Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  In July, Ansel was finally to become a member of his first full Sierra Club Outing. Joining an Outing was simplicity itself; the only requirements were membership in the club, payment of the trip’s fee, a sleeping bag, and a duffle packed with clothing. Virginia begged him to allow her to go along, promising that she would not bore him or get in his way. He agreed, and those few weeks, undocumented by letters, were probably the best period of their lives together.

  Ansel had accumulated some savings from the sales of Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. On little notice, he, Cedric, and Dorothy Minty presented themselves at the Bests’ Yosemite door on December 26, 1927. Immediate marriage to Virginia had not been on Ansel’s mind, but Cedric had made it his earnest project and at last convinced his friend that the time was right.57 Ansel proposed, and Virginia accepted.

  They were wed before eighteen guests in front of the fireplace at Best’s Studio at three in the afternoon on January 2, 1928.58 Attired in hiking clothes, Cedric served as best man and violinist Minty and pianist Ernst Bacon performed the third movement of a César Franck sonata.59 With no chance to leave the valley to shop, Virginia was married in her best dress, which came from Paris but unfortunately was black. Certain this was a bad omen, Ansel’s mother wept.60 She and Charlie had brought the wedding ring, a gold band set with small diamonds, from San Francisco; Cedric had briefly lost it in the snow as he wrapped chains around the tires on Ansel’s car. Ansel wore the only pants he had brought—knickers—and his black basketball sneakers.61 Their union was announced in a local paper with a grim choice of words: “A beautiful romance terminated in Yosemite Valley Sunday when the Reverend Luther Freeman of Pomona united Miss Virginia R. Best to Ansel E. Adams.”62

  Following a celebratory dinner, the newlyweds left with Cedric for Berkeley, where they spent their wedding night on a cold, uncomfortable single cot. But they were on a mission. The next day they had an appointment with Cedric’s architect, the great Bernard Maybeck. With the addition of their wedding money, they hoped to be able to realize their shared dream of a home and studio.

  A short time later, Maybeck presented his drawings to the young couple. He had responded better to Virginia than to Ansel, and so had centered the house around her needs as a combination singer/housewife. Ansel’s requirements for a studio and darkroom were neglected in order to provide a suitable kitchen and singing space for Virginia. Within days, they received the estimate for construction costs, which far exceeded their budget. There was no more talk of Maybeck.63

  Ansel devised a plan: the first three years of their marriage would be devoted to the development of their respective arts. Hoping to save up enough money for their own home, they moved in with his parents, where they stayed for the next two years. Virginia later maintained, “It wasn’t so bad.” She had waited for him for nearly seven years already, throughout the ups and downs of their sporadic courtship, and her commitment to their marriage was total.64

  Inspired by his status as head of a new household, and by the promise accorded his portfolio, Ansel began behaving like a professional photographer. Knowing that the members of the Sierra Club were a prime audience for his photographs, he took out a full-page advertisement in the 1928 Sierra Club Bulletin65 to announce that

  Not everyone was happy with his career decision, however. Ansel later recalled,

  When I got doing more and more photography, and finally decided [I was] going to be a photographer, [my mother] was very upset. “You’re not going to be just a photographer, are you?” She was thinking of me being a musician, because photography was not known as an art by people of her age and type. If anything, it was something down on Filmore Street where you’d go and get a family portrait for a few dollars.66

  In absolute agreement that they needed to have a home separate from his family, Ansel and Virginia sadly concluded that they had enough funds either to buy land or to build a house, but not both. In an act of adulterated kindness, Ollie gave them her dahlia garden. They hired a neighborhood architect known for designing theaters and with him created a very Maybeck-like brown shingled house, with an open, two-storied living/music room and a loft with two bedrooms. Ansel and Virginia held their housewarming on May 4, 1930, lighting a fire in the fireplace under a mantel inscribed with Edward Carpenter’s words, “O Joy Divine of Friends.”67 The fulfillment of their goal exacted its price: forsaking the independence they had longed for, they would now be physically bound to his parents for the rest of their lives, in houses twenty feet apart, at 129 (Charlie, Ollie, and Mary) and 131 (Ansel and Virginia) Twenty-fourth Avenue, San Francisco.

