Ansel Adams
Page 25
But even before the first class matriculated, Ansel realized that his active involvement in the school could not last for long. In early April 1946, he had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship of three thousand dollars to prepare a book of photographs and text on the national parks and monuments of the United States,18 and he was ready, determined that nothing would stand in the way of his carrying out the project. Since Edward’s 1937–1938 grant, only four other photographers had received the prestigious Guggenheim: Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Eliot Porter, and Wright Morris.
Ansel had applied before. In 1933, he proposed not one but two projects: “A Photographic Record of the ‘Pioneer’ Architecture of the Pacific Coast” and “Research in Contemporary Photography” (an open-ended subject if ever there was one).19 The experienced word on getting a Guggenheim was (and still is) that a photographer must expect to get turned down at least the first time, and possibly many more times; it was (is) all just part of the process.20
With the temptations of the Guggenheim-funded open road before him, Ansel had to find and train his CSFA replacement over the summer, in time to teach the first full class in September. Beaumont and Nancy thought they knew just the right person: Minor White, the same man whose photographs and name had captured their attentions during the Image of Freedom competition. After Minor left the service at the end of the war, he traveled to New York and interned with Beaumont and Nancy at MoMA. They became very fond of him and were impressed with both his intellectual and his photographic skills. When Beaumont resigned, Steichen asked Minor to assume his former position as curator, but to his everlasting credit, Minor refused, choosing instead to stick by his mentors. The Newhalls now shipped off their protégé to teach with Ansel during CSFA’s summer session.21
Somehow, although they were very different men, Ansel and Minor developed a strong friendship based on mutual respect. As much as he could, Ansel conducted his life, and especially his photographic life, on the basis of scientific fact and objectivity. He believed that a student should learn the craft of photography to the point of fluency, but he also felt that the essence of seeing was beyond words. He had little tolerance for those who analyzed photographs, imposing psychoanalytical meaning on every mountain and tree.
Minor’s mind traveled in a completely opposite direction, though he, too, imparted excellent technique to his students. While enrolled at Columbia University in 1945, he had attended two seminars taught by the great art historian Meyer Schapiro, who taught him to use Freudian analysis to decipher art and the artist’s intent.22 Minor insisted on verbally investigating the meaning of every aspect of an image, and he did not stop with Freud. He would place a print before the class and ask each student to stand behind another and draw the feelings elicited by the photograph on the back of the person in front of them. A few years later, prospective students would be required to submit their birth time and place along with their application so that Minor could have their horoscopes read.
Just as Ansel thought it all ridiculous, so Minor held that Ansel ignored the deepest meaning of art. Their students came to love the barely controlled explosive dynamics between their two teachers. Minor and Ansel themselves were each self-confident enough to see that the curriculum incorporating the combination of their extremes worked.23
Back in New York, on Saturday, July 6, 1946, bearing a melting chocolate ice cream cone as a gift, Beaumont and Nancy arrived at An American Place to find Stieglitz slumped on his cot.24 He had just called his doctor, and they stayed with him until help came. Stieglitz had suffered a heart attack. The following Wednesday, he was taken to the hospital in a stroke-induced coma from which he never awoke. After receiving a telegram in New Mexico, O’Keeffe boarded the first airplane out and kept flying until she had to switch to a train, arriving before his death at one-thirty in the morning on Saturday, July 13.25
That hot summer morning, O’Keeffe picked out a simple pine coffin for her husband’s remains. She ripped out its offensive pink satin lining and then sat alone all afternoon and long into the night, hand-stitching a white linen replacement. As Stieglitz had instructed, he was cremated without benefit of a service or music. O’Keeffe drove his ashes to the family country house on Lake George and took them down to the shore, where she mixed them with the earth at the base of an old tree whose roots were lapped by water.26
The truest praise of Stieglitz, Ansel felt, could be found reflected in the poem “For Him I Sing,” by Walt Whitman:
