Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  The fireplace, with its large black andirons from his San Francisco house, was flanked by wooden bookcases holding photography books on the left and natural history and Sierra Club coffee-table books on the right. Two of Ansel’s proudest possessions sat among the books: a marble bust of a young woman and an amazing ammonite he had picked up at a rock shop in Utah.

  Projecting from the living room was the gallery, to one side of which was the big gray work table where Phyllis Donohue spotted prints for more than twenty years. A mural of Monolith, three by five feet, commanded one wall, and Ansel’s Mason and Hamlin piano, the same one he had bought in 1924, took up the room’s opposite end, next to a three-panel screen of Leaves, Mills College, with hanging panels for photographs—an ever-changing exhibit held in place with pushpins—occupying the walls in between. On unusually warm days, the gallery would heat up courtesy of the skylights, and the dreaded sound of “ping!” “ping!” “ping!” “ping!” then “flop!” would announce that key pushpins had popped out of the board and an unprotected picture had hit the floor. There would be a mad scramble to take the rest of the prints down before they suffered the same fate.

  The gallery’s third wall consisted of very tall sliding doors concealing deep storage shelves for prints. Photographs were hung wherever there was space, with a dozen in frames right on the doors. Only a few pictures by other photographers ever appeared on these walls; Ansel had to really like an image to accord it such an honor. He was never shy about the fact that his favorite photographer was himself. On the main floor nearly all the prints were his own, save for a Bill Brandt nude and a J. B. Greene salt print of the Colossi of Memnon, dating from the late 1840s, a gift from art dealer Harry Lunn. The lower, bedroom floor was another story. Downstairs there was nothing by Ansel. Most of the photographs were by Gerry Sharpe, who had died young and tragically and whose prints seemed a living memorial.58

  Ansel’s small office back on the main floor, on the other side of the wall behind the piano, featured an unpretentious metal desk covered in green linoleum. Next to it, camouflaged with papers, was a heavy wooden table that gave no indication of its history as the Sierra Club’s original meeting table, over which John Muir had once presided. Beyond was the original garage, which of necessity had become makeshift staff office space for at times upward of four people. Parallel with the gallery lay the work room, where Ansel’s photographs were dried, trimmed, mounted, and stamped. At one end, and within talking distance of Ansel’s office, was the desk for the current photographic assistant; at the other, large-capacity drying screens were stacked almost to the ceiling. A very long, dark-gray Formica table occupied much of the room, with storage for printing paper and mount board along one wall and a deep counter for the dry-mount presses, copy camera, and other essentials along the other.

  The spick-and-span darkroom with its black-painted walls was entered via a heavy sliding door leading off the workroom. Like much of the rest of the house, it had nothing luxurious about it. Ansel’s big horizontal enlarger for large-format negatives and two vertical enlargers for smaller ones were spaced along the left wall. The opposite wall was lined with deep sinks for processing, toning, and washing. Ansel’s Carmel house worked for him very well.

  In 1963, with the nearly four thousand prints of Portfolio Four breathing down his neck, Ansel lamented to Brett Weston that he could find no one to spot them. With a twinkle in his eye, Brett assured him that he knew just the right person for the job. When Ansel asked if she could start today, Brett demurred, “Pasha (his nickname for Ansel), she will come tomorrow.” The next day Liliane De Cock appeared at Ansel’s door, a young, intense woman who proved to be a champion spotter. Not until much later did Ansel learn that she had known nothing about spotting when he had called Brett, who had taught her everything in the one-day grace period before she began work. Liliane served as Ansel’s chief assistant for longer than anyone else, from 1963 until her marriage, in 1972, to Doug Morgan, son of Willard and Barbara Morgan and Ansel’s publisher at the time.59

  Liliane’s prior experience in photography consisted of making snapshots; Ansel taught her technique in a natural and slow progression. She began with the scutwork of rinsing prints in the darkroom and progressed to developing, then to matching a master copy determined by Ansel, and then, finally, to taking full charge of the Yosemite special-edition prints, from exposure through shipping. After her boss loaned her a four-by-five-inch camera, Liliane discovered that she had not only a knack for photography, but a passion for it as well. As she eagerly attacked a new career, she recognized that Ansel had little creative spark left. In the nine years that Liliane worked for him, he made only one significant new image, El Capitan, Winter Sunrise.60

  Why an artist stops creating is often impossible to understand, but a persistent nightmare that troubled Ansel may provide an important clue.

