Ansel Adams Read online

  Ansel’s first known venture into the commercial photographic world had taken place in 1920. The family’s next-door neighbor, Miss Lavolier, taught kindergarten at the Baptist Chinese Grammar School (children of Asian ancestry were then still segregated in separate schools), and she asked if Ansel would take the class picture in her classroom. Unfazed by his own lack of experience with artificial-light photography, he agreed.

  The appointed hour arrived, and with it Ansel, three view cameras, a tripod, and flash equipment. This was before the invention of flashbulbs, and long before high-speed film or electronic flash. Adequate light for an indoor exposure had to be achieved through a controlled explosion of magnesium, known as flash powder. The lively six-year-olds were corralled, placed in some kind of order, and bade to smile at the birdie, in this case Ansel, doing his best imitation of a mockingbird. Ansel ignited the magnesium, and, as he later put it, “The light was truly apocalyptic!”38 Smoke billowed, children screamed and vanished under their desks, and the fire department was summoned. Ansel had overestimated the amount of magnesium needed by sixteen times too much! It was a wonder that he lived. When calm had been restored, Miss Lavolier ushered her students outside, and Ansel finally took some successful pictures without benefit of flash.39 It is doubtless that with this event Ansel’s dedication to natural-light photography was cemented.

  Hoping to come out of the whole episode with a profit, Ansel offered prints of the children in three sizes: six-and-a-half-by-eight-and-a-half, five-by-seven, and four-by-five.40 A dozen copies of the largest size, for example, cost five dollars mounted or four dollars unmounted, with hand-coloring a bit extra (courtesy of his china-painting mother).

  A glimmer of Ansel’s mature vision can be seen in Banner Peak and Thousand Island Lake, of 1923.41 With a thunderstorm imminent, roiling clouds fill the sky above sculpted Banner Peak, its contours still described by sunlight. Thousand Island Lake lies quietly at the mountain’s base, rimmed by a foreground of brush and boulders. Each element joins together to form the stronger whole of a dramatic picture. Although Ansel believed his soul was at one with the Sierra, he could not yet reliably produce what he saw before him in a finished print. He chalked up this, the first of his dramatic landscapes, to luck.42

  The artistic success of Banner Peak and Thousand Island Lake depends largely upon its clouds. It is in fact the earliest of Ansel’s photographs to have clouds in the sky; his previous landscapes, like those of nineteenth-century photographers, all had blank skies, owing to the hypersensitivity of photographic emulsion to the color blue, which meant that shade was rendered as white in the finished print. But shortly before Ansel left the valley for the trip to Banner Peak, Yosemite photographer Arthur C. Pillsbury’s studio (where Ansel attended at least one photography class) offered for sale some of the first glass plates to be coated with a panchromatic emulsion, which was equally sensitive to all colors, including the previously unobtainable blue.43 The actual clouds in a scene could now be captured. Although his funds were limited, Ansel bought some panchromatic plates and used one for the Banner Peak exposure.44 Clouds appear only sporadically in his images from this time until 1932, however, as he continued to use mostly the less expensive orthochromatic plates.

  Each passing year found Ansel approaching photography with increased seriousness. In a letter written on September 28, 1923, he declared that from that day forward he would seek to achieve the highest standards of art in his work, without compromise and following purely photographic values.45

  What was Ansel’s definition of “purely photographic” in 1923? Primarily he meant no hand-coloring. Hand-colored pictures were popular with the tourists in Yosemite, and his mother had tinted some of his early prints, but Ansel prophetically proclaimed that black and white was photography’s true dominion.46 “Purely photographic” did not yet refer to the use of only photographic techniques, a restriction that he would come to embrace fully a few years later.

  Ansel’s term “purely photographic” did not spring forth from a void. The world of creative photography that he involved himself in had long been engaged in self-examination. Ever since its announced invention, in 1839, photography had been accused of being little more than a mimetic device, though this view met with swift opposition. British historian Lady Elizabeth Eastlake wrote in 1857 that photography did not replicate reality, but rather interpreted it.47

  After Eastlake’s time, the struggle to establish photography as an independent art form moved onto a broader front. British photographer Peter Henry Emerson was an early defender of “pure photography,” admonishing those who could not accept a photograph that looked like a photograph to “leave us alone and not try and foist ‘fakes’ upon us.”48 Emerson was one of photography’s most important spokesmen until the end of the century.