For him I sing,
I raise the present on the past,
(as some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past),
With time and space I him dilate and use the immortal laws,
To make himself by them the law unto himself.27
Stieglitz himself had been much less solemn when contemplating his own demise, suggesting that his tombstone should read, “Here lies Alfred Stieglitz. He lived for better or for worse, but he’s dead for good.”28
Bad news came in bunches. Edward Weston was not well and had not been for some time, caught in a downward cycle that no one could diagnose. He felt terrible, his hands shook, he was unsteady on his feet, he developed a stoop, and his face grew inexpressive. In late 1945, Charis left him, partly because of his disintegrating health and partly because of her desire to have children. Within two years she had remarried and was pregnant.29
Ansel worried about Edward, wrote frequently to him, and often traveled to Carmel to spend a few days with him, after which he would bring him back over to Yosemite with him for a week’s visit.30 In early 1948, Edward was finally diagnosed with Parkinson’s. (Known as the photographer’s disease, it was also to afflict Margaret Bourke-White.) Unable to carry his camera, which had to be hoisted around for him by his youngest son, Cole, he made his last negative that year, a deceptively simple composition of small rocks set against the gray sand of Point Lobos.31
Ansel drafted a group of loyal friends to raise money for Edward, first by securing commercial sales of his images to Kodak and others, then by selling fine prints. In 1950, Ansel and Virginia published Edward’s last book, My Camera on Point Lobos, oversized and beautifully printed with thirty images.32 Virginia personally put up the money and advanced Edward a thousand dollars in royalties.33 Edward was more than pleased: “With the book in hand, a dream is fulfilled . . . For all the love, time, and labor you put into this superb job. If I started to indulge in superlatives, I just couldn’t finish.”34 Although My Camera on Point Lobos was judged one of the “50 Best Books of the Year,” sales were dismal. Virginia absorbed a loss upward of fifteen thousand dollars; the book’s distributor, Houghton Mifflin, remaindered it in 1953 at four dollars a copy, down from the original ten.35
Tenderly cared for by his sons so that he could stay at his home in the Carmel Highlands, surrounded by his huge tribe of cats, Edward would live ten more progressively infirm years before his heart finally stopped beating on January 1, 1958. He was seventy-one. At the time of his death, his bank account boasted three hundred dollars.36
Although Aunt Mary had died in 1944, Ansel’s aging parents still lived right next door in San Francisco. Shortly after their fiftieth wedding anniversary, in July 1946, Ollie fell and broke her hip. The injury refused to heal, and she was confined to a wheelchair for the remaining four years of her life; never a happy woman, she complained constantly. Ansel traded houses with his parents since his was primarily on one floor, making things much easier for his mother and thus his father as well. Their old home became a rooming house of sorts, with Minor White and a changing cast of students usually in residence. Ansel slept next door with his parents, in the upstairs loft; when he was out of town, Minor kept an eye on the old folks.37
Before Ansel could take off on his Guggenheim, he would have to make enough money to support everyone: three thousand dollars was hardly sufficient to cover his and his parents’ expenses and whatever Virginia and the children needed to supplement her Best’s Studio earnings. He engaged in
a flurry of work, from conducting a San Diego workshop to teaching part-time with Minor to completing assignments for Kodak and Fortune. Two jobs for Kodak, in August and September, paid more than his entire Guggenheim stipend.38
The Standard Oil Company purchased reproduction rights to a number of his color landscapes for its project “See Your West.” Those of a certain age can remember when gas stations vied for the public’s business, offering such tantalizing items as a pound of sugar, a juice glass filled with jelly, or a color photographic reproduction with every fill-up. At Standard stations in 1947 and 1948, patrons could collect a whole series of views of America that could be placed between hardboard covers with benefit of a plastic spiral ring. A number of the images were by Ansel.39
By the end of November, Ansel felt secure enough financially to leave CSFA, appointing Minor as the head of the photography department. He directed the Bracebridge Dinner at Christmas in Yosemite, brought Edward over for a visit, finished up some odds and ends, and finally declared his decks clear for the Guggenheim, ten months after he received the grant.
