Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, and Beaumont Newhall interview with the author, Adams’s home, Carmel Highlands, June 21, 1983. Edward Weston, The Daybook of Edward Weston: Vol. 2, California, ed. Nancy Newhall (New York: Horizon Press, 1966), 264; Edward Weston to Willard Van Dyke, October 10, 1932, in Leslie Squyres Calmes, ed., The Letters Between Edward Weston and Willard Van Dyke (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1992), 7–8. Edward Weston to Ansel Adams, undated [October 17, 1932?] and October 19, 1932 postmark, CCP.

  32 Willard Van Dyke, “Autobiography,” unpublished manuscript, CCP. Read with the kind permission of Barbara Van Dyke.

  33 Willard Van Dyke, Ansel Adams, and Beaumont Newhall, interview with the author, June 21, 1983.

  34 “November 8, 1932,” Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston: California, Nancy Newhall, ed. (New York and Rochester, N.Y.: Horizon Press and George Eastman House, 1966), 264–265.

  35 James Alinder, “The Preston Holder Story,” Exposure, February 1975, 2.

  36 Van Dyke, Adams, and Newhall, interview.

  37 An example of Ansel’s musical writing style for the letter f can be seen in Ansel Adams to Beaumont Newhall, July 11, 1949, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 210. The members of Group f.64 based their name on an idealistic f-stop, a tiny aperture that would be rarely or never used, but was symbolic of their cause. It is a bit confusing, because Group f.64 was written in more than one way. What is correct? Their memories are that they first conceived it as Group f.64, and used that on the cover of their invitation to their original exhibition. In the typewritten manuscript of the Group f.64 manifesto, all of the f’s are F’s, because the typewriter was unable to create italics, while the f in the announcement was drawn freehand. This explains why the italicized f was difficult to express, although this does not account for the change from lower case to upper case. Through the years, it was expressed as: Group f.64 announcement in 1932; Group F.64 Manifesto in 1932; Group f/64 in Edward’s Daybooks in 1932; Group F-64 in many articles about them in the press; Group F 64 in an Ansel Adams Gallery announcement in 1933 and in his 1935 book, Making a Photograph; Group f.64 in John Paul’s 1935 article for Camera Craft; Group f 64 in Willard’s 1938 article for Scribner’s; and Group f/64 in Ansel’s 1948 Camera & Lens. I have chosen to use Group f.64 because it was their original choice and the only one that we know was agreed to by more than one member. Graphically, it is the most elegant design.

  38 Edward Weston to Ansel Adams, n.d., CCP. From the content it is clear that this letter was written either in late September or the first two weeks of October 1932.

  In 1958, George M. Craven wrote a master of fine arts thesis for Ohio University entitled “Group f/64 and Its Relation to Straight Photography in America.” The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art published Craven’s essay “The Group f/64 Controversy” in 1963. Following his death, Craven’s wife, Rachel, was kind enough to give my husband, Jim, and me his Group f.64 files. A copy of this letter was included therein. CCP.

  39 Therese Thau Heyman, “Perspective on Seeing Straight,” in Therese Thau Heyman, ed., Seeing Straight: The f.64 Revolution in Photography (Oakland: The Oakland Museum of California, 1992), 29.

  40 Susan Ehrens, Alma Lavenson Photographs (Berkeley, Calif.: Wildwood Arts, 1990).

  41 Holder became a professor of anthropology and chairman of that department at the University of Nebraska, where we became good friends during the 1970s. A brilliant and accomplished teacher, he would have been the first to admit that photography had been only a passing hobby when he knew Willard.

  42 Ansel Adams, Cash Receipts, 13. CCP.

  43 Ansel Adams to Willard Van Dyke, November 26, 1932, Paul Hertzmann Collection.

  44 “Group F.64 Manifesto,” in Heyman, ed., Seeing Straight, 53.

  45 Included in Craven’s files was a photocopy of the final draft of the Group f.64 manifesto with corrections in Ansel’s hand.

  46 For his December 18, 1931, review for The Fortnightly, the typed manuscript Ansel submitted contained the spelling technic, which the magazine’s editor changed to technique in the published piece. Ansel’s later manuscripts for The Fortnightly contain the Americanized spelling of technique to conform with the magazine’s style.