  Ansel continued his traveling ways, leaving Virginia at home because they could not afford her costs, too. They wrote to each other frequently during his many absences. Her letters were adoring, entreating him to come home to her arms as soon as he could, while his repeatedly admonished her to improve herself and often scolded her for her lack of application.

  Dismissing Ansel’s three-year plan, Virginia wanted first of all to establish a comfortable home for her man and to raise babies. Ansel was not really interested in having children; certainly he was in no rush. He wanted his wife to be an equal, a companion, a liberated woman. He encouraged Virginia to forget the housework and look toward a career in music, a goal that though enlightened for the times, was asynchronous with Virginia’s own dreams. He had forgotten his earlier likening of Virginia to his mother, and all that might portend. The marriage of Ansel and Virginia was in trouble right from the start.

  Chapter 5: Southwest

  In addition to introducing Ansel to the movers and shakers of San Francisco, Albert Bender also brought him into the society of artists and writers in Carmel and Santa Fe. Although he did not drive, he owned a new Buick, and relied on the kindness of his friends and acolytes, such as Ansel, to chauffeur him, whether on a one-day drive to Carmel or all the way to New Mexico.1

  Robinson Jeffers made a huge impression on the young photographer from the first time they met, in 1926. With his wife, Una, Jeffers lived in Carmel, at the edge of the Pacific, in the medieval isolation of Tor House, a fortresslike compound he had built himself, stone by stone, complete with a forbidding tower. The writer, his home, its setting, and his poetry were all similarly austere.2

  Jeffers needed a likeness of himself for his next book. Inexperienced in the area of portraiture, Ansel photographed him using intense side lighting with a wide-open shutter that provided no depth of field. The result was a soft, gauzy image that did not speak truthfully of its sitter; in it Jeffers’s strong, angular features seem unnaturally gentled, and a shy smile curves upward on his lips.3 Maybe the poet saw himself differently than did others, for he chose Ansel’s portrait for the frontispiece of the collection.

  Letterpress printing was one of Albert’s passions, and soon it became one of Ansel’s as well. In 1928, at Albert’s invitation, Ansel joined San Francisco’s Roxburghe Club, an association devoted to fine printing.4 The high standards he gleaned from his fellow members, many of whom were top printers and designers, were religiously applied to his subsequent books. He understood the importance of paper quality, of hand-set type from exquisite fonts, of inks, design, and layout—things few authors cared about—and he managed these variables just as he controlled his photographs. For many years, Ansel supplied images for keepsakes published by the Roxburghe Club and the Book Club of California, all costs for which, including Ansel’s own fee, were underwritten by Albert.

  In May 1927, Ansel drove Albert and his friend the writer Bertha Damon nearly three thousand miles, to Santa Fe, Taos, and the Grand Canyon, returning through Santa Barbara. It was a tough ride over paved roads that dissolved to dirt washboards, with the car constantly filled with dust. Bertha bought everything she could get her hands on, while Albert, ever the gentleman, rode in back, perspiring without complaint as his friend’s purchases crowded in on him, accepting this as the price to be paid for traveling with her.5

  Ansel was entranced by Santa Fe
and Taos, by the old adobes, the Indian pueblos, the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo mountains, and the cosmopolitan world of artists and writers shown him by Albert. He took few pictures during this trip, but when he returned the next year, he would be ready.