Ansel drove off in January 1947, his station wagon packed to capacity, for a full fifty days all alone. Not solo by choice, he had tried unsuccessfully to entice Edward or the Newhalls to accompany him. He traveled seven thousand miles, through Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Organ Pipe, Saguaro, White Sands, Carlsbad, and Big Bend National Park in Texas, whose largely ignored, undeveloped spaces were a wonderful surprise to him.40 At night he typed out stacks of letters to Park Service Director Drury, evaluating each park and inserting insistent and continuous plugs for the elevation of Death Valley National Monument to national-park status.41
Ansel returned to Yosemite and San Francisco for almost two months to check in with his students and family, and to earn some more money, before again setting off in late May on another two-month Guggenheim drive. This time he had company: Nancy and Beaumont, himself a new Guggenheim fellow with his project to expand his earlier museum catalog to become the authoritative History of Photography, came west to accompany him on the first leg of his journey.42
In Yosemite, Nancy presented Ansel with a special gift. When using a view camera, a photographer must place a dark cloth over his or her head and the camera’s ground glass in order to compose and focus the image. Ansel had never been able to find the right focusing cloth, which had to be comfortably large, completely opaque, nonslippery, and heavy enough not to be disturbed in a wind.43 Knowing this, Nancy had sewn a focusing cloth that answered all his specifications and was black on the inside for darkness and white, for sun reflectance, on the outside. It was a great present for Ansel, who would use it for the rest of his life.
On May 28, 1947, Ansel, Beaumont, and Nancy pulled out of the valley and over the Tioga Road, Ansel insisting that the two New Yorkers ride on his rooftop rack to gain the best, if scariest, view.44 Nancy christened Ansel’s car Helios in honor of Eadweard Muybridge, who had signed his photographs with that name. They camped the first night on the shores of Mono Lake, its spindly tufa towers unlike anything the Newhalls had ever seen.
True to form, Ansel had packed so much that there was scarcely room for his passengers. Among many, many other items, he had his eight-by-ten camera, three lenses, four filter sets, and twenty-four film holders. He also brought his five-by-seven, three-and-a-quarter-by-four-and-a-quarter, and Graflex cameras, with their accessories, three tripods, and every smaller gadget known to a photographer, plus both black-and-white and color film for all those cameras. Of course, Nancy and Beaumont also had cameras, as well as a few clothes and sleeping bags. Of course there was also the required cooking gear and food.45
Ansel was prepared for any eventuality. Once, he had found himself out in the middle of Southwestern nowhere when the axle of his car broke. He got towed into the nearest town and was informed by the mechanic, “Mr. Adams, it will take me one day to go get a new axle, one day to bring it back, and at least another to install it in your car.” Ansel swore this would not happen again, so he never left on an extended photo safari without taking along an entire spare axle, wrapped in greasy paper, and occupying a significant amount of space.46
This trip was an adventure for Beaumont, who was more at home in a library than under the stars. Knowing that his friend cared deeply about food and drink, and the quality thereof, Ansel planned to take special care of his needs. The evening of May 29, Ansel established their camp in Death Valley at Dante’s View, affording a magnificent panoramic vista. He set up both his Coleman stoves on the car’s tailgate, mixed cocktails to start things off, then fried up some thick steaks flavored with curry powder and bay leaves. Other nights he served such fare as chicken chasseur and oysters with tomato sauce.47 Intrusive as it might seem today, Ansel’s car sported a high-intensity spotlight with which he swept the valley below for the Newhalls’ benefit, a dramatic bedtime spectacle.48
Since early morning and late afternoon provided the best photographic light, soft and revealing rather than harsh, as at midday, Ansel arose at dawn and made a big pot of coffee before rousing his guests with his personal version of an alarm clock: the old, reliable donkey’s bray. All three photographed until the light became less friendly, and then it was off to the nearest diner for a big breakfast, no holding back: steak, eggs, toast dripping with butter and jelly, and more cups of hot coffee.