  47 Herm Lenz, “Interview with Three Greats,” U.S. Camera 18, no. 8 (August 1955): 87.

  48 Imogen Cunningham, “Interview with Imogen Cunningham,” an oral history conducted 1972, Donated Oral Histories Collection, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 8. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library.

  Thirteen years earlier, Cunningham had remembered things differently: “In the main, the person who started this was Willard. I’ve been told that Ansel Adams claims he started it, but I would swear on my last penny that it was Willard who did it.” Imogen Cunningham, “Portraits, Ideas, and Design,” an oral history conducted 1959 by Edna Tartaul Daniel, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1961, 139.

  49 Van Dyke, Adams, and Newhall, interview.

  50 Ibid.

  51 Ibid.

  52 Maren Stange, ed., Paul Strand, Essays on his Life and Work (New York: Aperture, 1990); and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Gilles Mora, and Karen E. Haas, The Photography of Charles Sheeler, American Modernist (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2002).

  53 John Paul Edwards, “Group F:64,” Camera Craft 42 (March 1935): 107–108, 110, 112–113.

  54 Ibid.; Ansel Adams, “Discussion on Filters,” U.S. Camera 11 (October 1940): 57.

  55 An example: Ansel Adams, Table Set, reproduced in Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography, vol. 8 in the How to Do It Series (New York and London: The Studio Publications, 1935), pl. 23.

  56 Bridalveil Fall, Yosemite National Park (ca. 1927), A. Adams, Classic Images, pl. 3.

  57 “A superb study of water, considered by the photographer his best landscape.” Caption for Nevada Fall, Yosemite Valley, “The New Photography,” Modern Photography 1934–35: The Studio Annual of Camera Art (London and New York: The Studio Publications, Inc., 1934), plate 1.

  58 Reproduced in A. Adams, Classic Images, pl. 11.

  59 Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1983), 18–21.

  60 A. Adams, Making a Photograph, pl. 23.

  61 Reproduced in A. Adams, Examples, 10.

  62 John Szarkowski, “Kaweah Gap and Its Variants,” in Ansel Adams: 1902–1984 (Carmel: The Friends of Photography, 1984), 15.

  63 Helen LeConte, who was along on the 1932 Outing, remembered it as the best Outing ever. One older woman was scandalized by the naked swimming and loudly complained. As a joke Ansel and Virginia formed a Morals Committee and elected Virginia vice president. Helen LeConte, “Reminiscences of LeConte Family Outings, the Sierra Club, and Ansel Adams,” an oral history conducted 1972, 1974, 1975 by Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun, “Sierra Club Women II,” Sierra Club History Committee, Sierra Club, San Francisco, 1977, 66. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library.

  64 Szarkowski, “Kaweah Gap and Its Variants,” 15.

  65 Lloyd LaPage Rollins to Edward Weston, March 29, 1935, CCP. For more information on Rollins see M. Alinder, Group f.64.

  66 California Arts and Architecture 43 (May 1933): 6.

  67 James Thurber, “Has Photography Gone Too Far?” The New Yorker, August 11, 1934, reprinted in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 335–338.

  68 Mary Street Alinder, “Group f.64 and Closely Related Exhibitions 1932–1940,” Group f.64 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 297–307.

  69 Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham: Ideas Without End, 24.

  70 Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985).

  71 Barbara Rose, American Painting: The Twentieth Century (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 23.

  72 J. Alinder, “The Preston Holder Story,” 2.
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br />   73 Van Dyke, Adams, and Newhall interview.

  74 Ansel Adams to Edward Weston, November 29, 1934, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 72–74; Edward Weston to Ansel Adams, December 3, 1934, ibid., 75–76.

  75 In 1934, Ansel wrote that the current members of Group f.64 were himself, Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham, Consuelo Kanaga, Dorothea Lange, Henry Swift, and John Paul Edwards. Ansel Adams, unpublished “Statement for Camera Craft,” undated [summer or fall 1934], Adams archive CCP. In 1935, John Paul Edwards stated that Dorothea Lange, William Simpson, and Peter Stackpole were new members of Group f.64. John Paul Edwards, “Group F: 64,” Camera Craft, March 1937, 107. The historian’s historian, Beaumont Newhall, declared that Dorothea became a member of Group f.64 soon after its founding. Beaumont Newhall, “The Questing Photographer: Dorothea Lange,” Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1967), 5–6. Ansel invited both Lange and Stackpole to teach photography classes during the late 1930s and into the 1940s. Peter Stackpole insisted until he died in 1997 that he had been a member of Group f.64.