  Albert introduced Ansel to the writer Mary Austin, convinced that the two of them should collaborate on a book. Mary was a formidable woman, physically as well as mentally, her strength hard-won through a difficult life. Ansel’s first impression was that she was almost as wide as she was tall.6 “She was a commando!” he laughed. “She thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.”7 At her request, Ansel made some formal photographic portraits for her to use in promoting her many lecture tours. Whether out of tact or a premonition of doom, Ansel, unable to transform the homely author into the gorgeous creature she believed she was, did not send her the prints until 1929. As he had feared, Mary was appalled at the pictures; a large portion of her income came from her lectures, and Ansel’s portraits did not invite a second look, except out of curiosity.8

  Mary was born in 1868 and educated as a teacher, although writing was her true love. An unhappy marriage had yielded her only child, Ruth, who was profoundly retarded. (The neighbors thought it improper that Mary should send her daughter to a friend’s house during the day so that she could write.)9 From 1892 to 1906, Mary lived in one of the most beautiful places on earth, California’s Owens Valley. The eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada rises to a height of over fourteen thousand feet along the valley’s western side, the perimeter only slightly softened by the rolling Alabama Hills. The Sierra captures the snows of winter and blocks the lands for five hundred miles to its east in a perpetual rain shadow, relenting only to yield its spring melt into streams leading into the Owens River.10 The White Mountains, home to some of the oldest living things on earth, the bristlecone pines, guard the valley’s eastern side.11 Mary’s first important book was her story of this valley, The Land of Little Rain, published in 1903; it was a bestseller and established her reputation.

  Through irrigation, the valley had become productive, green, and lush. But this all depended on the very river slated to be hijacked in 1904 by Los Angeles for its urban needs. Unsatisfied with the river, the city even took the valley’s groundwater to slake its thirst.12 Mary’s book was a memorial to the people who had worked its lands and to the disappearance of livestock, orchards, and cultivated fields. Ansel, too, came to love the Owens Valley, seeing it as the western trip wire for the Sierra. For him, as for Mary, it held glorious splendors even when parched.

  In 1924, Mary moved to Santa Fe, attracted by the landscape and by its people, including her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan, who had established herself in Taos. Mabel and Mary were both domineering personalities, and for the sake of their friendship, Mary wisely chose to place some distance between them. She built a small adobe that she named Casa Querida (Beloved House), with a library and a writing office designed for her work.

  Ansel was entirely thrilled when Mary agreed to collaborate with him on a book about Taos Pueblo, the religious center for the Taos Indians. Built a thousand years ago of earth, straw, and water (the three elements of adobe), many believe it to be the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States.13

  Ansel and Virginia arrived on Mary’s doorstep in March 1929 to begin work on the book. Tongue in cheek, Albert warned his friend about the problems she would face with her two houseguests:

  I am writing you a confidential letter today about Ansel and Virginia Adams. These young people have practically every virtue in the catalogue of righteousness, and there is only one thing about which you should not be unaware, and that is their appetite. Please do not let them go hungry. They need food every hour in large quantities, and if you have no mortgage on your house now, you will have at the time of their departure. If the circulatory system permits, I think a special pipe should connect with Ansel’s room, through which a cup of coffee could be furnished day or night.14

  After a time, Mary introduced Ansel and Virginia to Mabel, who graciously provided a guest room for them at her compound in Taos. Mabel had married Tony Lujan, a member of Taos Pueblo, in 1923.15 (She insisted on spelling her name differently from her husband’s because she said it made it easier for her friends to pronounce.) With Tony, a member of the tribal council, negotiating the terms, Ansel was given complete access to the pueblo for a fee of twenty-five dollars plus one copy of the finished book.

  An eager beaver, Ansel photographed early and late, in good weather and foul. A sandstorm blew on May 12, but even when an old Native American reproached him, warning that the east wind brought evil, he would not stop. Within hours, Ansel was doubled over in excruciating pain, suffering from a ruptured appendix. Surgery and a two-week convalescence in Albuquerque returned him to health, and then it was back to Taos for an additional two weeks of photography.16 He and Virginia finally returned to San Francisco after three and a half months in New Mexico.