Their trip extended nearly two thousand miles, including a stop at Bryce Canyon, which at first looked like nothing much to Beaumont. Ansel parked the car and bade the Newhalls walk with him to the canyon edge, where they immediately saw Bryce’s hidden beauty, the Hoodoos: thin towers of eroded rock ranging from five to one hundred fifty feet tall, that the Native Americans had likened to men from some strange tribe. The trio all pulled out their cameras.
That night, Beaumont again dozed fitfully in his sleeping bag on the ground, only to be roused at the indecent hour of four a.m. by Ansel the Donkey. After a morning of photography, Beaumont longed for a nap, but Ansel and Nancy talked about further camera work. Beaumont had been up too long with too little sleep for too many days. In disgust, he blurted, “What, nature again? I’ve never seen so much nature. We sleep on it, we look at it in the morning and the afternoon and by moonlight and by sunrise and sunset. I’m looked out!”49 Ansel and Nancy conceded the rest of the day to Beaumont. They booked motel rooms and took naps in beds, then enjoyed a meal cooked by Nancy. According to Beaumont, “Nancy made fine ham, and with that inside me and nothing to look at but ordinary domestic trees I felt a good deal better.”50
They drove to both north and south rims of the Grand Canyon and then arrived at the finale, splendid Sunset Crater. Ansel deposited them at the train station in Williams, Arizona, on June 7.
During their travels, the first of Ansel’s Guggenheim photographs were published in Fortune, along with the work of four painters, to accompany an article entitled “The National Parks,” by Bernard DeVoto.51 The painters were a respected group: Max Ernst, Jane Berlandina (whose work he had shown in 1933 at his short-lived Ansel Adams Gallery), Dong Kingman, and David Fredenthal. Flipping through a copy of Time one morning at a café while they waited for their breakfast, Ansel spotted a review that not only sang the praises of his photographs but judged them superior to any of the paintings in the piece.52 With clinks of their coffee cups, Beaumont, Nancy, and Ansel toasted this as an important milestone for all of photography.
Soon after the Newhalls’ departure, Ansel picked up his son, Michael, now fourteen, at the station. Ansel had finally sensed that he was largely a stranger to his children, and he wanted to change that. He reckoned the problem could be solved by occasionally taking one of them with him on his travels—this time Michael, for six weeks. Ansel treated his children as adults, expecting them to respond with mature language and behavior at all times. He never thought to tailor the trip around his teenage son; there was serious work to be done. After returning home for a month or so, Ansel was back on the road by himself to photograph the Smokies,
the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Shenandoah National Park, then it was back to Yosemite for Christmas and the Bracebridge.
In January 1948 it was Anne’s turn. She accompanied her father for five weeks in New York and an array of Eastern destinations. They stayed with friends George and Betty Marshall in their elegant four-story town house on Beekman Place. George was an important attorney who was active in both photography and environmental work, and the Marshall daughters were close in age to twelve-year-old Anne, which freed Ansel from a great deal of child care.
Near the end of this stay, Ansel arrived at the Newhalls’ front door clutching his chest. They helped him to a chair and called their doctor. Ansel was hospitalized with a diagnosis of a spasm of the coronary arteries; happily, the electrocardiogram detected no permanent damage to his heart. Forbidden to climb stairs or mountains for the next few weeks, Ansel recuperated at the home of friends whose house was equipped with an elevator. As he struggled to keep calm and still, he was tortured by the thought that he would no longer be physically able to enjoy the high altitudes of Yosemite and the Sierra.53 But a miracle of sorts occurred: it turned out that Ansel had been misdiagnosed. His heart was not the problem; he had a hiatal hernia that was producing symptoms mimicking those of a heart attack.54 Although the hernia would bother him for the rest of his life, he knew it was not life-threatening, and the mountains could still be his.
The time with Anne proved less than successful. Reacting as would most normal twelve-year-olds, she was profoundly embarrassed by her very weird father, who did not dress or act like any of her friends’ dads. Her disapproval distressed Ansel, who did not want to upset her but nonetheless could never change into the type of father she would have preferred. Anne decided that the best way to handle the situation was to keep her distance. Ansel was rarely home anyway.55