  At nearly the same time, Alfred Stieglitz appeared on the scene. Stieglitz was the self-appointed leader of the creative-photography movement in America from the turn of the century until his death, in 1946. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1864 to a wealthy family, assured of an independent income and thus free of the demands of a job, he determined to explore the extent of his own creative abilities through art.49 It was fortunate indeed for photography that it became his chosen medium.

  After studying the chemistry and optics of photography in Berlin, Stieglitz returned to New York City in 1890 and joined the moribund Society of Amateur Photographers of New York, whose members were contemplating converting it into a bicycle club. Aghast, Stieglitz plunged in and by 1896 had merged his now-revitalized group with the Camera Club of New York, making it the largest photographic organization in America.50

  In 1902, having decided that he must roust photography from its secondary status in the art world, Stieglitz began a movement that he called the Photo-Secession. Its aim was to define creative photography, both in word and by example. Photography had not yet clearly identified itself as an art form separate from others and was still hiding its innate characteristics behind the Pictorialist sham; Stieglitz’s goal was “to compel [photography’s] recognition, not as the handmaiden of art, but as a distinctive medium of individual expression.”51

  Stieglitz’s protégé and fellow Photo-Secession leader was the painter and photographer Edward Steichen. Born in 1879, fifteen years after Stieglitz, Steichen became quite the enfant terrible in American photography, first presenting his work to the older man (who was then but thirty-six) in 1900 while on his way to Europe. When Stieglitz bade him farewell with the words, “Well, I suppose now that you’re going to Paris, you’ll forget about photography and devote yourself to painting,” Steichen emphatically replied, “I will always stick to photography!”52

  Employing such techniques as soft-focus, etching, bromoil, and platinum, Steichen’s photographs gathered awards and acclaim in Pictorialist salon after salon, both in Europe and in the United States. Settling into a proper studio in Paris, he soon made friends with Rodin and other important artists and became a member of the art cognoscenti, while still maintaining close ties to Stieglitz.

  Stieglitz was a brilliant photographer, and while his colleagues in the Photo-Secession continued in the Pictorialist tradition, he developed a different way of seeing. To prove that his results were not obtained by means of expensive equipment, he worked with a snapshot camera, choosing the streets of New York for his subject matter (a decidedly unPictorialist choice) and photographing daily events, recording the energy and beauty of the great city during winter storms and spring rains.

  In 1904, Sadakichi Hartmann, a respected critic of the arts, reviewed a huge, three-hundred-print exhibition of the Photo-Secession, which had been juried by Stieglitz, Steichen, and Joseph T. Keiley. The resulting landmark article, “A Plea for Straight Photography,” defined a straight photograph as one made using little or no manipulation. He advised that this could be achieved if the photographer was patient enough to wait for the ultimate moment of the scene before him, when every aspect was perfect, from light to co
mposition.53 Easier said than done: even when Ansel reached the peak of technical fluency, he never made a perfect negative. Either some edge needed slight cropping or a rock or some other element had to be darkened by burning. There was always something.

  From 1903 to 1917, Stieglitz published Camera Work, the journal of the Photo-Secession, often described as the most important and beautiful publication in the history of photography. In 1905, he opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which became known as “291,” after its street address on New York’s Fifth Avenue.54

  Steichen was Stieglitz’s remarkable “eye” in Europe, sending back entire exhibitions of the new and startling work of the Cubists and Fauvists to his mentor, who introduced, in their premier American shows, Rodin (1908), Matisse (1908), Toulouse-Lautrec (1909), Cézanne (1911), and Brancusi (1914).55 In 1911, he presented the first solo exhibition anywhere by Picasso.56 Stieglitz now commanded the attention of the entire art world.

  To critical acclaim, in 1910 Stieglitz curated the monumental six-hundred-print retrospective International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography for the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, New York. At the conclusion of this show, he completely renounced Pictorialism and abandoned the Photo-Secession, charging that it had not progressed far enough.

  The real problem was that photography had been so accustomed to emulating Impressionist painting that when painting took off in the direction of abstraction, most photographers were left behind, still immersed in their pictorial haze. Searching for photographers whom he believed photographed with a unique and personal vision, and were committed to expressing photography as an art, Stieglitz found only himself. Until 1916, his New York gallery continued to display paintings, sculptures, and prints by others, but the only photographs shown were by Stieglitz.

  With his exhibition of Paul Strand’s photographs in the spring of 1916, Stieglitz signaled hope for the future of the medium, in the form of a new photography influenced by the new painting.57 Viewing the work of Picasso and Braque at “291” as well as at the Armory Show had radicalized Strand’s vision. Through the eye of a Cubist, he photographed the streets of New York, taking on the same subject as Stieglitz but obtaining very different results. By breaking up the picture into flat planes, he pioneered a new visual approach.

  Strand explored New York City’s alleys and other aspects that had been seen as unworthy of the camera. Strand had been taught photography by the great documentarian Lewis Hine, whose poignant images of children working in mills and factories had helped establish American child labor laws.58 Strand’s New York, unlike Stieglitz’s, was often unattractive, but it found strong subjects in the faces of interesting characters: working folk and the unemployed, or a blind beggar caught unaware with one open eye. In a foreshadowing of Strand’s later commitment to communism, most of the image area of Wall Street, 1915 is dominated by the grand and massive facade of the Morgan Bank, impassive to the column of anonymous New Yorkers moving ephemerally across its base.59

  Strand described his version of Stieglitz’s philosophy in “Photography,” an article published in 1917 in the magazine Seven Arts.

  The full potential power of every medium is dependent upon the purity of its use, and all attempts at mixture end in such dead things as the color-etching, the photographic painting and, in photography, the gum-print, oil-print, etc., in which the introduction of handwork and manipulation is merely the expression of an impotent desire to paint.60

  There is no direct evidence that fifteen-year-old Ansel Adams saw Strand’s article, but the boy’s ardent reading of the current photographic literature makes it a possibility. He certainly had read it by 1933, when he owned a copy of the issue of Camera Work where it had been reprinted.

  Ansel slowly moved from Pictorialism’s artifice to the straight-photography camp. By 1925, having decided that the Pictorialist approach was not appropriate for the clean, hard Sierra granite he had chosen as his subject, he had forsaken the soft-focus lens and the bromoil print. He was at least aware of Stieglitz by this time; for Christmas 1925, a family friend gave him a copy of the book Musical Chronicle (1917–1923), whose dedication page read, “To Alfred Stieglitz.”61 But Stieglitz did not directly affect the direction of Ansel’s creative development until their first meeting, in 1933.

  Leaving behind familiar Pictorialist territory, Ansel took inspiration from the writings of English poet and philosopher Edward Carpenter, who reaffirmed his earlier affinity for Emerson and Ingersoll. Ansel was introduced to the writings of Carpenter by his best friend, Cedric Wright. Their intense comradeship began in 1923, when Ansel joined the Sierra Club’s summer Outing party for a few days at Tuolumne Meadows, above Yosemite Valley’s north rim. There he encountered Cedric, a serious musician dedicated to the study of the violin. Ansel was thirteen years younger than Cedric. They had been lightly aware of each other: Cedric’s father, George, was Charlie’s attorney, and Ansel had attended Cedric’s eccentric debut violin performance in about 1914. Cedric repeated the first section three times because he had forgotten the ending. He finally quit and cheerily announced to his audience, “Well, I bet you’ve heard enough of that.”62 After getting the basics out of the way (they agreed that Bach and Beethoven were the greatest composers) and finding that they shared an abiding love for the Sierra, they discovered the remarkable coincidence that they both considered photography their hobby. Ansel sat with the audience of Sierra Clubbers about the evening campfire as Cedric stood, violin under his chin, and serenaded the evening. Like Ansel, Cedric had a reputation as a pundit. After devising the first portable latrines for the Sierra Club, Cedric dubbed them Straddlevariouses.63 The two men found each other completely simpatico.64 (Ansel had not yet found out that Cedric’s father with his Uncle Ansel had been responsible for Charlie’s financial ruination.)