  Taos Pueblo was published in late 1930, combining Mary’s fourteen pages of text with twelve of Ansel’s original photographs.17 Each element was executed independently, with neither contributor seeing the other’s work. Mary’s words resonated in synchrony with Ansel’s images, their meter echoing the steady thump of drums. Powerful descriptions dominated her portrait of a matriarchal culture for which she felt great sympathy.18

  Ansel’s participation in the project was impeded by the fact that he did not yet possess a darkroom equal to his abilities. He struggled with the small room in his parents’ San Francisco basement that had been the quarters of the cook in more halcyon days. The making of the 1,296 prints necessary for the book consumed weeks of his time during 1930.19 An old eight-by-ten-inch view camera served as a rudimentary enlarger, while the light source was the sun, captured via a hole punched through the wall: an aluminum reflector was positioned outside to direct the sunshine through a diffusing screen and into the enlarger. He was able to print with this assembly only from eleven in the morning until three in the afternoon, while the sun was at its strongest. As the intensity of the sunlight varied, so did Ansel’s printing exposures. Stormy days, with their huge fluctuations of brightness, were anathema; he prayed for gray, foggy days, when the light would remain fairly constant.20

  Ansel engaged the services of William Dassonville, who ordered all-rag paper, sending half to the printers for Mary’s text, and coating the rest with a specially formulated silver-bromide emulsion minus the usual addition of starch, which would have produced a flat, matte finish. Although this paper could not be described as glossy, it was as reflective as possible, yielding Ansel’s most brilliant prints to date.21 The warm, buff-colored hue and rough texture of the paper, combined with the simple and limited tonal range of the emulsion, proved effective in translating the feel of the very earthy pueblo.

  Ansel pictured Taos Pueblo as if it were a mountain range, immutable and ageless, then moved his camera closer to compose the images as he did many of his Sierra subjects, the frame purposefully filled by one object. Two of the book’s photographs (neither actually taken at Taos Pueblo) speak more strongly than the others: Saint Francis Church, Ranchos de Taos, in which the adobe church, a monument of indigenous architecture located several miles south of the pueblo, appears isolated, as if it were a soft extrusion of the earth below; and A Man of Taos, a portrait of Tony Lujan wrapped in his traditional robes, exuding pride and presence.22

  Tony’s portrait, in which his eyes fix knowingly on the camera lens, was made in Ansel’s San Francisco studio, when Mabel and Tony visited in 1930. Tony caused quite a ruckus in Ansel’s upscale neighborhood when he insisted on sitting on the curb in front of the house, swathed majestically in blankets and beating his drum. Ansel thought it quite wonderful.23

  Some of the Taos Pueblo images suffer from a staged and formal feeling. Years later, when Ansel was making new prints of Winnowing Grain, Virginia complained that the photograph had always looked unnatural to her.24 With the pueblo as the ba
ckground, a woman holds a basket with upraised arms, its rim highlighted by sun as the grain pours to the ground. Ansel, with an embarrassed shrug, admitted that he had asked the woman to pose and had positioned her strategically for the sake of the composition.25 Ansel saw the pueblo and its people as possessing an unusually fine quality of nobility; his mistake in some of the photographs consisted in his not allowing them to speak for themselves, without the intervention of his artifice.

  Published one year into the Great Depression, surprisingly Taos Pueblo was a financial success thanks to the largesse of Albert Bender, who bought ten copies out of the edition of 108. The selling price of seventy-five dollars was steep, even for such a special, handmade book, but the run was sold out within two years.26

  Reviews of Taos Pueblo praised both photographs and text, although Mary consistently reminded Ansel that he was simply the illustrator of her much more important prose.27 This never bothered Ansel, who was grateful to have been able to work with such a fine writer.

  With Taos Pueblo about to appear, Ansel returned to New Mexico to stay once again at Mabel’s. A figure of consequence in the international art world for many years, Mabel had hosted earlier salons in New York and Florence, both of which had proved a magnet for writers and artists.28 Wealthy, independent, and smart, she had “discovered” Taos with a vengeance, building a sprawling adobe mansion networked with guest rooms. Somewhat improbably, she and Tony had fallen truly and deeply in love. He was the strong, silent type, given to occasional profound utterances punctuated by drumbeats, while she filled in his silences. When they wed, he was already married to a Pueblo woman. On Mary Austin’s insistence that she do the right thing, Mabel made payments to his first wife, and Tony kept both conjugal beds warm.29 Confounding nearly everyone, Mabel and Tony stayed together until their respective deaths, in 1962 and 1963.