17 Ibid.
18 Ansel Adams to Virginia Best, September 30, 1925, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 25–27.
19 Dorothy Minty, interview with Nancy Newhall, June 23, 1947, CCP.
20 Ansel Adams, records of his music students, CCP.
21 Dorothy Minty interview, CCP.
22 Ansel Adams to Virginia Best, March 11, 1927, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 29–30.
23 Letters from Virginia Adams to Ansel Adams, April 1927, Virginia Adams personal collection. In 1989, Virginia told me that she had a number of letters from Ansel that I had never seen and asked if I would care to read them. Of course, I said yes. Although I did not make photocopies of them, she let me take notes. We had no idea these letters existed when we made the selection for Ansel Adams: Letters and Images.
24 Virginia and Ansel Adams, Illustrated Guide to Yosemite Valley (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker, 1940), 18.
25 Ansel claimed that Monolith had been made on April 17, 1927. When I subsequently learned that April 17 that year was Easter, and the romantic day that Ansel and Virginia had spent in Carmel, I knew he had been mistaken.
In The Eloquent Light, Nancy Newhall stated that Monolith was first reproduced on April 16, 1927, in the Stockton Record. The kindly central reference librarian, Sjaan VandenBroeder, of the Stockton Public Library, sent me a photocopy of the article in question (see n. 31 below). Illustrating the story are four photographs, all credited to Arnold Williams, not Ansel Adams. One is a near twin of Ansel’s Monolith, but Williams’s version has slightly different cropping, and the sky is very pale, certainly not the beneficiary of a red filter. A comparison of a vintage print of Monolith with the newspaper clipping reveals that Williams set up his tripod and five-by-seven-inch view camera a few feet to the left of Ansel’s. Based on the date of the Stockton Record article, Monolith must have been made before April 16. The Sunday immediately before, the tenth, is most likely, since it appears that Sunday was their regular hiking day.
26 Ansel Adams, “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome,” in Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1983), 3–5.
27 My gratitude goes to Dr. Donald W. Olson, Texas State University, San Marcos, who realized that our print of Half Dome must have been made from Glacier Point, not the Diving Board.
28 I bought this print, Half Dome, at that 2012 auction. It came with an impeccable provenance; Ansel had given it to Albert Bender who then gave it to Alma Lavenson, the daughter of a close friend. Alma, a noted amateur photographer, was invited to show four prints in the first Group f.64 exhibition in 1932 at the M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco. Half Dome came to auction directly from her estate.
29 Ansel Adams with Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1985), 61–63, and 74; and Adams, Examples, 3–5.
30 I am grateful to “the” Yosemite historian, Shirley Sargent, for her memory of Arnold Williams and his Yosemite connection.
31 James V. Lloyd quoting Arnold Williams, “Photographic Party Climbs Diving Board, Unusual Views Obtained from Side of Half Dome Near Top,” Stockton Record, April 16, 1927, “Out-O-Doors” section, 1.
32 Ibid.
33 Snapshot of Ansel Adams and Virginia Best, A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 74.
34 A. Adams, Examples, 3–5.
35 A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 74–75. Also, photograph by Arnold Williams, “Virginia Best Standing Behind the ‘Diving Board,’” to illustrate his article “World’s Highest Diving Board,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 18, 1927,
36 Ansel Adams, On the Heights, reproduced in A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 75.
37 This short film, Ansel Adams and Friends Climb Diving Board Rock in Yosemite, can be viewed on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art website at http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/114.
38 Edward Carpenter, Angel’s Wings: A Series of Essays on Art and Its Relation to Life (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1898), 42–45, 64. Ansel had not yet seen Camera Work, so he could not be familiar with de Zayas’s statement from 1911.
39 The first exposure is reproduced in A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 76, and also in Ansel Adams with Robert Baker, The Negative (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), 4.
40 A. Adams with R. Baker, “Visualization and Negative Values,” in The Negative, 1–7.
41 Reproduced, with the story of its making, in A. Adams, Examples, 48–51.
42 Frederick R. Karl, Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist 1885–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), xii.
43 Edward Weston, “Random Notes on Photography,” Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays Images (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 223–227.
