Ansel Adams Read online

  Ansel scaled the earth to man size and the sky to infinity. The shore and ocean of the Golden Gate, the entrance to San Francisco Bay, comprise only a quarter of the image area. The sky, mounded with clouds, dwarfs the earth below.

  As memorable as we find the clouds in a few of Ansel’s earlier pictures, The Golden Gate Before the Bridge signals the inception of consistently detailed and great skies. To make this negative, he used his new eight-by-ten-inch camera loaded with Kodak Super-Panchromatic film, and added a K3, a strong yellow filter, before his lens. With the sky presenting a whole new subject possibility, Ansel’s lenses could enlarge his vision to include the heavens.

  In early 1932, Ansel still calculated his exposure times by “experience,” backing that up with a significant amount of bracketing, or making several negatives of each subject at different exposures. To respond to the problem that had been posed by the Golden Gate, and using money from the print sales of the image he made there, Ansel purchased his first Weston light meter (no relationship to Edward), which enabled him finally to quantify the amount of light reflected from various portions of his subject.60 No more guesswork would be required.

  The third photograph of significance in the Group f.64 exhibit, Frozen Lake and Cliffs, is a masterpiece, and one of the earliest abstract photographs made directly from nature.61 Mirrored ghostly upon the inky waters, a shattered black cliff descends into a partially frozen lake. The reflection is separated from its source by a band of white ice, a crumpled crust of grayed snow, and a tumble of scree. John Szarkowski, for thirty years director of the Department of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, described it as an “astonishing [and], it seems to me, unprecedented photograph.”62

  On the 1932 Sierra Club Outing to Sequoia National Park, Ansel had set up his four-by-five-inch view camera at the base of Eagle Scout Peak, with Precipice Lake at its feet. Virginia and a few girlfriends went skinny-dipping and paddled about in the still waters, which were dotted with patches of melting ice.63 Cedric Wright positioned his camera quite near Ansel’s. Cedric was later to exclaim that he was shocked to see Ansel’s image, so very different was it from, and so much more beautiful than, what he himself had seen.

  To make Frozen Lake and Cliffs, Ansel selected a long-focus lens that isolated the scene, eliminating the sky and telescoping cliff, ice, and water into an insistently two-dimensional, flat image. According to Szarkowski, “This is not a landscape for picnics, or for nature appreciation, but for the testing of souls.”64 Placed side by side with 1921’s soft-focus A Grove of Tamarack Pine (Lodgepole Pines), it demonstrates a decade of amazing growth and an entirely new aesthetic. With Frozen Lake and Cliffs, Ansel spoke once more in the powerful, stylized language he had discovered with Monolith.

  Ansel’s prints made in the early 1930s differ in significant aspects from later and more widely shown interpretations of the 1970s through early 1980s. Viewing the vintage print of Frozen Lake and Cliffs that was seen at the Group f.64 exhibition made for an intimate experience. The four-by-five-inch negative was enlarged to approximately eight by ten inches; the tonal values were soft, with detail in all areas. Later prints, such as those viewed by Szarkowski, can be coldly forbidding, the ice seeming of brittle whiteness, the cliff and melted lake glazed with forceful black and gray.

  Unfortunately, photography did not enjoy a long relationship with the de Young Museum. Less than four months after the Group f.64 exhibition, Rollins was fired by his board of trustees (he landed on his feet, moving to Texas as the director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, although his term there was also fairly short).65 His termination was a direct result of his commitment to mounting photographic exhibitions, which took up wall space that some trustees believed should be reserved for the canvases of “true” artists—that is, painters.66 Few photographs would be shown at the de Young for decades after Rollins’s dismissal.

  If the concept of straight photography did not begin with Group f.64, nonetheless Group f.64 brought it to the attention of the world. The influential humorist and cartoonist James Thurber rose to the challenge in 1934 in a New Yorker essay, “Has Photography Gone Too Far?”

