Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  During this assignment, Dorothea grew angry because Ansel kept shooting people (her world) and did not stick to the distant view (his). Her vision definitely rubbed off on him, at least for a few minutes; it was at Richmond that he made the keenly seen portrait Trailer Camp Children, an image more Langelike than Adamsesque.80

  Ansel and Dorothea together happened upon the three ragged children in a gritty Richmond trailer camp. The older brother, still a child himself, had been left to care for his two sisters while their father and mother were working at the shipyard. Realizing that his eight-by-ten-inch view camera was hardly the vehicle for an intimate environmental portrait, Ansel borrowed Dorothea’s Rolleiflex and made only one exposure.81

  Gently lit by available light, the brother cradles his younger sister in one arm while the baby clings to his knee. The eyes of the three children tell all. The boy looks away from the camera, into space and beyond, to an uncertain but surely desperate future—rather like Dorothea’s Migrant Mother, although his face is not yet furrowed by time. His sister is wide-eyed, staring into the horror of her present. The baby, however, looks directly at the camera, without fear and with a remnant of hope in her attitude. Providing visual resolution, at the bottom corner of the image, in dim light, the gently curled fist of the older brother lies next to the hand of the baby.

  Trailer Camp Children was not the image of Richmond that Fortune wanted to project. The editors chose pictures that showed the robustness of this wartime city, not its consequences. The strongest image from the entire shoot, Trailer Camp Children was not selected for the article.

  At this time, any photographer who claimed a social conscience joined New York’s Photo League. Founded in 1936, the Photo League was something well beyond the usual camera club, its roots firmly planted in the leftist movements of Depression-era America.82 Members of the Photo League commonly shared the philosophy that photography’s best use was as a tool for social change. Although they were primarily documentary photographers, as the years progressed, their discussions broadened to include those with other viewpoints, such as Ansel, Beaumont, and Nancy, who found the Photo League’s newsletter, photo notes, a worthy vehicle for occasional articles.

  No stranger to the Photo League, Ansel most likely joined when, trying to drum up support for MoMA’s new photography department, he gave a lecture to the group in November 1940. He returned to lecture again at eight-thirty in the evening on November 28, 1947, on the topic “The Interpretation of the Natural Scene.” He proposed classifying photography into four categories: 1) Record, as the name implies, simple records such as passport photos; 2) Reportage, that is, journalistic assignments from without; 3) Illustration, including advertising and portraits; and 4) Expressive, or creative photography. An audience member described the proceedings: “Ansel Adams leads with his chin. One member after another takes a swing. He’s up. He’s down. The crowd roars. Mr. Adams is a brave man. He asks for argument.”83 A noisy chorus begged to differ with Ansel, asserting that his definitions denigrated their work: it was entirely possible to have expressive reportage, and they were the living proof.

  Ansel relished the give-and-take of this debate, which continued in letter form. Famed Life photographer Philippe Halsman berated him for taking such a narrow view of photography, insisting that he acted as if everything of consequence must fit within his confining parameters.84 Ansel’s reply was two single-spaced pages full of friendly steam, denying any such parochialism.85 The Photo League was nothing if not lively.

  But the postwar years were also the dangerous era of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, with its slogan “Better dead than Red.” (Ansel and the Newhalls called it the House Un-American Committee.) Just one week after Ansel’s lecture, the Photo League was blacklisted by the United States attorney general, joining a catalog of groups that were judged to be subversive, beginning with the Communist Party.86 At first members rallied, and letters of support poured in from Edward, Dorothea, Eliot Elisofon, Ben Shahn, Paul Strand, and Ansel, each confirming his or her allegiance to country as well as to Photo League. Ansel’s letter proclaiming that he would stand by the organization—“I am a member of the PHOTO LEAGUE and proud of it”—also took pains to assert that he was certainly no Commie!87 He challenged the other members to “dust off your lenses and get going! . . . The constant, dynamic affirmation of the camera must be devoted to the support of the democratic potential. Do not feed the wrath of the stupid; bring shame to them through images of the truth.”88

