that Ansel had decided was the most appropriate so as not to transgress upon the design. Only one specific page would do, and it was not always the title page. I would then return it to the person, who was often by now relating to Ansel in rapid fire (the line was pressing behind) how he had changed his or her life, or reminding him that they had once met on some Sierra trail, or pleading, “Please look at my photographs!” (pulled out from under an arm and placed with a flourish under Ansel’s nose). It was rejuvenating for Ansel to feel the affection that so many people had for him and his work.
In 1981, the Museum Set project was still dragging on. Ansel was supposed to have completed 110 or so sixteen-by-twenty-inch prints of each of the basic ten images, as well as thirty-five to fifty each of the sixty variables, plus ten of Surf Sequence. This added up to a total of at least thirty-five hundred fine, original prints, an enormous number even for a more robust person. For his third and fourth portfolios he had to make just as many prints, but they were all small eight-by-tens, whereas the Museum Sets included many sixteen-by-twenties. Ansel made his fine, signed photographs by himself. Printmaking is arduous, physical work, and each day spent standing in the darkroom on behalf of the Museum Set was a personal marathon.
Ansel was dedicated to ensuring that his photographs would last as long as possible, and the Museum Sets were no exception. He was always at t
he vanguard of research into archival standards for gelatin-silver photographic papers. The biggest threat to permanency is incompletely fixed (that is, unstable) silver; Ansel’s first technical book, 1935’s Making a Photograph, stressed the use of two separate fixing baths to make permanent the exposed silver, and recommended washing for a minimum of one hour, with frequent changes of water, to completely flush the remaining free silver and the processing chemicals from the paper. Ansel was a very early champion of this careful darkroom technique, and as a result, his photographs will be longer-lived than those by many of his peers.
By the 1950 publication of The Print, he was advocating the use of two or three fixing baths to achieve the best permanence. In the revised edition of the same book, published in 1983, he advised toning all prints with selenium, not only to warm their color (as he had counseled since the late thirties) but to increase their stability, since selenium had in the interim been found to bind with migratory silver. Ansel was justifiably proud of having selenium-toned his prints for so many years.
In his books, Ansel cautioned against the overuse of selenium, which produces an obvious color. But as the 1950s progressed, his own photographs became more and more tonally dramatic, and as he chose to build contrast, obtaining blacker blacks and whiter whites, so, too, he began to rely more and more on selenium (which increases tonal densities) to nourish the details.
To complicate complexity, during the making of the Museum Sets, Ansel’s eyesight seemed to be dimming—a terrifying prospect for anyone, but at the top of the list must be photographers. He had his eyes checked out on a regular basis, but the problem was growing worse. In 1977, Bill had a renowned Washington eye surgeon examine Ansel, but he had found nothing physically wrong with him. During the years that I worked for him, Ansel developed cataracts in both eyes, though they never got far enough along to be removed.
Sometimes, when John and I scanned the day’s batch of dried Museum Set prints, we would look at each other and sigh. Ansel, so famous for the luminous tones he could coax out of any negative, was now at times producing prints that were dark and heavy, although he described them as “rich.” Ansel himself was the first to admit that sometimes he went overboard, but still, I was worried.17 Some of the prints looked not rich to me, but poor.
Since no one else dared question Ansel about the problem, I decided I must. Our relationship became so close because Ansel felt totally secure with me and believed I would take care of him in sickness as well as in health. He knew I loved and respected him and could always be relied on to be truthful with him. On one long, chatty afternoon drive to San Francisco, he told me, “I can hear you, but I cannot hear most women.” He had had a great deal of practice tuning out the voices of his mother, his aunt, and his wife.
Directly addressing the problem of his vision, I now brought out two prints of Clearing Winter Storm. One had been toned to his orders, but John and I agreed to slip the other out of the selenium a bit early. I could not enjoy a white winter scene transformed selenium purple-brown, as the first print was; to myself, I had christened it Clearing Chocolate Sundae. The second, less toned print was crisp and bright, with black blacks and brilliant whites, like a cold, snow-frosted winter day.
Ansel looked, listened, and acknowledged my criticism. I was happily relieved when he agreed to reduce the toning. But he didn’t. John and I made a pact: we encouraged Ansel to rest after lunch and let John and Phyllis do the toning, and on certain rare occasions (such as when Surf Sequence was threatened), we rescued prints from their selenium sentence. Ansel continued to examine every print after it dried; that he never rejected our less-toned efforts helped to ease our qualms about interfering with a great artist’s expression.
It was not just museums that could no longer afford Ansel’s prints; he received a steady stream of complaints that his photographs were just too expensive for the many regular folks who loved them. Pondering alternatives, he decided to produce a series of posters replicating as closely as possible the quality of his originals.