44 Ansel Adams, “The New Photography,” Modern Photography 1934–35: The Studio Annual of Camera Art (London and New York: The Studio Publications, 1934), 14.
45 Special dispatch to the Chronicle, dateline Yosemite, April 24, “Party’s Trek from Verdant Valley Takes Seven Hours,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 27, 1927.
46 Photograph at Glacier Point by Arnold Williams, a copy given to me by Dr. Donald W. Olson, Texas State University, San Marcos. As cited earlier, in April 1927, newspaper articles described two hikes by Ansel, Virginia, Cedric, and a couple of other friends, one about their April 10 trip to the Diving Board and the other an April 24 Outing to Glacier Point via the Four-Mile Trail. It is hard to believe that Ansel made the Half Dome that we know was taken from Glacier Point, on that April 24 trek, after he had already created Monolith. Half Dome would immediately pale beside Monolith. Perhaps Ansel made the negative of Half Dome a year earlier, in April 1926 soon after Bender’s offer of the portfolio. His gift of Half Dome for Bender was made on the same paper he chose for the portfolio, printed, it would seem, in 1927 before April 10. April 3, 1927 is a long shot for the making of the Half Dome negative, because he clearly went to Glacier Point on April 24, probably the first to arrive there that year, making it highly unlikely that he had gone even earlier.
47 LeConte, “Reminiscences,” 97.
48 N. Newhall, Eloquent Light, 50.
49 A. Adams, “Conversations,” 97. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library.
50 A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 82–83.
51 Ansel Easton Adams, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras (San Francisco: Jean Chambers Moore, 1927).
52 J. N. LeConte, “Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras,” Sierra Club Bulletin 13 (February 1928): 96.
53 Conversation between Ansel Adams and the author.
54 Ansel Adams, Record of Expenses, CCP.
55 Virginia Adams to Ansel Adams, April 1927, Virginia Adams personal collection.
56 Ibid. Her letters to Ansel stand in sharp contrast to his to her. Hers are full of emotions, passion, and yearning, while his describe his achievements and plans for the future.
57 Dorothy Minty interview, CCP.
58 Letter from Olive Adams to Mary Bray, January 2, 1928, Virginia Adams personal collection.
59 Dorothy Minty interview, CCP. Bacon became a noted composer and conducted the San Jose Symphony in his own Elegy for Ansel Adams soon after Ansel’s death.
60 N. Newhall, Eloquent Light, 50.
61 A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 100–101.
62 Excerpt from Mariposa, California, newspaper clipping, “Miss Virginia Best Claimed as Bride,” CCP.
63 Virginia Adams, interview with the author, February 1, 1988.
64 Ibid.
65 Sierra Club Bulletin, February 1928; Virginia Adams, interviews with James Alinder, August 26–27, 1994. Virginia Adams recalled that Ansel never made motion pictures, though she thought he would have if someone had asked him to. Virginia, however, did use a movie camera, and carried one on the hike that resulted in Monolith.
66 A. Adams, “Conversations,” 585. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library.
67 N. Newhall, Eloquent Light, 62.<
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5. SOUTHWEST
1 Ansel Adams, “Conversations with Ansel Adams,” an oral history conducted 1972, 1974, 1975 by Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1978, 72–73.
2 Ansel Adams with Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1985), 85–87.
3 Ansel Adams, Robinson Jeffers, frontispiece to Robinson Jeffers, Poems by Robinson Jeffers (San Francisco: Grabhorn Press for The Book Club of California, 1928). 310 copies were produced.
4 George Waters, Ansel Adams 1902–1984: A Tribute by His Roxburghe Club Friends (San Francisco: Roxburghe Club, 1984).
5 A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 87–89; Nancy Newhall, The Eloquent Light (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1980), 47–49; Ansel Adams, Photographs of the Southwest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), vii–ix.
6 N. Newhall, Eloquent Light, 48.
7 A. Adams, “Conversations,” 184. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library.
8 Mary Austin to Ansel Adams, February 23, 1929, in Esther Lanigan Stineman, Mary Austin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 190.
9 Ibid.
10 Page Stegner, Outposts of Eden (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1989), 23.
11 Genny Schumacher Smith, ed., Deepest Valley (Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, 1969); Galen Rowell, Mountain Light (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1986), 20.
