Ansel Adams Read online

  By the time I began working for Ansel, in 1979, the quiet buzz was that Ansel had once had a torrid affair with one Patsy English. Mystery is best applied to fiction, so I asked her if she had slept with Ansel, and if so, whether she had become pregnant. I knew she was telling the truth when she responded with a quick laugh and said, “Well, if I did, it would have had to have been the Virgin birth!” Of Ansel’s decision to remain with Virginia, Patsy succinctly said, “Ansel did not have the courage to leave her.”27 Patsy still had The White Tombstone hanging on her living room wall when I visited in 1994.

  Patsy met photographer Nathan Farbman in 1938, and they were married in November of that year. Her photography training served her well, as she first assisted “Farb” (her nickname for him) and then, when he went off to war, took his place for such clients as the Matson Line. In peacetime, Farb was hired full-time by Life, where his credit line read “Nat Farbman,” and Patsy was employed as a stringer. They had three sons and traveled widely, enjoying prolonged overseas assignments. Edward Steichen selected six of Nat’s images (five of them from the former Bechuanaland, now Botswana) for his landmark 1955 exhibition and book at MoMA, The Family of Man.28

  About every ten years, Patsy Farbman would pay a visit to Ansel and Virginia, as they kept faint track of each other’s lives. She felt lucky to have wed Farb and not Ansel. It saddened her to find, when she visited Ansel in the 1960s, that his most graceful feature, his hands, were distorted by arthritis, the ends of his fingers bent almost perpendicular to their joints.29

  Ansel and Virginia’s marriage never truly healed. Ansel centered his life on his San Francisco house and studio, a distanced father to his son and daughter, who were raised by their mother in Yosemite. In early 1937, still struggling with the demons of family versus passion, Ansel was plagued by nightmares of desolate emptiness.30 The emotional and physical depression that had claimed him the previous December continued to hold him tightly in its cold grip for two years more. To top it off, financial ruin loomed as his important eight-year relationship with YP&CC, a critical source of income, came to an end.

  If Albert Bender had given Ansel the fateful nudge toward a career in photography, during the years of the Great Depression it was YP&CC that kept his dream alive. In 1925, the feud between the two major Yosemite concessionaires (the Yosemite National Park Company and the Curry Company) had ended with their merger. While a handful of small businesses, such as Best’s Studio, managed to hang on, YP&CC established a near monopoly on tourist services in the park.31

  The president of the new company was Don Tresidder, who had worked his way up during summers at Camp Curry from porter to marriage to the Currys’ daughter, Mary, earning his way through Stanford Medical School in the process.32 As the facilities for tourists grew, Tresidder came to understand the need for keeping beds filled all year long, not just during the overpopular summer. Ensuring winter visitation required a multidimensional marketing effort.

  In July 1927, Yosemite’s luxurious Ahwahnee Hotel opened its doors, in response to Stephen Mather’s decree that deluxe lodgings must be built to care for notable guests.33 To attract visitors over the Christmas holidays, Tresidder proposed staging some sort of Christmas entertainment. In 1928, this took the form of a loosely constructed banquet/pageant based on a Washington Irving tale about an eighteenth-century English Christmas repast at the manor house of the Squire of Bracebridge.34 All parts were to be acted by locals, and Ansel was typecast in the role of the Lord of Misrule.35 Dressed in striped knickers and a jester’s cape, and cap festooned with bells, Ansel was the perfect picture of a fool, but it was his faithful black basketball shoes, bound securely to his feet with ribbons, that turned out to be the crucial component of his costume.

  In an effort to loosen up the actors, the cast party was held before, not after, the performance, and its aim was admirably met. Fortified by a few convivial bourbons stirred with icicles pulled from the roof’s eaves, Ansel made quite an entrance into the Ahwahnee’s grand dining room, a truly spectacular, voluminous space punctuated by massive wrought iron chandeliers and stone columns. To the amazement of most, and the fright of some, Ansel scampered up a steep forty-foot pillar, his sneakers earning slight purchase on the rounded boulders. Achieving the summit, he rejoiced with abandon, remaining in character but coming perilously close to breaking his neck.