  A controversy about controlled photography is now raging in the land . . . You could have knocked me down with an old box-style Brownie No. 1 Kodak when I discovered . . . that the Camera Club has been “arguing the question of straight versus controlled photography for fifty years.” Without, apparently, getting anywhere . . . It seems to me that more control should be exerted upon the subjects before they are photographed and less upon the plates afterwards.67

  This was straight photography interpreted for the layperson.

  Group f.64 was a landmark in the history of photography. It marshaled eleven of the medium’s most influential and important artists, all from diverse backgrounds, under one philosophical banner. Together they swore allegiance to the unmanipulated, straight print, made using purely photographic methods. They functioned together from 1932 until about 1940. During that time they participated and often curated nearly thirty exhibitions that were directly Group f.64 or closely related. Individual members never stopped pressing his or her own version of the cause.68

  Edward Weston has always been seen as the group’s philosophical leader, whose own photography had evolved from salon-winning Pictorialism in the teens and early 1920s to revealing, sharply focused portraits of people, seashells, trees, and vegetables by 1932. But Imogen Cunningham had found her way to straight photography before Weston. Their friendship began in 1920, and they looked at each other’s work and engaged in photographic discussions, both in person and via the mail.69 The difference was that Cunningham did not proceed to have her thoughts published. Who, then, influenced whom?

  Cunningham was already an important artist by 1932. Her opinions were of consequence, and her photographs had been groundbreaking for years. Both Lavenson and Kanaga looked to her for guidance, and Dorothea Lange would later say that Cunningham had provided her with ongoing advice and support.

  Cunningham has never been given due credit for her influence on the other members of Group f.64 or, indeed, for her importance as a photographer. It does not help that although she is recognized in Beaumont Newhall’s magnum opus, The History of Photography, her name is nowhere mentioned in John Szarkowski’s important 1989 history, Photography Until Now. An overview of the photographers whom the latter author championed during his tenure at MoMA reveals few who expressed traditional values of beauty in their work, as did Imogen.

  Group f.64 was one of the first art movements, perhaps the earliest, to comprise such a substantial proportion of active women artists—four women to seven men in the de Young exhibition. Gender seemed to have no bearing on membership. Following the Russian Revolution, women were involved in the Constructivist movement, whose aim was to bring the revolution to the people through posters and other propaganda, but how much of this was art? Credit has been given to the Surrealists for their inclusion, but women did not exhibit to a significant extent with that group until 1935; although a few works by women had found their way into Surrealist shows by 1929, a woman’s major role was to serve as muse, not as creator.70

  The Great Depression challenged American political and social values and prompted many American artists to take action. Two opposing camps formed, one believing in art for art’s sake and the other championing art for life’s sake.71 In photography the simplified form of this schism in the mid-1930s could be represented by Group f.64 on the one hand (art for art’s sake), and Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and their colleagues at the Farm Security Administration on the other (art for life’s sake).

  This split presented an ethical and ideological dilemma for some members of Group f.64. Preston Holder, for his part, mused, “I had hopes for that group, that it would activate some of those people to do some socially aware things. But I was the only one in the group who agreed on my plan of what f.64 should be.”72 But that turned out not to be the case. Cunningham had come to be
lieve that the most important subject matter was humanity. People became her primary subject. From the start, Kanaga had earned the respect of her Group f.64 colleagues with her photographs of the African American community. She moved to New York to become more socially active. Van Dyke concluded that he could never come close to the brilliance of his mentor Weston in photographing landscape, so he changed subjects, depicting the evidence of rustic buildings that reflected their habitants. These prints began appearing with Group f.64–related shows. Van Dyke moved to New York in 1935 and became a filmmaker, an avant-garde idealist convinced that

  we had to change the world. We couldn’t have people starving. I thought that film could promote change faster than still photography. I was wrong. Your photographs [talking to Ansel] awakened a sense of wilderness. Dorothea [Lange] and Walker [Evans] increased the sensitivity of people. Motion pictures are ephemeral . . . they’re up there on the screen and then they’re gone.73

  Edward Weston and Ansel persisted in working as they always had, undaunted by criticism charging them with photographing rocks and trees while the world was being destroyed about them, believing that it was exactly during such tragic times that the inspiration of beauty was most needed.74 But Ansel remained more open than Weston. Ansel was clearly moved by the changing philosophy of his colleagues, if not outwardly by the social conditions resulting from the Depression.

