The dramatic and largely lonely Big Sur coast stretches out southward from below Ansel’s Carmel Highlands house, its curvaceous landscape echoed by sinuous Highway One. Few other man-made things impede the eye from that vantage, but although Ansel lived there for his last twenty years, he made few photographs and even fewer successful ones.
The preservation of Big Sur was Ansel’s last battle, one that still has not been resolved. Both the Big Sur Land Trust and the Big Sur Foundation were formed during meetings in Ansel and Virginia’s living room, in 1973 and 1977, respectively.49 Ansel served as the foundation’s vice president until his death. Following the model of Cape Cod, where homes and towns are seen as important elements, reflective of their setting, he worked tirelessly alongside then-senator Alan Cranston, then-Congressman Leon Panetta, and Assemblyman (now Congressman) Sam Farr, as well as the Wilderness Society, to create a Big Sur National Scenic Area. Ansel often said that Big Sur was of national importance, and therefore deserving of national protection.50
Sadly, the Yosemite that cured the young Ansel proved unhealthy for the old one. The valley’s floor is over four thousand feet above ocean level, an altitude that tested his heart, now compromised by age. His visits there grew shorter and less frequent. