37 Ansel Adams to E. K. Burlew, August 18, 1942, YNPRL.
38 E. K. Burlew to Ansel Adams, September 30, 1942, YNPRL.
39 Of the eighty-six pictures reproduced in Peter Wright and John Armor, The Mural Project (Santa Barbara: Reverie Press, 1989), plate 84, North Palisade from Windy Point, Kings River Canyon, California; plate 92, Junction Peak, Kings River Canyon, California; plate 100, Roaring River, Kings Region, Kings River Canyon, California; plate 106, Clouds—White Pass, Kings River Canyon, California; and plate 107, Kearsarge Pinnacles, Kings River Canyon, California were made well before Ansel was employed by the Department of the Interior.
40 Allan Parachini, Los Angeles Times Service, “Document Says Adams Gave U.S. Wrong Information on Negatives,” Monterey (Calif.) Sunday Herald, June 18, 1989, 9A.
41 Ansel Adams, “Statement of Time, Etc. Devoted to the Photographic Mural Project, Department of the Interior Appointment, Ansel Adams, Yosemite, October 14th through November 29th, 1941,” submitted December 2, 1941, YNPRL.
42 David Roybal, “Ansel Adams Gives ‘Moonrise’ to Hernandez,” New Mexican, June 12, 1980.
43 Ibid.
44 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 191.
14. GUGGENHEIM YEARS
1 Nancy Newhall, “The Enduring Moment” [unpublished manuscript], 297.
2 Ibid., 312–313.
3 Ansel Adams to Nancy Newhall, Wednesday, [mid-July] 1945, CCP.
4 Ansel Adams to Edward Weston, September 19, 1945, in Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman, eds., Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, 1916–1984 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 161. A short excerpt from Edward’s letter of response is reproduced in Amy Conger, Edward Weston: Photographs (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 1992), 41.
5 Ansel Adams, Natural-Light Photography (New York: Morgan and Morgan, 1952), pl. 38.
6 Ansel Adams to Nancy Newhall, November 25, 1945, CCP.
7 Doris Leonard, interview with the author, September 11, 1995.
8 My conclusions are based on many interviews with a number of Ansel’s compatriots, including some of the “women in his life.”
9 Ansel Adams to Nancy Newhall, July 15, 1944, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 152.
10 This person asked to remain anonymous.
11 Ansel Adams with Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1985), 323–324.
12 Peter C. Bunnell, Minor White: The Eye That Shapes (Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1989), 5.
13 A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 317.
14 Beaumont Newhall, Focus: A Life in Photography (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993), 153.
15 Pirkle Jones, interview with the author, September 12, 1995.
16 Ruth Marion Baruch, interview with the author, September 12, 1995.
17 Pirkle Jones interview.
18 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 382–384.
19 Ansel Adams to the Guggenheim Foundation, November 13, 1933, Sandra S. Phillips, “Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange: A Friendship of Differences,” in Michael Read, ed., Ansel Adams: New Light (San Francisco: The Friends of Photography, 1993), 54.
20 Liliane De Cock, interview with the author, September 20, 1995.
21 Nancy Newhall, From Adams to Stieglitz: Pioneers of Modern Photography (New York: Aperture, 1989), 93–95.
22 Bunnell, Minor White, 16.
23 Pirkle Jones interview.
24 Richard Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 572.
25 Nancy Newhall to Ansel Adams, July 15, 1946, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 175–177.
26 Sue Davidson Lowe, Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), 377–378.
27 Walt Whitman, “For Him I Sing,” in Leaves of Grass: The Complete Poems (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1986), 43.
28 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, 565.
29 Charis Wilson, Through Another Lens (New York: North Point Press, 1999). Charis finalized her divorce from Edward on December 13, 1946, and was married the next day by the same judge in Nevada who had issued her divorce papers; Conger, Edward Weston: Photographs, 41.
30 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 781.