  [I get into] a taxi and [am] driving to a music hall or an opera house or a symphony hall, and seeing great placards screaming that Ansel Adams is going to play the Brahms Second Concerto with the Boston Symphony. It’s all very real. I’m in a terrible state because I don’t know the Brahms Second Concerto at all. But I nevertheless am disgorged at the stage entrance and go in. All the musicians are there backstage, tuning up and talking, and the conductor comes forward and says, “I’m so glad to see you. Our rehearsal was encouraging.” And I sit there, and a slight feeling of perspiration—“What am I doing here?” I take a glimpse, and the hall is completely packed with hundreds or thousands of people. Finally the conductor invites the orchestra to go out on the stage, and they go out and take their places. And I’m supposed to lead, so I walk out and the conductor follows me, and I get as far as the piano. And the conductor bows and we all bow, and he steps to the podium. And at that time I wake up from the situation with the screaming heeby-jeebies because I don’t know the work, I don’t know anything about it, even the first notes! I’m absolutely incapable of doing it . . . And I keep getting this dream over and over again.61

  Ansel had become world famous, his name synonymous with photography, Yosemite, and the growing environmental conscience. He had created an awesome string of important images that spoke only of his vision and no one else’s. But with time, an ambivalence grew deep inside him, his past achievements both a flower and a thorn in his side, a source of monstrous performance expectations from the public, the critics, and himself. Ansel’s creative genius had become paralyzed by fear—the fear of failure.

  Chapter 18: Mortal Combat

  Over the years, many environmental skirmishes and battles found Ansel at their center. He came to wield political clout as did no other environmentalist. For decades he personally knew each secretary of the interior and director of the National Park Service; his pleas did not end up at the bottom of a pile on some underling’s desk. Fluent with photograph, pen, and tongue, he bombarded Washington with telegrams, letters, personal appearances, and phone calls. His persistence was a most important virtue. He attended meetings day after day, year after year. His commitment lasted a lifetime.

  Since the 1920s, when he became an active member, both Ansel and the Sierra Club had grown up. The enormous growth in membership the club achieved in the twentieth century was in large part due to the leadership of David Brower. The two men had first met while hiking in the Sierra in 1933, when Ansel was thirty-one and David twenty. Their lives held many similarities. Both had been bright, awkward, and lonely children. Brower’s early love of nature took root as he played in and about Strawberry Creek in Berkeley, while Ansel traced his environmental beginnings to his daily wanderings along Lobos Creek in San Francisco. Both boys felt physically self-conscious: Brower’s front teeth were missing from an early accident, and even Ansel’s broken nose could not distract the eye from his prominent ears. Each had discovered the powers of the Sierra in his youth, and both were determined to preserve that experience for future generations.1

  Before World War II, Brower had enjoyed a brief career as the p
ublicity manager for YP&CC, where he worked with Ansel and his photographs. Closely observing the younger man, Ansel was greatly impressed by his energy and abilities. He had long believed that the Sierra Club needed a full-time executive director, and he began a campaign to appoint Brower to that position. Before this could be accomplished, however, the war immediately superseded everything.

  Following his discharge from the Army, Brower assumed the editorship of the Bulletin. In 1947, the purposes of the Sierra Club were still, as they had been since its founding, “To explore, enjoy, and render accessible,” et cetera. Later that year, Brower published the first Sierra Club Handbook, which opened with a call to members to examine the club’s goals. With Brower’s encouragement, the organization finally began to consider the direct linkage between accessibility and destruction of wilderness. In 1948, the phrase “to render accessible” was omitted, leaving as the remaining goals “to explore and enjoy.” By 1967, under Brower’s leadership, the shift was complete: the club’s aim was “To explore, enjoy, and preserve.” (Today the motto reads “Explore, Enjoy, and Protect the Planet.”)