12 Elliot Diringer, “The True History of the Owens Valley,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 8, 1993, A7.
13 Taos Tribal Tourism Director, Taos Pueblo: A Thousand Years of Tradition (Taos, N.M.: Taos Pueblo, 1994).
14 Albert Bender to Mary Austin, March 23, 1929. Courtesy of F. W. Olin Library, Mills College, Bender Collection.
15 Lois Palken Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 182.
16 N. Newhall, Eloquent Light, 60; Ansel Adams to Charles Adams, May 26, 1929, CCP.
17 Mary Austin and Ansel Adams, Taos Pueblo (San Francisco: The Grabhorn Press, 1930), unpaginated.
18 Stineman, Mary Austin, 197.
19 Weston J. Naef, afterword to Austin and A. Adams, Taos Pueblo (facsimile edition; Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977), unpaginated.
20 A. Adams, “Conversations,” 570–571.
21 Peter Palmquist, “William E. Dassonville: An Appreciation,” in Susan Herzig and Paul Hertzmann, eds., Dassonville (Nevada City, Ca.: Carl Mautz Publishing, 1999), 26.
22 Reproduced in A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 93, 95.
23 Ibid., 92.
24 Reproduced in Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: Classic Images (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1986), pl. 4.
25 Conversation between Ansel and Virginia Adams in 1981, while the author was present.
26 A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 90.
In July 1995, an original volume of Taos Pueblo sold for $21,850 at San Francisco’s Pacific Book Auction. Pacific Currents (The Pacific Book Auction Galleries) 4, no. 1 (September 1995): 2. In 2014, a rare book dealer had it priced at $65,000. New York Graphic Society published a facsimile reprint in 1977, with fine reproductions but not original prints, as in the 1930 edition. The general value in 2014 is $3,500 a copy.
27 California Arts and Architecture review of Taos Pueblo, reproduced in N. Newhall, Eloquent Light, 65; Stineman, Mary Austin, 194.
28 Bruce Altschuler, The Avant Garde in Exhibition (New York: Abrams, 1994), 72.
29 Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan, 155.
30 Mabel’s house is now a private residence. For many years it was a bed-and-breakfast. Visitors could choose among Mabel’s own room, Tony’s (down a back hallway) (where Jim and I stayed once), O’Keeffe’s almost monastic cell, or a variety of others. One of the bathrooms sported glass windows painted in vibrant colors by D. H. Lawrence. These windows surrounded the bathtub where Una Jeffers threatened to take her life. I found it an eerie place to take a bath.
31 A. Adams, “Conversations,” 180. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library.
32 Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan, 191.
33 Ibid., 298–299.
34 A. Adams, “Conversations,” 190.
35 Sarah Greenough, “Alfred Stieglitz, Rebellious Midwife to a Thousand Ideas,” Sarah Greenough, Modern Art and America, Alfred Stieglitz and his New York Galleries (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2000), 61, 544.
36 N. Newhall, Eloquent Light, 60.
37 A. Adams, “Conversations,” 563.
38 A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 309–310.
39 Van Deren Coke, Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist’s Environment 1882–1942 (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1963), 86–88.
40 Barbara Rose, American Painting: The Twentieth Century (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 29–31.
41 Ansel Adams to Virginia Adams [late August 1930], in Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman, eds., Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, 1916–1984 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 46.
42 A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 275.
43 Ibid., 237–238.
44 A. Adams, “Conversations,” 181.
45 Ibid., 109.
46 Ansel Adams to Alfred Stieglitz, October 9, 1933, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 58–61; and Ansel Adams to Paul Strand, September 12, 1933, ibid., 56.
47 N. Newhall, Eloquent Light, 62.
48 Ansel Adams to Virginia Adams [late August 1930], M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 46.
6. STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
1 “Pictorial Photographer Show,” Washington Post, January 11, 1931.
2 In 1923, an album of forty-five of Ansel’s photographs had been included in an exhibit at the Sierra Club. Nancy Newhall, The Eloquent Light (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1980), 87. Beginning in 1928, Ansel had solo exhibitions at the Sierra Club’s San Francisco offices: October 1–8, 1928; September 12–23, 1929 (and from September 30 to October 7 at the club’s Los Angeles headquarters); and October 20–27, 1930. His annual exhibitions at the club continued through 1935.
3 Francis Peloubet Farquhar (1887–1974). The Francis P. Farquhar Mountaineering Award was created in his honor in 1970. He was an important leader in the fight to establish Kings Canyon National Park and it is there that 12,893-foot Mt. Farquhar rises.
4 Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 44.
5 Francis P. Farquhar, “Mountain Studies in the Sierra: Photographs by Ansel Easton Adams with a Note About the Artist by Francis P. Farquhar,” Touring Topics (Automobile Club of Southern California) 23 (February 1931). Ten photographs of Sierra mountains illustrate the article. Courtesy of the Farquhar family.
6 N. Newhall, Eloquent Light, 68–69.
7 Ansel Adams with Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1985), 142. This was a total and final change, with one exception: he frugally used up his stock of Dassonville Charcoal paper for his four Sierra Club Outing portfolios, the last made to commemorate the 1932 expedition.
8 Anchors, San Francisco (1931), reproduced in Andrea Gray, Ansel Adams: An American Place (Tucson: The Center for Creative Photography, 1982), pl. 42.
9 Reproduced in A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 131; Ansel Adams, “An Exposition of My Photographic Technique,” Camera Craft 41 (January 1934): 20.
10 Leslie Calmes, archivist at the Center for Creative Photography, has determined that The Fortnightly first appeared on September 11, 1931, and ceased publication on May 6, 1932.
11 Ansel wrote six columns for The Fortnightly, only four of which were published before the magazine folded.
12 Ansel Adams, “Photography,” The Fortnightly, November 6, 1931, 25.
13 Ibid.
14 Reproduced in Ansel Adams with Robert Baker, The Negative (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1981), 184.
15 Ansel Adams, The Portfolios of Ansel Adams
(Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977), pl. 6.
16 Reproduced in Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: Classic Images (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1986), pl. 7.
17 Jasmine Alinder, interview with the author, March 17, 1995.
18 Edward Weston to Ansel Adams, January 28, 1932, in Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman, eds., Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, 1916–1984 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 48–50. Ansel Adams Archive, CCP. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents, 1995.
19 Ansel Adams, “Photography,” The Fortnightly, February 12, 1932, 26.
20 Johannes Molzahn, “Nicht mehr lesen, Sehen,” Das Kunstblatt, 1928; Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 432.
21 Richard Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham: Ideas Without End, a Life in Photography (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993), 24.
22 Nicholas Callaway, ed., Georgia O’Keeffe: One Hundred Flowers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).
23 Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham: Ideas Without End, 26–27.
24 “All Around the Town,” The Argonaut, February 5, 1932, 10.
25 Untitled statement for solo exhibition, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, February 1932, Nancy Newhall, Notes for The Eloquent Light, CCP.
26 Junius Cravens, “The Art World,” The Argonaut, February 12, 1932, 14.
27 “Yosemite Studies by Adams,” San Francisco Examiner, June 26, 1932.
28 Virginia Adams, interview with James Alinder, August 26–27, 1994.
29 Richard Dillon, California Trees Revisited (Berkeley: University of California, 1981).
30 “California Trees Competition,” Camera Craft 39 (November 1932), 481.
31 “Establishing the exact date of the party takes a bit of detective work. First, Saturday was the traditional night to gather. On October 6th, Edward received his check for the ‘California Trees’ exhibition. On October 10th, he wrote to Willard that he really needed to get away. A letter from Edward to Ansel dated October 19 referred to Group f.64 and included a check for $10 as his contribution. In an undated letter from Edward to Ansel, the name for the group had not yet been decided, but Ansel had already met with Lloyd Rollins, director of the M.H. de Young Museum. That letter, written before the one of the 19th, can likely be dated Monday, October 17th. Therefore the Group f.64 party must have taken place after the 10th and before the 17th. The only Saturday that occurred during this period is October 15th, 1932.” Mary Street Alinder, Group f.64 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 70. Edward wrote about attending the party in an entry in his daybook dated November 8, describing the event as having taken place a few weeks earlier.
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