31 Conger, Edward Weston: Photographs, fig. 1826/1948.
32 Edward Weston, My Camera on Point Lobos (Yosemite National Park: Virginia Adams, 1950).
33 Conger, Edward Weston: Photographs, 43.
34 Edward Weston to Ansel Adams, Virginia [Adams], Dody [Thompson], “in fact all concerned with ‘my C[amera] O[n] P[oint] L[obos],’” May 8, 1950, quoted in Conger, Edward Weston: Photographs, 43. Ansel Adams Archive. Collection Center for Creative Photography. © 1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.
35 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 758–759. Two of Ansel’s books also suffered the same “remaindered” fate: Yosemite and the High Sierra and The Land of Little Rain. Teiser and Harroun, Conversations with Ansel Adams, 430. In 1968, DaCapo Press published a second edition.
36 Conger, Edward Weston: Photographs, 43.
37 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 401, 442.
38 Ibid., 405–08.
39 “See Your West,” a series of twenty-five color photographic reproductions for 1946, at least two of which were by Ansel Adams; and “See Your West,” a series of fifty-four color photographic reproductions for 1947, nine by Ansel Adams.
40 Ansel Adams to Francis Farquhar, February 16, 1947, in Letters and Images, 181–182.
41 Ansel Adams to Newton Drury, February 26, 1947, quoted in N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 422, 426.
42 B. Newhall, Focus, 154.
43 Ansel Adams with Robert Baker, “Focusing Cloth,” in The Camera (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 174.
44 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 459.
45 Ibid., 464–465.
46 This was a favorite story often told by Ansel.
47 B. Newhall, Focus, 185.
48 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 462.
49 B. Newhall, Focus, 185. Copyright Beaumont Newhall, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Estate, courtesy of Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd., Santa Fe, New Mexico.
50 Ibid. Copyright Beaumont Newhall, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Estate, courtesy of Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd., Santa Fe, New Mexico.
51 Bernard De Voto, “The National Parks,” Fortune, June 1947, 120–135.
52 Time, June 2, 1947.
53 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 527–528.
54 A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 365.
55 Ansel Adams to Virginia Adams, April 1948, quoted in N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 526–527.
56 Ansel Adams and John Muir, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948).
57 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 586–591.
58 Don Worth, interview with the author, September 20, 1995.
59 Ansel Adams to George and Betty Marshall, May 8, 1948, CCP. Ansel Adams to Edward Weston, April 10–14, 1948, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 190–192; Edward Weston to Ansel Adams, April 1948, ibid., 192.
60 Ansel Adams, The Crater of Haleakala, Clouds, Hawaii National Park, Maui, T.H., reproduced in My Camera in the National Parks (Yosemite National Park: Virginia Adams, 1950), pl. 26; Ansel Adams, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on the Island of Hawaii, from Haleakula, in Hawaii National Park, Maui, in The Islands of Hawaii (Honolulu: Bishop National Bank, 1958), pl. 65.
61 Ansel Adams to Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, June 20, 1948, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 195.
62 Ansel Adams to Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, July 21, 1948, in N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 568–569.
63 Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photogr
aphs (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1983), 75–77.
64 Ibid.
65 Virginia Adams, interview with Nancy Newhall, May 12, 1947, CCP.
66 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 586–587.
67 Ibid., 659–663.
68 Ansel Adams to David McAlpin, February 7, 1941, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 129.
69 In 2014, the appraised value of a near-mint condition Portfolio One is $125,000.
70 Ansel Adams, The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1981, revised edition).
71 Ansel printed Portfolio One on a bromo-chloride projection paper developed in Metol-Glycin and lightly toned in selenium. Eight of the twelve images were contact-printed (that is, the negative was placed in direct contact with the printing paper—there was no enlargement), providing the maximum rendition of detail.
72 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 647; A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 287.
73 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 656–657. Newhall appears to have overestimated the number of negatives made for the Mural Project at about 600 (see the preceding chapter, “Moonrise”). When we reviewed all his negatives, the figure Ansel and I arrived at was 229.
74 List of prints with prices for Ansel Adams Exhibition, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June–July 1949. From the museum’s files.