  Largely due to Ansel’s insistence, Dave Brower was appointed the club’s first executive director in 1952. He led the transformation of the Sierra Club (sometimes kicking and screaming) from a provincial, rather elitist group concerned mainly with keeping the mountains of the Sierra intact for their own personal enjoyment, into an organization dedicated to a new philosophy of preservation for the sake of the earth, which would be touched in places by no more than an occasional soft footprint. He achieved this success through the brash force of his character and the abiding belief that he was in service to the greatest cause.

  Brower was very fond of a certain Thoreau quote that spoke for Ansel’s sentiments as well, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”2 Brower considered it the club’s mission to reach as many people as possible with that message, and to that end, he began an expanded publishing program. Through his efforts, the membership began to reflect a national constituency; its numbers exploded from ten thousand in 1956 to fifteen thousand in 1960 to over fifty-seven thousand in 1967. (With an astounding 2.4 million supporters in 2014, the Sierra Club is the country’s largest and most important environmental association.)3

  In 1954, the Park Service notified the club that the continued operation of the LeConte Memorial Lodge was no longer justified in Yosemite Valley; it was suggested that it be transformed into a geology museum since its namesake had been a famed geologist. Ansel firmly believed that the Sierra Club should keep the site open as a center for effective conservation education. He felt that if club members could explain the spiritual benefits of wilderness—beyond the obvious physical importance of pure water and clean air—the full impact of the need for preservation could be made clear.4

  Ansel’s idea found expression in This Is the American Earth, an exhibition of inspirational photographs accompanied by a lyrical free-verse text by Nancy. In 1950, Nancy had collaborated with Strand on the book Time and New England, pairing his photographs with a selection of texts, both historical and contemporary.5 The photographs were not used to illustrate the text but instead maintained a separate identity. The combined effect was powerful and quite different from that of either the photographs or the words alone. Ansel’s term for this was “synaesthetic,” denoting two discrete creative forms brought together to create a third, and independent, expression.6 The concept, begun with Nancy and Strand, grew to maturity in This Is the American Earth.

  More than a year of intensive work was required before the show’s 103 photographs were mounted, along with Nancy’s text, on panels built for touring. Most of the prints (fifty-four by Ansel and thirty-nine obtained from the usual cast of photographers, including Edward and Brett Weston, Eliot Porter, Minor White, William Garnett, and Margaret Bourke-White) had been made by Ansel to meet exacting size and tonal requirements.7

  That summer of 1955, This Is the American Earth opened at the LeConte Lodge, where enthralled crowds jammed the small space to slowly savor each magnificent image amplified by Nancy’s moving ballad. Ansel himself marveled at the power of her words.

  This Is the American Earth traveled to Stanford University and Boston’s Museum of Science before coming under the direction of the Smithsonian Institution, which then circulated it throughout the country. Ansel made four duplicate sets of the exhibit, to be sent around the world under the aegis of the United States Information Agency.8

  Ansel and Nancy worked with Brower to package This Is the American Earth into the ultimate traveling exhibition: a coffee-table book. After substantial changes (of the eighty-four photographs included, fewer than a third had appeared in the exhibition), This Is the American Earth was published in 1960 as the first of the Sierra Club’s large-format books. It became a long-lived bestseller, with seventy thousand copies sold before it went out of print over a decade later.9 In the early 1980s, the club moved to reissue This Is the American Earth, but Ansel put a stop to the plan, suggesting that it was time for a new book by another generation of photographers and writers. In 1992, this classic of the environmental movement was brought back into print for some years, although it is not currently available. Some still say it is the finest conservation book ever.

