Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Chapter 17: Another Path

  A glance over a list of Ansel’s greatest photographs reveals that after 1949, he made few images of consequence, nothing like the abundance of masterpieces he produced before that time. Simply put, Ansel was burned out: the muse of inspiration had vanished. And he knew it, confessing to Beaumont and Nancy in 1952 that making photographs had become a bore.1 He had come to believe that all artists moved through these stages—rise, plateau, and descent—and he saw himself as being in the final phase. He thought that perhaps he had accomplished all he could and it was now time, at the age of fifty, to follow another path, as had been the case twenty-five years earlier with his musical career.2 As the 1950s progressed into the 1960s, Ansel turned his still-considerable energies to writing, making portfolios, consulting, and teaching.

  Commercial assignments did not require the inner spark so crucial to his creative work, and they continued to supply his basic income.3 From 1949 until the end of his life, working as a consultant for the Polaroid Corporation kept him busy and gainfully, if but part-time, employed.4

  Ansel and Polaroid’s founder, Edwin Land, developed a mutual admiration society. Both were brilliant men who had never graduated from college but had nonetheless achieved huge success by marching to their own drummers. Known as Din to his close friends and Dr. Land to everyone else, Land was a real maverick, just like Ansel. He was addressed as “Dr.” Land because of the great respect accorded him as well as the honorary degrees that had been bestowed on him. Just as Georgia O’Keeffe was always spoken of as Miss O’Keeffe, so Edwin Land, a formal, reserved man, was Dr. Land.

  Although Ansel’s walls, too, would be hung with prestigious honorary doctorates, no one who knew him, and most especially Ansel himself, would have considered for a minute calling him Dr. Adams. From the moment of meeting, he was “Ansel” to everyone, regardless of age or achievements in life.

  Land knew at age seventeen that he would be a scientist and began a search to find a field in which he could make a contribution of consequence. He decided on optics, and specifically the invention of man-made polarizing lenses to eliminate the natural scatter of light and its glare by allowing only parallel rays to pass through. The best his predecessors in science had been able to come up with was a mixture of dog urine, iodine, and quinine; the resultant tiny crystals did polarize light, but it was a fragile and less than aesthetic solution.5

  Following his freshman year at Harvard, Land dropped out, to the great disappointment of his parents, announcing that he would use his school money (tuition was three hundred dollars a year) to fund his independent quest to learn everything about the polarization of light. By 1935, when he was twenty-six years old, Land produced an effective synthetic polarizing filter that was quickly picked up by Kodak for placement in front of the camera lens. Sunglasses were just becoming commonly available, and Land jumped in with polarizing lenses, which proved immediately popular and the prime moneymaker for his fledgling company, incorporated in 1937 as the Polaroid Corporation. Land also introduced 3-D movies, the kind that must be viewed through special glasses.6

  The World War II years were filled with extremely important war-related projects for Polaroid, but still Land’s restless mind never stopped. During a few days over Christmas of 1943, when his wife, Terre, demanded that he stay at home and enjoy the holidays—an enforced break from his obsessive, round-the-clock laboratory life—he brought out a camera and made some family snapshots. Their daughter Jennifer innocently queried, “Why can’t I see the pictures now?” Since Land could not provide an answer, he was driven to find one.7

  On February 21, 1947, at a conference of the Optical Society of America in New York City, Land demonstrated his new instant photography, producing a self-portrait in just fifty seconds, much to the astonishment of the audience and the delight of the press. The achievement made the front page of the next day’s New York Times.8

  Forever and always a techie, Ansel wanted a Polaroid camera from the first word he heard of it in 1947, but he could not justify spending $89.75 for a snapshot camera.9 In February 1948, while in New York, he took the train up to Boston and went straight to Polaroid’s research laboratory, where Land made a picture of him with the new camera. Ansel and Din began to talk and could not stop, finding a coincidence of parallel intellect. To continue their discussion, Land brought Ansel home to dinner. By the end of the evening, Ansel was hooked on Polaroid.10