  As the months rolled by and belonging to a blacklisted group became dicier, Ansel, among others, asked the board to announce officially that it had no ties to the Communist Party. Photographer Barbara Morgan telephoned him to warn that Communists had taken over the board of directors; she advised him to join her in resigning.89 In testimony before HUAC, it was revealed that one of the leaders of the Photo League was indeed a Communist.90 Ansel believed that the contemporary practice of Communism in Stalinist Russia was in the same league of repression and persecution as fascism.91 When the board refused to issue any statement, and did not even respond to his query, he quit, writing a formal letter of resignation and sending a copy to the FBI.92 The League, virtually memberless, finally folded in 1951.

  Soon after the completion of Ansel and Dorothea’s Fortune assignment on Richmond, she became very ill with a duodenal ulcer. Over the next few years, it laid waste to her. Surgery followed surgery, and then she underwent extended radiation treatments. Always a small woman, Dorothea became emaciated, too weak to photograph. It took her a long time to regain enough strength to begin working again.93

  In 1954, nine years after her last major job, she asked Ansel to join her in photographing three Mormon towns in Utah. He realized how important this story was to her, and sensed that she did not feel strong enough to complete it herself.94 Together they would describe the hard life of the people who lived in this desolate though magnificent landscape, a land more conducive to contemplation than farming and ranching.

  At first Dorothea and Ansel thought of an exhibition, but financial realities forced them to secure financial backing by selling the story to Life. Life’s editors were not particularly excited about doing a photographic essay on Mormon towns in Utah, but they were intrigued by the unlikely team of Lange and Adams, both world famous but for opposite achievements: the document versus the landscape.95 Ansel welcomed the rare opportunity to show his work in Life’s exalted pages, and as for Dorothea, what better venue for her comeback effort?

  Ansel and Dorothea, accompanied by her husband, Paul Taylor, and son, Dan Dixon, who would write the text, arrived in southern Utah on August 24, 1953, to find their subjects uncooperative and suspicious. Lange and Taylor reassured them—and Ansel as well—that all permissions had been granted by the church fathers in Salt Lake City. Tensions dissolved, and the team went to work.

  There was never any doubt in Dorothea’s working relationships with others that she was in charge. She gave the orders, and when Ansel balked, she threatened to quit. In the truest spirit of friendship, Ansel acceded to her throughout the three weeks of shooting—not his usual modus operandi.96

  Ansel and Dorothea completed an extensive document of the towns of Toquerville, St. George, and Gunlock. After they returned home, Ansel suggested that Nancy be brought in to assemble the images and text. Dorothea bristled, as usual demanding full control. Ansel demurred to her, afraid to tax her small energies in any way.

  Dorothea flew to New York and handed in to Life’s editors the story of the three towns in 135 photographs.97 Unfortunately, much of the space reserved for “Three Mormon Towns” was preempted at the last minute by fast-breaking stories, resulting in the publication of a severely truncated version on September 6, 1954, reduced to thirty-four images98

  Letters of outrage poured into Life’s New York offices from Utah. It turned out that Lange and Taylor had not mentioned the Life article to the church elders but had obtai
ned permission only for the exhibition.99 Dorothea had also neglected to obtain any model releases, believing that the practice undermined the relationship of trust that must be built with each subject.100 One woman demanded a thousand dollars as recompense for the use of her photograph without her consent.101 In addition, many residents of Toquerville, described as living in a dead-end town, were deeply angered by what they felt was a misleading depiction of their home sweet home.102

  Ansel was stung by the criticism. A central element in his self-identity was the conviction that his life must be lived ethically. He had cooperated with Dorothea at every turn, yet she had lied to him, as well as to the Mormons.103 He rarely courted conflict and believed that Dorothea and Paul had placed him squarely in a mess of their making. In an unusual move for him, Ansel wrote to tell Dorothea directly how personally angry and disappointed he was with her.104

  It may have added to Ansel’s feelings of betrayal that only a quarter of the photographs in the article were his, and three-quarters Dorothea’s. Since she had met with the editors in New York on the layout, Ansel may have thought she pushed her images over his own. Years later, the Life editor in charge of “Three Mormon Towns” recalled that fewer of Ansel’s pictures had been used because it was felt that the magazine’s poor reproduction quality would not serve them well, whereas Dorothea’s photographs were already grainy and would not be hurt.105

  Dorothea dismissed the problems with the permissions and releases as simply coming with the territory of journalistic photography, and certainly the editors at Life did not seem to hold it against her. Almost immediately, she left for Ireland on another assignment. The resulting story, “Irish Country People,” was also published in Life, but only after the editors had ironed out yet another enormous hassle: Dorothea returned with lots of fine pictures, but with no names of people nor any permissions. Two researchers flew to Ireland and attempted to match photographs with faces, eventually obtaining enough information to allow the article to run.106

  When Dorothea asked Ansel to work with her on a story about the Berryessa Valley, whose homes and farms were about to be flooded for a new dam, he gracefully declined, recommending the photographer Pirkle Jones in his stead.107 “Three Mormon Towns” was their last project together.

  Dorothea never really regained her health, but instead gradually worsened. Her scarred esophagus grew so constricted from the surgeries and radiation that eating became a trial for her. Pain was her constant companion. During these years, her friendship with Ansel, which had cooled after their Life assignment, began to revive. In 1962, when he was hospitalized for removal of an enlarged prostate, she cabled,

  It is my turn to tell you that I wish for you the very best under all circumstances and also that I have loved you right or wrong. Dorothea.108

  A large solo retrospective of her photographs was planned to open at MoMA in November 1965. It would be the most important of her life. Although exhausting. Tragically, after years of suffering, Dorothea was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the esophagus in the summer of 1964.109 Ansel remembered,

  About two or three weeks before she died I went over to see her. I took a camera. She didn’t look well, but she was still marvelous and sparkling and talking. Her gestures were incredible and I’ve got five or six series. I don’t think they’re great shakes as photographs, but they have something of her spirit. Not perfectly sharp, but . . . the older she got the more beautiful she got. Absolute sexless beauty. Rather frightening sometimes. I mean, she became sort of chiseled, sort of a . . . tragic quality, stronger and more luminous.110

  Dorothea died before sunrise on October 11, 1966. Her show opened three weeks later.

  Following the debacle surrounding “Three Mormon Towns,” Ansel for all intents and purposes gave up his ten-year personal crusade to develop a documentary side to his vision. He had tried mightily to skip out of his established “Nature Boy” groove, and many would say he partially succeeded. Perhaps the creation of such images as Winter Sunrise and Mount Williamson, two of the greatest landscapes of all time, allowed him to realize that in his groove he was the best at what he did. In the world of photojournalism, there were better.

  Chapter 16: Conclusions

  By early 1950, Ollie, now eighty-seven years old and bedridden, was failing fast. In January, Ansel hired a night nurse for his mother so that his father, her very conscientious caregiver, could get some sleep. Suffering from pneumonia, Ollie sank into a coma, her eyes opening only at the time of her death, as if to see into the beyond. Her body shook in a death rattle as she released her last breath in her own bed on the evening of March 22, son and husband by her side.1 Later, the two men sat together by the fire, drinking hot toddies. Ansel knew his grieving father would not understand the relief he felt at his mother’s death.2

  Charlie never recovered from the loss of his wife, sliding quickly toward his own death less than a year and a half later, on August 9, 1951. Ansel held his hand during the final hours as the family’s longtime cook and gardener, Harry Oye, dressed in his ceremonial robes as a Buddhist priest, lighted candles and silently prayed. Charlie’s passing was peaceful and warmed by the love he left on earth.3

  The bodies of both Charles and Olive Adams were cremated, their ashes mixed together and buried unmarked under the thick green grass at the base of a woody thicket in the family plot at Cypress Hill Cemetery, in Colma, California. Charlie’s brother-in-law Ansel Easton, who had been instrumental in his financial ruination, is also buried there with his family, although an impressive carved granite obelisk towers over their remains.

  Throughout the stressful months of his parents’ last days, Ansel poured out his heart in a torrent of letters to Nancy and Beaumont, confessing that he cried for the first time in his life when his father died.4 With great empathy, Beaumont wrote to Ansel about the death of his own father,

  I could only wish for your father and for you so peaceful an ending . . . I wanted to tell you about my father because I do not know how else to tell how much I owe to him. If it had not been for [his] deep understanding, his confidence, his belief in what lay unknown and unexpressed within me, I would not have been able to develop the way I have.

  So I think I know, Ansel, how you feel about your father. To look back over the years, to measure that love, is almost too much.5

  Ansel’s letters to Beaumont and Nancy were usually covered with doodles and accented with a red typewriter ribbon. To one such letter, he attached a full-page drawing that summed up the Newhalls’ central importance to him: in a sketch of a heart, the right atrium held the initials BN, the left atrium was marked AA, and across both ventricles was inscribed NN.

  Nancy was the one person with whom Ansel could be most himself. Her friendship grew rather than faded as she learned of the qualities he kept hidden from almost everyone else, such as his confirmed mysticism. Although he did not practice any formal religion, Ansel believed that there was another reality beyond the one we usually experience that could be glimpsed only on the rarest of occasions. He most often encountered it while lying in his sleeping bag and gazing at the night sky from the top of some Sierra peak. He was convinced that each of us is born with a program of possibilities encoded in our brain and that few are able to express the incredible potential of that gift. He had known from childhood that he was special, but he thought that everyone else was, too, if only they would recognize it.6

  One mystery that he could never unravel was what he called spirit writing. At times Ansel felt literally forced to sit down and write a poem; in a trance, he would set down the words without thought, as they flowed through him but not from him, emerging whole and complete. He was confused by this, and a bit chagrined, unable even to discern whether the results were good or bad.7 For a man who held dear what he called the objective approach, these events were unsettling. At first with embarrassment, he talked to Nancy about this phenomenon; later, secure in her acceptance, he would refer casually to spirit writing in his letters.8
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br />   At the end of his life, Ansel remembered a number of telepathic experiences: a voice in his ear commanding him to stop just before a huge piece of concrete fell from above, crashing directly in front of him; sudden impulses, although his car evidenced no problems, to pull into garages, only to find that the steering was about to fail, or that the tires had developed explosive bulges. Once, driving with Beaumont and Nancy, Ansel swerved the car into a ditch without warning and waited; moments later, two trucks came careening around the bend, racing down the two-lane road side by side.9

  Ansel and the Newhalls seemed to be involved in everything of value, photographically speaking. Their intertwined lives can be easily traced because of their voluminous correspondence. They wrote not only about events but about their reactions to the work of other photographers, their ideas about the future of photography, and their philosophies of art.

  They dreamed of the projects they might work on together. When Arizona Highways, an advertisement-free magazine published by the Arizona Highway Commission to promote travel to that fair state, contracted with Ansel for a series of articles on Southwestern parks, he recommended Nancy to write the text. This first publishing collaboration between them became ongoing, with six major stories published in the magazine between 1952 and 1954: “Canyon de Chelly,” “Sunset Crater,” “Tumacacori,” “Death Valley,” “Organ Pipe,” and “Mission San Xavier del Bac.”10 The editor, Raymond Carlson, always provided generous space for every article, enabling the pair to convey the particular atmosphere of each special place. In addition to writing the text, Nancy acted as the stories’ editor and designer, selecting the images as well as creating the layout in a drama-building sequence for which she became recognized.11 Two of the stories, “Death Valley” and “Mission San Xavier del Bac,” grew into complete books published in 1954 by 5 Associates.12 The coauthors traveled together to each of the locations save one; in that instance, Nancy amazed Ansel by producing an effective text about Canyon de Chelly without actually ever having been there.13