  This Is the American Earth was not the only show of its kind that year. Also in 1955, Ansel and Nancy’s old nemesis, Edward Steichen, presided over the mother of all photography-as-entertainment exhibitions: The Family of Man broke all attendance totals at MoMA and traveled to thirty-seven countries, where it was viewed by nine million people.10 The companion book is still in print. It has sold a phenomenal four million copies.11

  Although Nancy and Ansel were blind to the similarities, the two shows had much in common. Both were intended not just to educate or delight but to motivate the viewer: in the case of This Is the American Earth, to save the earth; in that of The Family of Man, to save mankind. Ansel and Nancy had long ago tried, convicted, and hung Steichen for his use of photography as emotional propaganda; it did not seem to occur to them that they might be guilty of the same charge.

  The disrespect that Steichen showed for the aesthetic quality of a creative photograph removed any possibility that Ansel could truly “see” his show. He cringed when he went to The Family of Man. Steichen had insisted on having all the prints made to his specifications, right in New York, and had even asked Ansel to send his negative of Mount Williamson from Manzanar so that it could be turned into a gigantic mural. Ansel would never allow anyone else to make a print for exhibition from one of his negatives, and this particular negative bore his inadvertent fingerprint in its sky due to a mistake in processing. The bigger the enlargement, the more apparent was this flaw. When Steichen refused to let Ansel make the mural himself, Ansel sent him a copy negative to work from. He literally became ill when he viewed the results: Mount Williamson had been cropped (an absolute Ansel artistic no-no, a decision only he could make), and the fingerprint was so big it looked like the mark of a wrathful God.12

  For This Is the American Earth, Ansel had insisted on the very same conditions as Steichen, requiring that the participating photographers send him their negatives for printing. Perhaps with well-merited darkroom arrogance (he possessed one of the few darkrooms equipped to handle large murals), Ansel believed he could make better prints and murals than the images’ originators, and he was held in such high esteem as a printer that most of his fellow photographers agreed to his demands. Even Edward Weston relinquished his negatives, though his son Brett held firm and sent only finished prints, shocked that Ansel would make such a request.13

  Throughout this time, Ansel continued to serve as a member of the Sierra Club’s publication committee, though he was scrupulous to avoid even the hint of personal profiteering. (He and Nancy split just 5 percent royalties based on retail price; typical royalties are double that.)14 This Is the American Earth’s earnings helped to save the club at a time when it was nearly insolvent: although the fees a
ccrued from the growing membership swelled the coffers, Brower’s multifarious projects proved fully capable of draining them again.

  While the accomplishments on behalf of the environment were sweet, Ansel remembered the failures with great pain. In 1957, the National Park Service, acting under a directive dubbed “Mission 66” (whose stated purpose was to make the parks more accessible by 1966), announced that major improvements would be made to the Tioga Road, which connects the Owens Valley, via Yosemite, with the highly populated San Joaquin Valley. The construction would bring the middle section of twenty-one miles up to the same high-speed-highway quality of the roads on either end. But while a straight road marks the shortest distance between two points, as the young Ansel had observed in 1915, nature comes fully equipped with curves. The old Tioga Road traced a winding course that respectfully followed its majestic footings; the new route could be achieved only by dynamiting pristine granite domes along the shores of Tenaya Lake.15

  The idea of blasting a highway in such a place infuriated Ansel; it required immediate action. He demanded that the Sierra Club’s board take up the cause of protecting the Tenaya wilderness. Disheartened by the trustees’ timid response, he resigned from the board, believing he could carry Tenaya’s banner more effectively alone than with a waffling Sierra Club.16

  After the “improvement” began, he pleaded for the three most critical miles, along the glacier-polished shores of Tenaya Lake, to be spared. In 1958, work on the road stopped while Ansel was granted an on-site meeting with regional officers of the Park Service and Yosemite’s superintendent. An inspection by Conrad Wirth, director of the National Park Service, soon followed. Ansel left the discussion feeling confident that the most important stretch of domes would be spared. Returning to Yosemite from a trip some weeks later, he was appalled to discover the road had been completed with full devastation. In the meantime, the Sierra Club board had refused to accept his resignation, and he returned to its midst.