  Returning to New York, he wrote Land a letter just busting with questions about the new process. After first assuring him that he saw great aesthetic potential, Ansel ripped into what he saw as some of the possible problems. How permanent would the prints be? Could they be dry-mounted? What would be the effect of filters? He suggested that these were all questions he could answer through testing. Land did not respond to that letter or to the others that Ansel continued to send. Nor was any camera forthcoming—until Land purchased Ansel’s Portfolio One in late 1948 and then followed up with a letter of admiration and the shipment of camera and film as a gift of appreciation.11

  In November 1949, in the East to photograph in Maine with the Newhalls, Ansel spent the sixteenth with the Lands. When Beaumont and Nancy came to pick him up the next day to begin their trip, he announced with delight that Land had hired him as a consultant, complete with a budget and a monthly retainer.12 Although it was unusual for a corporation to place an artist on its payroll, Ansel earned every penny paid him, and much more. (For most of his tenure at Polaroid, he received a hundred dollars a month plus expenses.)13

  First and foremost, it was understood, if not formalized by contract, that Ansel’s use of Polaroid products would place upon them a seal of approval, similar to Good Housekeeping’s. The large audience of Modern Photography magazine was soon treated to Ansel’s article “How I Use the Polaroid Camera.”14 From Cambridge to California came prototype films and cameras. Ansel tested them in the field and wrote back lengthy reports in more than three thousand memos.

  As a teacher, Ansel found the instant feedback provided by the Polaroid camera extremely valuable. He could individualize his students’ learning experience: on the spot, each student could see, using the print he or she had just made, what could be improved, and then another exposure could be made, the entire process serving to refine the student’s visualization.15

  The full weight of Ansel’s influence on photographers around the world via his technical books would eventually come into play on behalf of Polaroid. In his 1948 technical book, Camera and Lens, Ansel referred to Polaroid in but a few sentences, only briefly describing the effects of polarizing filters.16 By the publication of the fourth book in the series, Natural-Light Photography, in 1952, he gave four pages to the same subject.17 His audience building, in 1963 Ansel produced a substantial manual devoted to Polaroid products, entitled Polaroid Land Photography, which was substantially revised and released again in 1978.

  Ansel was not content simply to demonstrate Polaroid products; he insisted on being involved in their development as well. The first Polaroid prints were brown and white, not black and white. Ansel objected to the color, believing that professional photographers would not take Polaroid seriously until it produced a true black-and-white photograph.18

  A new Polaroid film (Type 41) that produced black-and-white prints was introduced in late 1950. Disconcertingly, six months later a wail of complaints arose: prints were already fading and were easily scratched. Land concentrated on the two problems and in less than a month, with camera returns piling up and the company’s survival at stake, came up with a solution.

  The first Polaroid photographs were completed in the camera, in what advertisements proclaimed as a one-step process. After a prescribed time, the sepia-toned photograph was peeled away from its negative in the camera, already developed, fixed, and resistant to scratching. When removed from the camera, the new black-and-white prints carried with them a thicker layer of light-sensitive emulsion, which proved delicate as well as incomplete
ly fixed. Land devised a coating stick that the camera operator wiped across the picture surface to achieve permanence along with a protective plastic coating.19 It was messy and smelly and required a second step, but it worked, and that was the way Polaroid prints were made for many years.

  Ansel’s next push was for the creation of a professional line of products, especially a Polaroid film pack that could be used in any standard four-by-five-inch view camera. By 1956, Ansel was testing such a product, which was released for sale in 1958. By 1970, the four-by-five-inch Polaroid film pack was generating sixteen million dollars annually in sales, a small but nonetheless significant amount for what had by now become a major corporation.20

  When Ansel wondered why a negative could not be obtained from the process, as well as a print, the result was the introduction of Type 55 P/N (positive/negative) film in 1961. There was a definite problem, though: if correct exposure was given for the negative, the print would be too light, and if the print looked good, the negative would be too thin, or underexposed. Always honest, Ansel counseled in Polaroid Land Photography that the photographer must make two exposures, one for the negative and one for the print.21