  Ansel was an instant star, his antics to be recounted for years to come, although, through the clearing fog of morning, he swore he would never do anything like that again.36 Deciding to harness this tremendous force of nature, Tresidder appointed Ansel to direct the following year’s Bracebridge and, in addition, retained his services as a part-time freelance photographer.37

  For the next extravaganza, Ansel asked Jeannette Dyer Spencer to design the set and costumes. Jeannette and her architect husband, Ted, had assisted Arthur Pope and his wife, Phyllis Ackerman, in the interior design of the Ahwahnee. Jeannette had a master’s degree from the Sorbonne, where she had definitively dated the glorious stained glass windows of St. Chapelle (1243–1248). For the Bracebridge, she created a huge, translucent pseudo stained glass window of painted parchment paper that filled the hotel’s large west bay and served as a glowing, richly colored backdrop for the performance. Her versions of stained glass roundels decorated other windows in the dining room, and Ted constructed the rest of the set.38

  Taking his inspiration from Irving’s story, Ansel wrote a musical script based on a persistent 4/4 beat and incorporating a variety of fine old English carols. Still performed every holiday season, the event is presided over by the non-singing Squire and his Wife, proudly played for many years by the Tresidders. Other characters include a Performing Bear, a Minstrel, the Parson, the Lord of Misrule, and the Majordomo, a role that Ansel wrote for himself. The important vocal part of the Housekeeper was long sung by Virginia.

  The central premise of the Bracebridge is that the members of the audience are the expected guests of the Squire and thus part of the performance, seated throughout the resplendent dining room. Quiet interludes of minstrel music are followed by rousing choruses of “Wassail!”39 Ansel’s one and only Life cover was a candlelight portrait of the Minstrel strumming her lute; unfortunately, his credit was buried.40

  Ansel’s first photographic commission from YP&CC was to show the public the potential of Yosemite under snow. He was savvy enough to pre­­sent two offers to Tresidder. For one price, YP&CC would own the negatives; for half that amount, Ansel would retain ownership but would agree to make any and all prints they required.41 Tresidder chose the second option.42

  Ansel photographed twirling ice skaters on Yosemite’s six-thousand-square-foot rink, cross-country skiers dwarfed by sequoias (one of the few times that Virginia served as his model), horse-drawn sleighs, a challenging toboggan run, and even the sport of skijoring, which is something like waterskiing except with no water and no boat, but a skier being pulled by a galloping horse.43

  Since most of the snow lay above the valley floor, ski-touring in the high country became a popular pastime for a growing number of hardy souls. With no ski lifts, the skier first had to climb to the top. It was definitely a demanding sport. In February 1930, Ansel accompanied Yosemite’s Swiss ski instructor, Jules Fritsch, for two days’ skiing around Tuolumne Meadows to scout possible locations for a high-country ski center. With his new four-by-five-inch camera, Ansel made a series of elegant images: Jules carving a figure eight on the side of Lembert Dome; Jules in the midst of gravity-defying, graceful leaps off snowy hillocks.44

  Ansel made an impressive set of ski pictures for Tresidder on Dassonville Charcoal paper. Because so much of the subject was snow, and this paper did not register subtle nuances of tone, each image was reduced to a nearly featureless pale field engraved with the simple, curving lines of the skis’ tracks and accented by the black silhouettes of the skiers. The simplification of tonal values resulted in graphic images that were stronger than those that would have been obtained
printing the same negatives on glossy paper with a full range of tones.45

  YP&CC immediately put Ansel’s photographs to use, and from 1931 through 1937 hired him for up to four months a year, giving him an assured annual income of between one and two thousand dollars during the country’s hard times.46 The one exception was 1933, when YP&CC simply could not afford any extra expenses, including Ansel.

  No longer confined to just winter photography, Ansel was now responsible for photographing everything that went on in Yosemite. His photographs appeared on Ahwahnee menu covers, on company stationery, in magazine advertisements, in scrapbooks, and in displays at YP&CC’s Yosemite, San Francisco, and Los Angeles offices. Ansel’s framed landscapes hung from the walls of two Yosemite Lodge restaurants.