  Even loftier-minded than Ansel, Cedric set new standards for his young friend, quoting Walt Whitman, Elbert Hubbard, and Carpenter. Cedric was blessed with an assured family income. He bought an old barn in Berkeley and hired famed architect Bernard Maybeck to design its brown-shingled Craftsman-style remodel. From the rafters that towered above its huge main room hung a swing (and mind you, this was forty years before the sixties). Built-in couches upholstered with loose pillows lined its walls. Cedric’s home became “party central” for Sierra Clubbers and musicians. Immensely impressed by the highly personal space Maybeck had created for Cedric, Ansel resolved that someday he would have Maybeck design a home for him as well. (Maybeck was a professor of architecture at University of California, Berkeley, and designed the ornate Palace of Fine Arts for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition). In the interim, Ansel could often be found at Cedric’s. In this era, before bridges connected San Francisco with either Marin County to the north or the East Bay (Berkeley and Oakland), it took him two hours to get to Berkeley and another two hours to get back, combining streetcar, train, and ferryboat.65

  Cedric entertained with ease, serving his guests—the sophisticated as well as the unsophisticated—what he believed to be the best chow in the world: the usual Sierra Club camp dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, French bread, tossed salad, and cookies supplemented with the very unwilderness treat of Jell-O for dessert. The coffee was boiled, thick and rich. The only thing missing was the mountains.

  Ansel idolized Cedric, whom he saw as intelligent, accomplished, and worldly. Cedric became his guide to the tantalizing world of wine, women, and song, and to the young artistic achievers living in Berkeley. Although Cedric was wed, first to Mildred and then to Rhea, and although he had three children, he seems not to have let his marriages get in the way of his quest for the ideal woman. For Ansel, Cedric proved to be a potent influence in matters of the heart as well as philosophy.66

  Together, the two friends reflected on line after line of Carpenter, who instructed, “Never again will Art attain to its largest and best expressions, till daily life itself once more is penetrated with beauty.”67 An unwritten pact was made between them:
they would devote their lives to the creation of beauty.

  During the next years, as he hiked and photographed the Sierra, Ansel was never without his pocket edition of Carpenter’s book Towards Democracy. His letters during this period were peppered with quotes:

  In the first soft winds of spring, while snow yet lay on

  the ground—

  Forth from the city into the great woods wandering,

  Into the great silent white woods where they waited in their beauty and majesty

  For man their companion to come:

  There, in vision, out of the wreck of cities and civilizations, . . .

  I saw a new life, a new society, arise.

  Man I saw arising once more to dwell with Nature.68

  Carpenter’s beliefs reaffirmed Ansel’s own feeling that nature was the source of all goodness and man’s best friend, nourishing life by providing beauty. An ordered nature conformed to an organic logic and pattern, but these largely eluded man’s comprehension. Nature was meaningful in a way that few could perceive, for one can seldom glimpse more than a small portion of the universal mysteries. Ansel’s goal, whether on the piano or through the camera, was to express something of what nature revealed to him.69 First with Charlie and Aunt Mary’s help, then with Cedric’s, Ansel worked out his philosophy before he established its full expression through his art.

  Ansel returned to San Francisco in the fall of 1925 and, affecting Carpenter’s style of capitalizing words of central importance, wrote that he was pledging his life to “Art.”70 The end results of his summer in the Kings River Canyon were a consistent group of directly seen, sharply focused, and cleanly composed images. His ground glass narrowed and isolated the scene before him in such a way that the natural world appeared uncomplicated and understandable. Many of the best images were portraits of individual mountains, standing tall and apart from their surroundings, with characteristics so unique that one could never be mistaken for another. This represented a strong first step toward a personal vision.