  There is compelling evidence that both Dorothea Lange and Peter Stackpole were later members of Group f.64.75 In 1932, Lange had been considered to exhibit with Group f.64, but at that time her pictures consisted of her professional studio portraits of San Francisco high society. In early 1933, perhaps stung by not being accepted by her peers, she confronted the traumatic effects of the Great Depression head-on. Quietly moving through the streets populated by the unemployed, she began her iconic series of photo-documents, beginning with White Angel Breadline. In a revolutionary break from her past, she continued opening eyes with her photographs to the social situation until the end of her life. Peter Stackpole became prominent on the San Francisco photography scene in the mid-1930s with his extraordinary 35mm images of the building of the Oakland Bay Bridge. The men who built this engineering marvel are central to Stackpole’s imagery, most often dwarfed by the structure they were creating.

  Dorothea Lange demanded that artists must reveal what is evil and wrong: anything less would be unacceptable. Dževad Karahasan, a Bosnian writer, contends, “The decision to perceive literally everything as an aesthetic phenomenon—completely sidestepping questions about goodness and truth—is an artistic decision. That decision started in the realm of art, and went on to become characteristic of the contemporary world.”76

  If Ansel’s photographs did not directly acknowledge the world’s troubles, his personal actions did. He was a chief supporter and promoter of Lange and her photographs. Personally, Ansel held true to f.64 tenets, keeping his creative photography pure and separate from both his commercial jobs and his environmental causes. But his activist role in the Sierra Club allowed him to respond to the demands that he clearly heard: to be involved with and responsible to the earth and man.77

  Chapter 7: Sierra

  Ansel’s wellspring, Yosemite and the Sierra, moved his soul, changed his life, and focused his dreams. Heaven was to be found right here on earth. It did not take long for him to discover, however, that far from being eternal, nature in fact lay hostage to man. What he witnessed in Yosemite Valley, desecrated by a pool hall, bowling alley, golf course, bars, curio shops, and lengthening lines of automobiles, convinced Ansel that he must become a defender of the earth; he must fight to protect it for all those who would follow, and especially for the children who could be cured, as he had been, by the healing power of wilderness.1

  The protection of the Sierra was a central concern of the Sierra Club, which Ansel joined in 1920 as a prerequisite of the summer job he would hold for the next four years, as custodian of the club’s Yosemite headquarters. From the LeConte Memorial Lodge, dedicated to the memory of the “original” Joe—Professor Joseph N. LeConte, geologist, conservationist, and founding member—Ansel took his first steps into the established world of conservation.2 What was more, he no longer had to feel so guilty about his months in the valley: his parents revered the word work, and he was even getting paid!

  In 1921, he opened the lodge on May 15 and closed it on August 20. That spring, the weather was still frosty, and snow surrounded the building. He began by rolling out his bedroll on the lodge’s one small cot, then proceeded to sweep out the mice and prepare for his duties in the months ahead, when he would answer questions, provide access to the lodge’s small library and botanical collections, set out salt licks for deer, and lead tours about the valley.3

  Ansel was also responsible for laying down and then removing the clamps that secured the climbing cables on the side of Half Dome, a tradition begun in 1875 to enable ordinary folk, straining to their maximum limits, to attain its summit.4 The clamps weighed about five pounds each; Ansel would load his backpack with ten at a time. This job required him to go up and down Half Dome so many times that he may still hold the record for total number of ascents. It took six full days of work each spring to position the clamps, and six more in the fall to remove them.5

  All of Ansel’s responsibilities fell within the club’s stated mission:

  To explore, enjoy and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast; to publish authentic information concerning them; to enlist the support and cooperation of the people and the government in preserving the forests and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada.6

  Although committed to these anthropocentric purposes, John Muir, William Colby, and the club’s other early directors had been well aware of the threats posed to existing wilderness areas—already diminishing quickly at the century’s turn—by the material demands of man. In the late nineteenth century, thousands of sheep had grazed the length of the Middle Fork of the Kings River Canyon, devouring a lush country and turning it into a barren one. The Sierra was heavily pockmarked by mines, a few still active but most abandoned. California’s grand landscape was under attack from all sides.

  Muir and Colby reasoned that if enough people experienced the Sierra for themselves, public support would grow and the lands could be protected. Annual group treks, the Sierra Club Outings, began in 1901 and continue to this day.7 The earliest participants were chiefly professors and students from the University of California, Berkeley, whose vocations allowed them luxurious quantities of summer vacation time. Members hiked and camped along a designated route for two to four weeks.

  No small enterprise, the Outings at times numbered upward of a couple hundred people and a hundred head of pack mules and horses, a certain definition of the term “high-impact camping.” Their dusty and smoky spoor billowed about them, visible for miles and miles.

  Aside from a few days’ participation in 1923, Ansel could not afford to join an Outing until 1927, when he and Virginia participated for the entire month. Enjoying the young man’s vibrant good humor and exuberant energy, and valuing his personal experience in the Sierra and photographic talent, Colby, the club’s president and leader of the Outings, made the trip possible. He appointed Ansel the official photographer for the 1928 trip to the Canadian Rockies, waiving the normal fees, and paying him a stipend. This tradition continued in the years ahead, and from then on, Ansel rarely missed an Outing.

  Ansel earned a reputation as a fine companion around the nightly campfire and was designated director of the evening entertainment. Often this meant his conducting the assembled in a few songs (although not singing himself) and then turning the floor over to Cedric, who might perform a movement from a violin sonata, or to Virginia, who would sing a song or two, perhaps giving her sonorous and moving rendition of “Down in the Valley.”8 Since he had already hiked much of the Sierra, Ansel was also assigned the additional task of mapping out each day’s eight- to twelve-mile-long route. He woke up
each morning at four-thirty a.m. and hit the trail to determine the next campsite for the Outing, enabling him to chart each day’s hike with an eye for the best photographic territory. For some reason, he was also in charge of the Lost and Found, maybe because he already had to carry so much equipment.9

  On July 18, 1931, the Outing, two hundred members strong, ascended to Benson Lake, a few days’ hike above Yosemite Valley. With a broad sandy beach, trees for shelter, waters jumping with silvery trout, and gray granite slopes all around, the lake was to be their home for three days. The group’s sheer numbers and rowdy behavior shattered the peace of two women, Lillian Hodghead and Ada Clement, who had already been camping there for three weeks. Their detailed diary of their trip and the Sierra Club’s invasion reads, in part, “The first contingent of ‘hikers’ came at about eight this morning, and immediately began to shout and splash around in the Lake, and swarm around the rocks, fishing. How do people stand it, traveling with a noisy crowd like that for a month?”10

  Recognizing this disturbance of their peace, Colby invited the two women to attend all the group’s meals. Wandering over to the club’s camp, Hodghead and Clement, who cooked over an open fire and kept food cold by immersion in the lake, were astonished to witness this version of camp life, which included a “kitchen with three big sheer iron stoves and a large low camp fire with big cans full of vegetables; the chef slicing onions very dexterously at his cabinet which has a folding top that lets down and exposes five or six shelves where his seasonings are kept.”11

  The two women were cofounders of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and were acquainted with Ansel and Virginia, whom they invited over to their more modest campsite for a dinner of spaghetti and hot biscuits. At the last minute Ansel had to cancel due to serious rehearsals for a campfire entertainment he had written, entitled “Exhaustos,” which was to premiere the next evening, Monday, July 20.