  In 1935, YP&CC commissioned him to make some photographic murals for an exhibit at the San Diego Fair, advancing him funds that he used to remodel his San Francisco darkroom to accommodate the larger format.47 Murals were definitely in the artistic “air”; in the midst of the Depression, the U.S. government employed artists to paint them in many public buildings, and private companies and museums soon followed suit. At the head of the muralist list were the Mexican artists, including Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, who had staked out this idiom as their turf. It seemed that no city with a claim to culture could rest until it had hired Rivera to sit on stool and scaffolding, detailing his inimitable vision of the working peoples of the world.

  Stimulated by the challenge, photographers began projecting their negatives into huge enlargements. In 1932, MoMA hung an exhibition called Murals by American Painters and Photographers,48 which included the work of fifty-three of the former and twelve of the latter (including Berenice Abbott, Charles Sheeler, and Edward Steichen). It marked the first time photographs were exhibited at the museum.49

  YP&CC’s assignment provided the impetus for Ansel’s extended venture into the theory and practice of making very large prints and, by the next year, photographic screens.50 By 1940, with the publication of his article “Photo-Murals” in U.S. Camera, Ansel was considered an authority on the subject.51

  Ansel’s halcyon days with YP&CC came to a difficult end as the result of a darkroom fire in the summer of 1937 that destroyed almost all of his YP&CC negatives. Buoyed by an insurance settlement, Ansel reassured Tresidder that he could make new negatives at no cost to the company.52 But soon YP&CC’s head of advertising, a Mr. Stanley Plumb, began asserting himself, insisting on a negative-by-negative accounting to ensure a complete replacement. If a thousand negatives had burned, he argued, Ansel should make a thousand new negatives. Rankled by the apparent lack of trust, Ansel objected; he believed that he was obliged to supply a variety of excellent images, not a set quantity for the sake of numbers.53 Ansel wrote to the sympathetic Stieglitz to complain that Big Business, as personified by YP&CC, was crucifying the artist, in the person of one Ansel Adams.54

  The following year, Ansel’s employment by YP&CC was significantly reduced.55 Since the income from Best’s Studio was not enough to support the family, the Adamses depended on YP&CC’s paycheck; relations grew so strained that at one point Virginia suggested to Plumb that she be allowed to substitute for Ansel and make any necessary photographs during the coming winter.56

  Plumb pushed Tresidder to clear up the matter of who owned Ansel’s YP&CC negatives. Plumb felt that as work-for-hire, they belonged to YP&CC, but Ansel had been clear about the negatives’ ownership from the very beginning. He forcefully reiterated that they belonged to him, though he promised that he and, after his death, Best’s Studio would continue to supply the company with all the prints it needed.57 That was not the answer that either Plumb or Tresidder wanted, and they finally concluded that Ansel was more trouble than he was worth.58

  One day, in a Yosemite gift shop, Ansel spotted a book for sale, entitled The Four Seasons in Yosemite National Park.59 He picked up a copy and opened it to find that the credit read, “Photographed by Ansel Adams, Edited by Stanley Plumb,” and that it had been published in 1936. Ansel hit the roof. His agreement with YP&CC specified that if his images were sold in any way, he was to share in the fee, and this was the first he had heard of the book.

  Attorneys stepped in. On April 25, 1939, Ansel signed an agreement to drop all claims against YP&CC for the sum of five hundred dollars. Landscape negatives were deemed sacrosanct, owned fully by Ansel and no one else, but commercial-activity negatives were another story. Ansel kept custody of them, but they were the ultimate property of YP&CC.60 This spelled the end of Ansel’s work for YP&CC; from this point on, he mostly just filled orders for new prints from old negatives.

