Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  An energetic keeper of the Sierra Club flame, Ansel joyfully continued the Outing tradition of screwball theatrical productions. In 1905, Outing members had created “Sack-o-Germea,” whose title combined the Native American Sacajawea with the name of a popular cereal. During rainy days on the 1931–1933 Outings, Ansel invented a series of mock Greek tragedies written in deathless prose—“The Trudgin’ Women,” “Exhaustos,” “The Oxides,” and “The Mules”—which he credited to that well-known ancient poet Oresturphannies.12

  Lillian and Ada not only attended the final afternoon rehearsal of “Exhaustos,” but returned for dinner and the full performance that night.

  The “Auditorium” is a beautiful place surrounded by huge Fir trees and at the back, a big rugged rock with niches suitable for seats . . . We stayed to dinner—it was amusing to see them all eating, filing around and being helped “Cafeteria Style”—very well seasoned food . . . Then the evening performance; a huge bonfire to which all the men contributed . . .

  The tragedy went off very well. Ansel Adams, as the “Spirit of the Itinerary” floating in, draped in a sheet with a wreath around his head and carrying a lyre—a work of art made from a crook of boughs and strung with wires. A violinist behind the scenes synchronized her playing perfectly with his motions. The character of “Privus Counsellus” made up with a shovel, burlap and a roll of toilet paper on his head was a marvelous conception—the King “Dehydrus” had extraordinary whiskers made from steel wool, the Queen “Citronella” was very resplendent in a grand batik drapery and had a necklace of tin can tops and earrings of electric flashlight bulbs. The Princess “Climb-An-Extra” and Prince “Rycrispos” who had a stunning brown body like a young Greek athlete, made a very pretty picture and after their grand love scene under the Aspen tree, the tree marched off in back of them.13

  When the Sierra Club members finally bundled up their sleeping rolls and moved on, early on the morning of Tuesday, July 21, Lillian and Ada sighed with relief.

  Heavenly peace. The Sierra Club has departed . . . Late in the afternoon we took a short walk. The beautiful forest is much trampled and looks in many places as though a swarm of locusts had swept over it—the aftermath of the Sierra Club. We visited their Camp, and they had left everything in clean condition considering what a horde of people lived in one spot; found their delicious cold spring and also the lyre used by Ansel Adams in “Exhaustos.”14

  As an only child, Ansel craved friendship, and the Sierra Club became his extended family. His brothers and sisters were his comrades of the trail; they shared a deep commitment to the earth and pledged to guard it with all their energies. He could use his camera to create, as he could his piano, but the difference was that he could also hike with his camera, and return each evening to a warming campfire surrounded by good friends. The Sierra Club provided a very social and structured way to wander in the American wilderness, and Ansel got paid for going along: for his work on behalf of the 1935 Outing, he received $250.15

  Ansel routed the 1934 Outing through the Lyell Fork of the Merced River, his favorite place in the Sierra. The group camped in an idyllic meadow below a ripple of peaks, among which was an unnamed knobby one, handsome enough but not the highest or the grandest in the Sierra. Around that evening’s campfire, an enthusiastic bunch that had just climbed the no-name mountain proclaimed that from this time forth it would be known as Mount Ansel Adams. Although he rarely mentioned it, Ansel was secretly thrilled that he would be a mountain one day.

  When Ansel returned to San Francisco each fall, his social life centered around a circle of Sierra Club friends, including Cedric Wright, David and Anne Brower, Francis and Marj Farquhar, Dick and Doris Leonard, and Ed and Peggy Wayburn, all of whom would eventually become important to the American environmental movement.16

  It must be emphasized again how important the Sierra Club was in every facet of Ansel’s life. Respect for him within the club grew as his photographs and articles appeared in the Sierra Club Bulletin with increasing frequency. His reports as custodian of the LeConte Lodge were published each year from 1921 to 1924, and his portfolios and books were announced and reviewed. When Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras appeared in 1927, Professor Joseph N. LeConte II (Little Joe), himself an accomplished photographer, wrote a glowing appraisal for the February 1928 Bulletin.17 A few pages later, Ansel’s own advertisement appeared, announcing the availability of the portfolio and how readers could contact him for its purchase (reproduced on page 57).

  Ansel was appointed to the editorial board of the Bulletin in 1928, a position he would hold for forty-three years. He was becoming well known to the membership, which numbered about two thousand stalwarts from 1920 to the mid-1930s. These lovers of the Sierra were Ansel’s prototypical audience, and with that in mind, he wisely produced portfolios commemorating the Outings of 1928, 1929, 1930, and 1932. These were meant to be instant albums, a record of places hiked and camped; at thirty dollars apiece and containing upward of twenty-five photographs, they were excellent mementos.

  Virginia fully shared her husband’s enthusiasm for the Sierra Club. She was elected to the board of directors for a two-year term in 1932, but following the birth of their first child, in 1933, she found that she didn’t have enough time to serve effectively, and resigned. In 1934, she was again nominated, as was Ansel. She campaigned for him, and he for her; Virginia must have been better at it, because he won.18 Once elected, Ansel would serve as a director for thirty-seven years, from 1934 until 1971. His term saw him metamorphose from lover of nature into environmental activist.

  Although such events are commonplace now, Ansel was one of the first to devise a celebration of nature when, in 1934, he organized the first Yosemite Wildflower Festival. He chose wildflowers as a symbol of natural beauty under siege by man. Ansel employed movies, hikes, and lectures to teach the public the importance of protecting native plants.

  The National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Yosemite Park and Curry Company (YP&CC), and the Sierra Club always seemed to be at odds with one another, with the two federal agencies each holding fast to an opposing philosophy: the Park Service, led by Stephen Mather, talked of preservation, while the Forest Service, directed by Gifford Pinchot, advocated controlled use. These differing positions ensured conflict at almost every environmental turn. An early proponent of the win-win philosophy, Ansel believed that if people of good faith worked together, a solution could be found for almost any problem.19

  Emboldened by the success of the Wildflower Festival, in June 1935 Ansel presented the Yosemite Conservation Forum. A panoply of leaders agreed to cosponsor the event, from the director of the Park Service to the presidents of Stanford University and the University of California. In keeping with his inclusionary concept, such groups as the Garden Club of America and the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts were also represented. Ansel constructed a program encompassing legislation, education, landscape, and highways, with a mini-conference to talk about building a Pacific Crest Trail that would run from Alaska to Mexico.20

  Sadly, the final outcome of the Conservation Forum was the precise opposite of what Ansel had intended: it merely led to greater division among the participants. Don Tresidder, president of YP&CC and Ansel’s good friend and sometime employer, argued that national parks should be made accessible for the maximum enjoyment of millions. He reminded the audience that roads were good and that building more lodges meant that more people could enjoy the great outdoors in comfort.

  The superintendent of Yosemite reacted by walking out. So dismayed was he by Tresidder’s use of the Conservation Forum to promote business interests that he withdrew his support, and that was the end of it.21 The Conservation Forum was not Ansel’s last freelance effort on behalf of the cause, but after its conclusion he channeled most of his energies directly into Sierra Club projects.

  Ansel’s affections embraced the entire Sierra, stretching far beyond Yosemite’s boundaries to include the Kings River Canyon. Yosemite V
alley is only one of a great system of deeply carved river valleys that spread across California’s Sierra Nevada. To Yosemite’s north is San Francisco’s water supply, the dammed and damned Hetch Hetchy, an exquisite valley drowned to quench the city’s thirst in 1913 despite John Muir’s valiant efforts to prevent this.22 To Yosemite’s south, the three-pronged Kings River flows west from the Sierra’s heights and west through sculptured canyons and flat meadows stretching over five hundred square miles. Considered plain by those who measure everything against Half Dome, Kings Canyon is more subtly adorned by nature and had been a favorite destination for the early leaders of the club; Muir led the second Outing there in 1902, and subsequent Outings followed during the summers of 1906, 1910, 1913, 1920, 1922, 1925, 1932, and 1935.

  When Ansel hiked and photographed extensively in the Kings, in 1925 and 1926, he wrote to Virginia from Marion Lake, waxing upon its indescribable beauty and calling this the peak experience of the entire trip. He added that he hoped his photographs would come close to doing it justice.23 Much of the 1926 Sierra Club Bulletin was devoted to the Kings River Canyon and reports of the past year’s Outing. Editor Francis Farquhar chose six of Ansel’s photographs to illustrate the articles.

  Establishing Kings Canyon as a national park had been a top priority for the Sierra Club for many years. The routing of the 1935 Outing there was of genuine significance; as the group camped in the magnificent canyon, leaders from the Park Service spoke passionately about the proposed park, urging the Outing members to join their campaign.

  As was happening all too often, a power struggle between the Park Service (overseen by the Department of the Interior) and the Forest Service (controlled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture) had blocked the preservation of Kings Canyon. The Forest Service controlled the Kings Canyon lands and protested that it was a better steward than the Park Service, which would take over if the canyon achieved national-park status. Returning from the 1935 Outing, Sierra Club members pledged to join with the Park Service. Now all that was left was to get the legislation passed.24

  In January 1936, Congress held hearings on the establishment of Kings Canyon National Park. The Sierra Club sent Ansel to act as its lobbyist;25 he proved to be the perfect selection and a prime center of attention. Dressed in black jeans and black shirt, wearing a big Stetson (not the usual Washington garb) and armed with an array of photographic landscapes of the Kings River Canyon, he dazzled the assembled senators and representatives.

  Not wanting to rely solely on his photographs, Ansel had carefully studied the issues and presented both the history and current facts of the Kings Canyon situation, but it was his visual message that was most persuasive. Previously, in Washington, Kings had been dismissed as “just another canyon”; politicians from Los Angeles had fought hard to establish dominion over it, intending to make of it another Hetch Hetchy, in which to store the water pumped from the Owens Valley until it was needed in the city. Through Ansel’s photographs, members of Congress now saw that there was more to Kings Canyon than an empty hole to fill. It held a rich array of wilderness. Its mountain lakes, waterfalls, granite cliffs and high peaks, remnants of glaciers, clear skies—pure, clean, and American—were all given long-distance life in Ansel’s crisp prints. But even this was not yet enough.

  During his days in Washington, Ansel made contacts that would turn out to be important to him personally. In 1936, the Interior Department published a photographically illustrated booklet on Yosemite containing not a single Adams photograph;26 until his January testimony, he had been an unknown in Washington. That now changed.

  In 1938, Ansel published his third book and first book of landscapes, Sierra Nevada, the John Muir Trail.27 A large proportion of the images in the exquisitely produced volume had been made in Kings River Canyon. With pride, Ansel sent a copy to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who presented it to President Roosevelt. In these two, the campaign for the Kings Canyon National Park found the champions who would make the difference: with the leadership of both Roosevelt and Ickes, the battle was won in 1940, and the treasure of Kings Canyon was added to the real national wealth, our national parks.28 While Ansel would have been quick to protest that he was only one of many advocates on Kings Canyon’s behalf, it would not likely have become a national park when it did were it not for his visual testament and his tenacity.

  Chapter 8: Recognition

  In December 1932, during the de Young’s Group f.64 exhibition, Virginia discovered that she was pregnant with her and Ansel’s first child. Her father gave the young couple a gift of a thousand dollars to enable them to travel to the East Coast before the baby’s arrival. Ansel hoped that in the hub of the art world, New York City, he could make his fortune.1 Armed with potent letters of introduction from Albert Bender and the estimable Mrs. Sigmund Stern, a prominent San Francisco supporter of the arts and wife of the president of Levi-Strauss. On Monday, March 6, 1933, Ansel and Virginia embarked on a train trip across Depression-stricken America.

  Their first stop was Santa Fe, where they found themselves grounded. Two days after inspiring the country with his inauguration speech, with its famous line “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt closed all the nation’s banks for a full week.2 Ansel and Virginia were traveling with bank checks, and it took them almost two weeks to secure their funds. They bunked with friends and hopped from party to party as their many Santa Fe and Taos buddies happily entertained them.