Ansel chose three images to begin with—Moonrise, Clearing Winter Storm, and Aspens (vertical)—and made extra-large prints of each so that they could be directly laser-scanned with no enlargement. Each poster was designed to highlight a recent book. Ansel’s favorite printer, David Gardner, made superb duotone reproductions on heavy, coated stock, and the combination of laser-scanning and exquisite printing resulted in an image with a huge range of clearly defined tones. I accompanied Ansel as he supervised the first press runs; the posters were so good that he chuckled that the one of Aspens in particular looked better than a print made in the darkroom. Although this was a bit of an exaggeration, it reflected the esteem in which he held Gardner’s achievements.
Priced at twenty-five dollars, the posters became instant bestsellers. Each year a few more images were added, so that now there are more than two dozen different posters in the Adams series. The most popular is Oak Tree, Snowstorm.18
The posters’ popularity eventually led to the creation of a deluxe version, with the same first three images printed with a warmer combination of inks on an even heavier stock, in an edition of 350. Each reproduction was trimmed and dry-mounted on a sheet of handmade paper bearing an “AA” watermark, which was then numbered and signed by Ansel. While I was all for the poster project, believing that it would give the public access to Ansel’s images with minimum compromise in quality from an original print, I was opposed to issuing the deluxe posters because I felt it made us seem like the Franklin Mint of photography, creating new “collectibles” by the month. For his part, Ansel saw no compromise and was happy as a clam to collect the semiannual royalties they generated.
Next we proceeded to calendars. Having argued, unsuccessfully, that Ansel was making his photographs ubiquitous, and that familiarity often bred boredom as well as contempt, I found myself in charge of an annual wall calendar first published in 1984. As usual, Ansel insisted on the highest quality, even though the publisher initially complained (calling it the Rolls-Royce of calendars) that at $12.95, it would be substantially more expensive than any of its mass-market rivals. The worry was unfounded: Ansel’s calendar was a phenomenal success, a contender for champion right up there with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar, teddy bears, and Garfield.
While the Museum Sets consumed Ansel’s mornings, his afternoons were spent on the New Ansel Adams Photography Series. For all of his earlier technical books, Ansel himself had acted as both writer and editor, but in 1977, at Bill’s wise insistence, he had hired a professional technical writer to assist him on Polaroid Land Photography. Robert Baker, a graduate of MIT who had worked at Polaroid as a liaison with Ansel, proved so adept that he continued as Ansel’s collaborator on The Camera (1980), The Negative (1981), and The Print (1983). The field of photography had grown so huge that it was impossible for one person, or even two, to know everything, so Ansel also asked my husband, Jim, to serve as a technical advisor.
Bob approached life with calm deliberation. He was a perfect foil for the easily distracted Ansel. When Ansel attacked a subject, it was his practice to type to the end of a page, then turn it and fill up the right margin, then turn it again and fill the left. At that point he would almost always consider himself done, whether or not the original objective had been met.19 This was certainly a difficult way to go about writing a whole book, but Bob kept to the task, huddling at the dining room table with Ansel with such steady persistence that the works progressed in record time, considering Ansel’s other commitments. Whereas the volumes in the earlier Basic Photo Series were slim, concentrated, and difficult for all but the true cognoscenti to decipher, Bob constructed Ansel’s text so that even the layman could truly learn from the master.
Next to viewing the sun setting over the western edge of America spread before his picture windows with martini in hand, Ansel’s most anticipated moment of each day was the arrival of the mailman in his little truck. This particular vehicle fortuitously possessed a set
of squealing brakes that Ansel’s alert ears nearly always detected. If he was not in the darkroom, he would be out the door in a flash and hiking the short distance up the driveway to the huge mailbox, his treasure chest of news, offers, and enticements. Back in the house, protocol was observed: Ansel would hand everything over to Virginia, who would sort it on the coffee table into suitable piles, properly slit each envelope with an opener, and then pass each pile to its recipient.
A sucker for anything bearing a postage stamp, Ansel always entered the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes (although he never won) and once even filled out a very lengthy Scientology questionnaire that I begged him not to return. After he ignored my pleas, it took a few weeks and a number of firm answers to their dogged phone calls to convince the Scientologists that he did not want to become involved in their religion: he simply liked the process of answering questions.
The mail usually arrived shortly before lunch (punctually served between twelve and twelve-fifteen). On occasion, Ansel, newly sprung from a morning of darkroom duties, would stroll up to the mailbox on the off chance that the noisy brakes had finally been fixed on the mail truck. One such morning, Ansel discovered the mailbox empty save for a single slip of paper: a typewritten death threat warning him to stop his work to bring federal protection to Big Sur, or else!
Ansel Adams Page 39