75 N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 778.
76 Copyright page for Ansel Adams, My Camera in the National Parks (Yosemite and Boston: Virginia Adams and Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
77 A. Adams with M. Alinder, Autobiography, 103; A. Adams, “Conversations,” 500.
78 Ansel Adams, Portfolio Two: The National Parks & Monuments, in The Portfolios of Ansel Adams.
79 Alfred Frankenstein, “Around the Local Art Galleries,” San Francisco Chronicle, “This World,” July 3, 1949, 9.
80 Imogen Cunningham to Ansel Adams, August 1, 1949, CCP. Courtesy of the Imogen Cunningham Trust.
15. A DOCUMENTARY APPROACH
1 Ansel Adams to Alfred Stieglitz, December 25, 1944, in Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman, eds., Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, 1916–1984 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1985), 153–155.
2 Elizabeth Partridge, Dorothea Lange, Her Lifetime in Photography, Grab a Hunk of Lightning (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2013); Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange, A Life Beyond Limits (New York: Norton, 2009); Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), 3–50; Sandra S. Phillips, “Dorothea Lange: An American Photographer,” in Dorothea Lange: American Photographs (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994), 11–12.
3 Anne Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look, Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 15–17; Dorothea Lange, interview with Richard K. Doud, May 22, 1964 (Washington, D.C.: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution), 57. Quote reproduced in Elizabeth Partridge, ed., Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life (Washington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 104.
4 Ansel Adams, “Statement for Camera Craft, 1933,” in Therese Thau Heyman, ed., Seeing Straight: The f.64 Revolution in Photography (Oakland, Calif.: The Oakland Museum of California, 1992), 55–56; Ansel Adams, “Applied Photography,” Camera Craft April 1934, 173–183.
5 Willard Van Dyke, “The Photographs of Dorothea Lange: A Critical Analysis,” Camera Craft (October 1934), 461–467; Richard Street, Everyone Had Cameras (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 169–173.
6 Meltzer, Dorthea Lange, 70–72.
7 Beaumont Newhall, Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman (Fort Worth: The Amon Carter Museum, 1967), 6. All negatives in the National Archives are in the public domain. Migrant Mother is an American masterpiece. The cover of a recent excellent novel based on the making of this photograph sports a colorized and severely cropped version of Lange’s great photograph. To add to this desecration, at Costco the price stamp covers one of the mother’s eyes. It is, however, a wonderful read. Marisa Silver, Mary Coin (New York: Plume, 2014).
8 Dorothea Lange, “The Assignment I’ll Never Forget,” Popular Photography 46 (February 1960): 42, 126. Reproduced in Beaumont Newhall, ed., Photography: Essays & Images (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 262–265.
9 Geoffrey Dunn, “Photographic License,” Metro 10, no. 47 (Santa Clara, Calif., January 19–25, 1995): 20–24.
10 Partridge, Dorothea Lange, Her Lifetime in Photography, 21–22; Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange, A Life Beyond Limits, 235–243.
11 Gordon, Dorothea Lange, 237.
12 Dunn, “Photographic License,” 20–24.
13 David and Victoria Sheff, “The Playboy Interview,” Playboy, May 1983, 72.
14 Ansel Adams to Dorothea Lange, January 25, 1936, CCP.
15 Adams, Eastman Studio Cash Book (July 30, 1931–January 6, 1936), CCP.
16 Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life, 183.
17 Ibid., 264.
18 Therese Thau Heyman, “A Rock or a Line of Unemployed: Art and Document in Dorothea Lange’s Photography,” in Phillips, Dorothea Lange: American Photographs, 57 and 73 n. 13.
19 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, 570. 352–353.
20 Ansel Adams to Edward Weston, 1943, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 139–141; A. Adams, “Conversations,” 105.
21 Nancy Newhall, “The Enduring Moment” [unpublished manuscript], 235.
22 There is an exception: the U.S. Coordinator for War Information assembled an exhibition entitled “Photographs of America by Ansel Adams,” a diverse selection of imagery ranging from landscape to industry that was circulated in England. Soon afterward, though that country was still in the midst of war, a movement began to establish national parks there. It is probable that Ansel’s photographs had some influence on this effort. N. Newhall, “The Enduring Moment,” 208–209.