  76 Amitav Ghosh, “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi,” The New Yorker, July 17, 1995, 40.

  77 A portion of this chapter was first published in Mary Street Alinder, “The Limits of Reality: Ansel Adams and Group f/64,” in Heyman, ed., Seeing Straight, 42–50.

  7. SIERRA

  1 Ansel Adams, “The Horace M. Albright Conservation Lectureship: The Role of the Artist in Conservation,” lecture given at University of California, Berkeley, College of Natural Resources, Department of Forestry & Conservation, March 3, 1975, 1.

  2 During the summer of 1919, Ansel managed the LeConte Lodge for about ten days when that season’s custodian took ill.

  3 Ansell [sic] E. Adams, Custodian LeConte Lodge, “LeConte and Parsons Memorial Lodges,” Sierra Club Bulletin 12, no. 1 (1921): 201–202.

  4 Ansel Adams, “LeConte Memorial Lodge—Season of 1923,” Sierra Club Bulletin, 1924, 83; Linda Wedel Greene, Yosemite: The Park and Its Resources (Yosemite National Park: U.S. Department of the Interior/National Park Service, 1987), 84–85.

  5 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, 252–253.

  6 The club’s statement of purpose was published in every issue of the Sierra Club Bulletin.

  7 Today, numerous Outings depart all year long; some are still in the Sierra, but others explore the entire globe, from the Galapagos to Vietnam to Antarctica. “Sierra Club Outings,” Sierra (March/April 1914), 58–61.

  8 Doris Leonard, interview with the author, September 11, 1995.

  9 Anne Adams Helms, “Ansel Easton Adams,” The Descendants of William James Adams and Cassandra Hills Adams (Salinas, Calif.: Anne Adams Helms, 1999), 200.

  10 Lillian Hodghead and Ada Clement, “Sierra Log, Summer of 1931,” typewritten manuscript illustrated with corner-mounted snapshots. Courtesy of Sita Dimitroff Milchev, Gualala, California.

  11 Ibid., 91.

  12 “Exhaustos” proved to be such a hit that it was produced at least one more time, on the 1940 Outing, when the “gripping Sierra tragedy, was performed by an all-star cast.” Weldon F. Heald, “High and Dry—1940,” Sierra Club Bulletin 26, no. 1 (1941): 22.

  13 Hodghead and Clement, “Sierra Log,” 94–95.

  14 Ibid., 93.

  15 Ansel and Virginia Adams, Eastman Studio Cash Book (July 30, 1931–January 6, 1936), CCP.

  16 Doris Leonard interview.

  17 Ansel Adams, “The Photography of Joseph N. LeConte,” Sierra Club Bulletin 29, no. 5 (October 1944): 41–46; J. N. LeConte, “Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras,” Sierra Club Bulletin 13 (February 1928): 96.

  18 “She Won—or Maybe He Did; Anyway, He Got the Job,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1934.

  19 Ansel Adams, “TO THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE SIERRA CLUB,” September 1968, in Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman, eds., Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, 1916–1984 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 298–300.

  20 Nancy Newhall, The Eloquent Light (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1980), 114–120. The Pacific Crest Trail became a 2,650-mile-long reality, stretching from the border of Mexico to the Canadian border, officially completed in 1993. Tom Stienstra, “Pacific Coast Trail Leads to Wonder,” San Francisco Examiner, July 24, 1994, A1, A12. The PCT passes through the Ansel Adams Wilderness.

  21 Ansel Adams, “Record of Comment on Yosemite Conservation Forum,” June 23, 1935, CCP.

  22 The first water from Hetch Hetchy did not flow into San Francisco reservoirs until October 24, 1934, but it continues to serve today as the water-storage facility for 2.4 million residents of the Bay Area. Carl Nolte, “Hetch Hetchy at 60 Is Still Causing Controversy,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 27, 1994, A19–20; “Hetch Hetchy Water System,” Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency, http://bawsca.org/water-supply/hetch-hetchy-water-system [accessed March 10, 2014].