  Another of Ansel’s responsibilities was to induce other respected photographers to work with Polaroid materials. He sent out free cameras and film to the chosen, including Charles Sheeler, Dorothea, and Imogen, who, after a suitable period, sent him back a Polaroid self-portrait of herself apparently passed out on her bed, surrounded by piles of flack for the process, including Ansel’s own Polaroid Manual. Her accompanying note warned, “Herewith I am giving you notice that I am practically dropping dead from overexposure to POLAROID.”22

  Ansel made thousands of Polaroid photographs, most of them close-up studies suited to a small four-by-five-inch print: spruce needles against rough bark, a lichen-encrusted branch curling across pine boughs, wild grasses set amid ruffled leaves. He used the four-by-five Type 55 P/N film differently, however. Since he could obtain an excellent negative for enlargement, he did not hesitate to make images of a wide variety of subjects, just as he would with any four-by-five film. One of his major projects in 1961 had him making murals from his Polaroid negatives to prove their fine-grain quality.23

  Ansel’s last great photograph, El Capitan, Winter Sunrise, was made in 1968 with Type 55 P/N film. This particular day dawned on a frosty Yosemite, dappled with snow as the sun played tag with fast-moving clouds. The dramatic weather roused Ansel, and before the snow could melt, he was out driving around the valley looking for pictures. He stopped and parked when he came to the El Capitan pullout, which provided what he felt was the best view of that natural monument. Ansel had made many exposures from this spot, although the growth of trees over the years had encroached upon a formerly expansive view. Before him loomed El Cap, its great granite face glazed with ice and wreathed in shifting bands of fog.

  He chose his favorite lens at the time, a Schneider 121mm Super Angulon, which would give him greater covering power for this broad scene while maintaining a normal perspective.24 Again, by setting up the camera on top of his car, Ansel was able to frame the image with minimal foreground, entirely removing the Merced River below. It was so cold that the film would not develop, and so Ansel ended up back in his Yosemite darkroom to process the negatives.25

  What makes El Capitan, Winter Sunrise so wonderful is Ansel’s courageous choice of tonalities. A full half of the image is taken up with the somber near-monotone of the dark-gray trees that frame two sides. Snow gently traces each branch, exquisitely detailed in a tone of slightly lighter gray, kept from its natural whiteness by full shadow. In the soft light of sunrise, the prime subject—gigantic El Capitan—its waist gracefully obscured by a diaphanous, low-hanging cloud, somehow transcends its granite self. It is no longer of this world but from some better reality.

  The occasion of Ansel’s 1974 retrospective exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, his first solo museum exhibition in that city since 1936, demanded an accompanying catalog. Unfortunately, Ansel was about to publish his first very-large-format book, Images: 1923–1974, which was much too expensive to serve as the catalog. The exhibition’s sponsor, Ansel’s old friend David McAlpin, found his personal collection of four-by-five-inch unique Polaroid contact prints enchanting. An entire section of the Metropolitan show was to be devoted to them, so why not a catalog based on these little-known images? This idea took hold, and the slim and inexpensive softcover catalog, Singular Images, containing fifty-three of Ansel’s Polaroids made between 1954 and 1973, was published.26

  In a short, rather convoluted essay for the book, Land concluded that it was an act of the greatest bravery as well as of wisdom for Ansel to photograph the landscape, a subject dismissed by many as just a lot of rocks, trees, or twigs. Ansel achieved greatness by beginning with the ordinary and creating something new and extraordinary.27

  The easy camaraderie between Land and Ansel eventually grew distant. At one time the Lands proposed building a small museum outside Boston devoted to Ansel’s photographs, and Ted Spencer was engaged to draw up plans. He designed a remarkable building constructed in the shape of a nautilus shell: on entering, the visitor would be drawn in through the inward-spiraling corridor to the center of the building, as well as deeper into Ansel’s photography. When all seemed ready to proceed, the Lands abruptly withdrew their support, to Ansel’s depressed consternation. He never figured out what had happened to cause such a swift change.28

  Still, the basic respect each man held for the other remained. In 1982, when Land could not attend Ansel’s eightieth-birthday celebrations, he sent a witty, heartfelt poem in his stead.29 And, in 1983, when Ansel was sentenced to a month of bed rest, the longest and most revealing letter he wrote was to Land.30