  Back on track, and after stops in Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester, they arrived in a rainy New York City on the morning of Tuesday, March 28.3 The weather was bleak and the streets stank, piled high with garbage thanks to a strike. They found and rented an inexpensive studio at the Pickwick Arms Club Residence at 230 East Fifty-first Street, at a rate of sixteen dollars a week, service included.4

  After settling in, the pregnant Virginia retired for a nap. Ansel took a brisk walk, then picked her up for lunch and a visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Julien Levy Gallery. That first night they met Don Tresidder for drinks and dinner at the 21 Club, the most famous speakeasy in Prohibition-era New York, followed by a Broadway show.5

  The next morning, leaving Virginia at the Pickwick Arms to unpack, Ansel charged off, intent on showing his photographs to Alfred Stieglitz at his gallery, An American Place.6 Strand, Marin, and O’Keeffe had impressed Ansel to his importance, while Albert Bender had characterized Stieglitz as an “intellectual talking machine, but nevertheless . . . the chief man in America to have raised photography to a high plane.”7

  Composed of three galleries, a small office, and a storage room/darkroom on the seventeenth floor of an office building, Stieglitz had founded An American Place in 1929, the same year that MoMA, funded by Rockefeller money, opened its doors. (The collapse of the stock market came in late October 1929, MoMA premiered in early November, and An American Place presented its first exhibition on December 29 of that same year.) It was no coincidence: Stieglitz believed it was important to offer a strong alternative to what the bright young men (most under thirty years old) at MoMA planned to present. He was certain their prejudice would run against American artists and toward the Europeans.8 Stieglitz feared that the artists he had been promoting, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Arthur Dove, and John Marin, would be ignored by the museum. Strand and O’Keeffe encouraged him to open a space where their work would be assured of a New York audience.9 An American Place attained an almost immediate status as an influential gallery that was sympathetic to artists—provided, of course, that the artist was deemed worthy by Stieglitz.

  Stieglitz had married Georgia O’Keeffe in 1924, after a passionate six-year courtship.10 He adored her and created the most magnificent collective portrait ever made of one woman through his intense and personal photographs, lingering on the curve of her shoulders, the stretch of her neck, the grace of her hands, the fullness of her breasts, and the directness of her gaze. Twenty-three years
older than O’Keeffe, Stieglitz suffered a heart attack in 1928; the following year, he came to the depressing realization that she was physically distancing herself from him, more content in New Mexico than in New York.11

  Stieglitz had a well-earned reputation as a curmudgeon who would not suffer fools. Rationing his words to describe himself, he proclaimed, “I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.”12

  Ansel entered An American Place in 1933 clutching his letter of introduction from Mrs. Stern, a portfolio of prints (High Sierra landscapes and Group f.64 subjects), and a copy of Taos Pueblo.13 Stieglitz greeted him with a scowl, and then things got worse. Glancing at the letter from Mrs. Stern, Stieglitz sniffed, “All she’s got is money.”14 With a warning that he was too busy to be bothered, he allowed that if Ansel came back in a few hours, he might look at his work. Hopes dashed and offense taken on Mrs. Stern’s behalf, Ansel huffed back to their room and advised Virginia that they were leaving the city. He had no idea of the current difficulties faced by Stieglitz, whose black mood was even blacker than usual.

  The previous November, unable to carry out a commission to paint a mural across the walls and ceiling of the second-floor women’s room at Radio City Music Hall, O’Keeffe had suffered a nervous breakdown. Stieglitz had become irate after she independently signed the contract for this huge job that he felt was beneath her talents and for which she was to be paid a paltry fee of fifteen hundred dollars. (He had recently sold two of her paintings to the Whitney Museum of American Art for a total of nearly six thousand.)15

  On February 1, 1933, Stieglitz agreed to have O’Keeffe admitted to a private New York mental hospital, where she was diagnosed as suffering from a rather unspecific condition termed psychoneurosis. In fact, she was acutely depressed. Just a couple of days before Ansel’s arrival, O’Keeffe had been discharged and immediately boarded a southbound ship to recover in the warmth of Bermuda for two months. These events had emotionally depleted Stieglitz, who had been allowed to visit her for only ten minutes each week while she was hospitalized. He blamed his wife’s problems on menopause.16 Feeling abandoned, he had had little interest that morning in viewing the portfolio of an unknown photographer from California.