23 A. Adams, “Conversations,” 23–24.
24 John Hersey, “A Mistake of Terrifically Horrible Proportion,” in John Armor and Peter Wright, Manzanar (New York: Times Books, 1989), 50.
25 An excerpt of Executive Order 9066, reproduced in Maisie and Richard Conrat, Executive Order 9066 (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1973), 5.
26 Annie Nakao, “Remembering the 100th/442nd,” San Francisco Examiner, October 4, 1992, D-6.
27 M. and R. Conrat, Executive Order 9066, 22.
28 Ansel Adams, Born Free and Equal: Photographs of the Loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California (New York: U.S. Camera, 1944), 29; William H. Michael, “Manzanar National Historic Site,” in Wynne Benti, ed., Born Free and Equal (Bishop, Ca.: Spotted Dog Press, 2002), 27–29; Masumi Hayashi, “American Concentration Camps,” See: A Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 1 (San Francisco: The Friends of Photography, Winter 1995): 32–43.
29 Armor and Wright, Manzanar, 89.
30 Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life, 240.
31 Jasmine Alinder, Moving Images, Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 24–26.
32 “Internment Camp Site Preserved in Owens Valley,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 28, 1995, A-26.
33 Mary Austin and Ansel Adams, The Land of Little Rain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 110.
34 Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life, 238–245.
35 Roger Daniels, “Dorothea Lange and the War Relocation Authority,” in Partridge, Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life, 49.
36 Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life, 241.
37 Archie Miyatake, “Manzanar Remembered,” in Benti, ed., Born Free and Equal, 15–23; Graham Howe, Patrick Nagatani, and Scott Rankin, Two Views of Manzanar (Los Angeles: F
rederick S. Wight Art Gallery, UCLA, 1978), 10–11.
38 A. Adams, “Conversations,” 25.
39 Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 146, 148.
40 The two dead were Ito and Kanagawa. Michi Nishiura Weglyn, Years of Infamy, The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 312, n. 3; and Jasmine Alinder, Moving Images, 47–48.
41 Pete Merritt (son of Ralph Merritt, who lived at Manzanar), interview with the author, September 25, 1989; A. Adams, “Conversations,” 23–24.
42 Ansel Adams to Nancy Newhall, 1943, in M. Alinder and Stillman, Letters and Images, 143–145.
43 Ansel Adams to Ralph Merritt, October 16, 1943. Letter bound into Merritt’s personal copy of Born Free and Equal, author’s collection.
44 Ansel Adams to Ralph Merritt, October 22, 1943, 10:15 a.m. Telegram bound into Merritt’s personal copy of Born Free and Equal.
45 Jasmine Alinder, Moving Images, 48, 73.
46 Richard Steven Street, “Photographs of Truth and Propaganda,” Everyone Had Cameras, Photography and Farmworkers in California, 1850–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008), 316–317.
47 Armor and Wright, Manzanar, xx.
48 A. Adams, Born Free and Equal, 110. On the title page, Ansel acknowledged, “Dedicated with Admiration and Respect to Ralph Palmer Merritt Who Has Given Thousands of our Fellow-Citizens A Renewed Faith and Confidence in Democracy.” For more on Dillon S. Myer see Richard Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
49 Nancy Newhall, “Ansel Adams, Born Free and Equal,” photo notes, June 1946 (New York: The Photo League), 3–5.
50 Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” United Feature Syndicate, 1945.
51 Ansel Adams to Nancy Newhall, December 24, 1944, CCP.
52 Armor and Wright, Manzanar, xviii.
53 Pete Merritt remembers that one incensed citizen bought as many copies of Born Free and Equal as he could find and then burned them in his garage. Pete Merritt interview.
54 Karin Becker Ohrn, in her book Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, relates that in a letter Ansel wrote her on April 2, 1975, he stated that U.S. Camera had intentionally destroyed copies of Born Free and Equal.
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