  23 Ansel Adams to Virginia Best, August 3, 1925, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 22. Hikers gave letters they wanted to mail to others they met along the trail who were on their way home. This tradition was part of an unwritten code of behavior.

  24 Robert L. Lipman, “The 1935 Outing,” Sierra Club Bulletin 21, no. 1 (February 1936): 34–39.

  25 Francis P. Farquhar, “Legislative History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks,” Sierra Club Bulletin 26, no. 1 (February 1941): 55.

  26 Yosemite (California) National Park (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, 1936).

  27 Ansel Adams, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (Berkeley, Calif.: The Archetype Press, 1938).

  28 Tom Turner, Sierra Club: 100 Years of Protecting Nature (New York: Abrams, 1991), 123–125. By design, few services are allowed within Kings Canyon National Park. It remains the least developed national park in the lower forty-eight.

  8. RECOGNITION

  1 Andrea Gray, Ansel Adams: An American Place, 1936 (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 1982), 13.

  2 “Many Banks FDR Shut Will Reopen,” March 12, 1933, Clifton Daniel, ed. Chronicle of the 20th Century (Mount Kisco, N.Y.: Chronicle Publications, 1987), 418.

  3 Virginia Adams to Mr. and Mrs. C. H. Adams, March 29, 1933, CCP.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ansel Adams, “The New Photography,”Modern Photography 1934–35: The Studio Annual of Camera Art (London and New York: The Studio Publications, 1934), 12.

  7 Albert Bender to Ansel Adams, April 4, 1933, CCP.

  8 Benita Eisler, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 406–408.

  9 Ibid., 408–412; and Sarah Greenough, ed., My Faraway One, Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume I, 1915–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 405–409

  10 Doris Bry, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographer (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1965), 17–20.

  11 Alexandra Arrowsmith and Thomas West, eds., Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives (New York: HarperCollins Publishers/Calloway Editions, 1992).

  12 Alfred Stieglitz, from the catalog of an exhibition of photographs by Alfred Stieglitz held at the Anderson Galleries, New York, 1921. Reprinted in Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays & Images (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 217.

  13 Gray, An American Place, 14.

  14 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, 55.

  15 Greenough, My Faraway One, 644–655; Richard Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 537–548.

  16 Greenough, My Faraway One.

  17 Gray, An American Place, 14.

  18 Nancy Newhall, The Eloque
nt Light (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1980), 85.

  19 Ansel Adams with Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1985), 78.

  20 Maria Morris Hambourg, The New Vision: Photography between the Wars (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 10; Marius de Zayas, “Pablo Picasso,” Camera Work 34–35 (April–July, 1911): 65–67.

  21 Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz, 431–434.

  22 Ibid., 451.

  23 Ansel Adams to Alfred Stieglitz, June 22, 1933, in Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman, eds., Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, 1916–1984 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 50–52.

  24 Virginia Adams to Ansel Adams, August 2, 1933, ibid., 54.

  25 Ansel Adams to Cedric and Rhea Wright, August 5, 1933, ibid., 56.

  26 Ansel Adams to Alfred Stieglitz, October 9, 1933, ibid., 58.

  27 Paul Strand to Ansel Adams, October 14, 1933, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 61–62; Alfred Stieglitz to Ansel Adams, June 28, 1933, ibid., 52–53.

  28 Charles Sheeler to Ansel Adams, September 25, 1933, CCP.

  29 Ansel Adams to Jean Charlot, October 7, 1933, CCP.

  30 Ben Maddow, Edward Weston: Fifty Years (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1973), 281.

  31 Howard DeVree, “Other Shows,” New York Times, November 19, 1933.

  32 Ansel Adams, “An Exposition of My Photographic Technique,” “Landscape,” “Portraiture,” and “Applied Photography,” Camera Craft (January, February, March, and April 1934).

  33 Adams, “The New Photography,” 9–18.

  34 Beaumont Newhall, “Modern Photography, 1934–5,” The American Magazine of Art (January 1935), 58.

  35 Ansel Adams, Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography, vol. 8 in the How to Do It series (New York and London: The Studio Publications, Inc., 1935).