  With both his personal and his professional life a mess, Ansel held on to one thing: his hope of having a second show at An American Place. On his every trip to New York (and there were many), Ansel visited his mentor, although he rarely brought new work. He was crushed to learn that Stieglitz planned to exhibit photographs by Eliot Porter in late 1938: only a few short years before, Porter, then but a fledgling photographer, had asked Ansel to critique his work. Porter later acknowledged that when, in turn, he viewed Ansel’s prints, he had become acutely embarrassed at the realization of how much finer they were than his own.61

  At An American Place, a gentle picture of Porter’s sleeping infant son hung next to his photographs of birds and landscapes from Maine and Austria (more intimate and quiet than Ansel’s strongest work). To add to Ansel’s suffering, David McAlpin purchased seven photographs, money that Ansel must have felt could have been better spent on Adams prints.62

  Ansel inevitably rushed into and out of New York, working on so many deals, commercial and artistic, that Stieglitz scolded him to concentrate on his own work and stop frittering away his energies on all the other nonsense in his life. Resisting Stieglitz’s suggestion that he move to New York to assume his mantle of leadership, Ansel insisted on living in California. In Stieglitz’s opinion, Ansel was bourgeois, with a wife, two kids, and mounting debt; he continued to “waste his time” on the Sierra Club, and by writing books, teaching workshops, and giving lectures. And what was worse, to finance it all, he not only accepted commercial assignments, he beat the bushes for them.

  According to O’Keeffe, none of the prints that Ansel made in the coming years compared in beauty to those in his 1936 show.63 To no avail, McAlpin pleaded with Stieglitz to offer him another exhibition, on the theory that it might stir Ansel’s thickened creative juices.64 But Stieglitz would show an artist for a second time only if he felt he or she had something new to say within the limits of his own aesthetic.

  Ansel could neither get the Sierra out of his blood nor continue to exclude it from his imagery, however much Stieglitz might disapprove.65 His greatest personal joys came from his rambles with his camera in the mountains, not from photographing fences and old doors in the city.

  Anathema to Stieglitz’s belief that art was for the appreciative and intelligent few, Ansel was a popularizer who made his photographs and his teachings available, in numbers and price, to all who were interested. Making a Photograph explained the basic craft of photography to anyone who cared to read it, and its author’s articles in Camera Craft magazine found an audience of thousands.

  In the late 1920s, Ansel’s vision had been molded by the Sierra; in the early 1930s, he had become the quintessential f.64 photographer, his photographs clearly reflecting the group’s parameters, just as the images in the Stieglitz exhibition had mirrored Stieglitz’s aesthetic as much as Ansel’s own.

  Ansel came to understand that he could no longer satisfy Stieglitz. For the first time he found himself in uncharted waters, on his own, no longer bound by the photographic requirements of others. He realized he must make photography that was uniquely his and his alone. It scared the hell out of him.

  Chapter 10: Friends

  Just in time, good news arrived by mail. Soon after New Year’s 1937, the Museum of Modern Art asked Ansel to provide six photographs for its first major photogr
aphic exhibition. The letter from the exhibition’s young curator, Beaumont Newhall, proved to be life changing for both men.1

  Initially hired as the museum’s librarian by MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., in November 1935, Beaumont had soon come to be regarded as the resident photography expert. As a brilliant young academician at Harvard, he had failed his doctoral orals, perhaps because his interests ranged far beyond the limited, static boundaries that that institution defined as valid art-historical concerns. Beaumont was absorbed in serious study of the art and history of photography, a medium not then accepted within those ivy-clad walls.2

  In May 1936, Barr announced to Beaumont that five thousand dollars had been earmarked for a photography exhibition, one that was to fill all four floors of the museum—what the director called a Big Top show. (Beaumont would not know until 1977 that the money had been given by David McAlpin.) It would be accorded the same respect as the Van Gogh, Cubism, and abstract art exhibitions of the past year. Barr offered him the position of exhibition curator, and without missing a beat, Beaumont proposed mounting a retrospective view of the history of photography under the title Photography 1839–1937.3 Barr agreed, and Beaumont, not quite twenty-eight years old, was thrust into the center of creative photography.

  Eighteen thirty-nine is a better date than most to mark the beginning of photography. In 1725, a German chemist named Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that silver nitrate, when exposed to light, turns black. Photography is based on that principle: a photograph is made of shades of blackened (oxidized) silver set against white printing paper. But it would take over a century more for the medium’s invention.

  The idea of photography was explored without success for decades. Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous English potter, had made photographs by 1802, although a major problem stumped him: the image could be viewed for only a few minutes under candlelight before it faded away. It was impermanent, unfixed.