  In the late 1970s, Polaroid experienced great success with its instant color camera, the SX-70, but this was diluted by Kodak’s entry into the market with a copycat color camera that ate deeply into what should have been Polaroid’s sales. Although Polaroid would eventually win a huge settlement in court, the interim years proved costly. Greatly adding to its financial woes would be another one of Land’s personally backed products, Polavision, instant color movies without benefit of sound. The timing was bad: too little, too late. Videotape recorders and playback units were then also just hitting stores, and we know who won.31 In August 1982, Land retired without fanfare, quietly announcing that he would devote the rest of his life to pure research at his just-founded Rowland Institute for Science, Inc. He died on March 1, 1991.32

  Although Ansel served Polaroid with devotion, he never took a vow of chastity, and he worked on many projects for rival Eastman Kodak at the same time. Shortly after he became a consultant for Polaroid, Ansel accepted a similar position with the Swedish camera company Hasselblad. After meeting its founder, Dr. Victor Hasselblad, in New York in 1950, Ansel arrived home to find one of their first cameras awaiting him—a far cry from the suspense he experienced expecting a Polaroid.33 All the people at Hasselblad asked was that Ansel let them know how he liked it. He responded eagerly with a deluge of reports detailing both the good and the bad.34

  And he did find problems. Hasselblad had brilliant engineers, but no one there really knew about the requirements of making photographs. With that first camera, Ansel discovered if it was not carried and stored in the upright position, the internal mirror would fall out; the engineers had not understood that cameras may be stuffed into backpacks and cases, ending up in all kinds of positions.35 Hasselblad was grateful for Ansel’s suggestions and criticisms and through the years shipped him each new model camera as it was produced, along with whatever lenses he might be interested in.

  With age, arthritis and gout began to afflict Ansel, and his larger view cameras became increasingly cumbersome for him to operate. He found it necessary to have an assistant to carry and set up his equipment; even making the necessary adjustments before an exposure was difficult for him. The Hasselblad proved to be the perfect cam
era for him at just the right time. He did not need the help of an assistant because it was relatively small and lightweight, and he could position it himself on a tripod. Its negative size was decent—two and a quarter inches square—and the quality of the negatives he obtained was splendid. The Hasselblad became his preferred camera for most of the rest of his life. (The year before his death, Ansel also enjoyed using a Leica, whose ease of use and very small size were hugely attractive to him at eighty-plus years of age.)

  The Hasselblad Foundation awarded Ansel its gold medal in 1981.36 The ceremony was held at MoMA, and the honor presented by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, in the presence of four hundred guests and nearly as many photographers, whose jostling and electronic flashes transformed the festivities into a battlefield. Afterward, Ansel retired happily to a small private reception hosted by Mrs. Hasselblad. It was an ultimate party, featuring unlimited quantities of champagne (Roederer Cristal) and caviar (Beluga Malossol), though Ansel himself preferred the simpler combination of a vodka and a few crackers.

  Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park (1960) remains the most famous photograph that Ansel made with the Hasselblad. Although he continued to live primarily in San Francisco, he always spent the Christmas holidays with his family in Yosemite, seeing to his Bracebridge Dinner responsibilities. One afternoon, on his way to a rehearsal at the Ahwahnee, Ansel spotted the nearly full moon rising over Half Dome. He immediately visualized an image and parked his car. With Hasselblad and tripod across his shoulder, he hiked a couple of hundred yards out into the middle of the meadow east of the hotel.

  He knew that the image he was about to make would end up as a vertical, even though the Hasselblad produced a two-and-a-quarter-inch square negative. His eye cropped the image he saw through the viewfinder. He experimented with first a 150mm mildly telephoto lens, then switched to a 250mm Zeiss Sonnar lens that made the moon appear bigger in relation to Half Dome and moved the image toward abstraction by flattening the picture planes, a device he had used successfully for most of his life. He made twelve exposures, an entire roll of Panatomic-X fine-grain film that would allow him to make enlargements even to mural size.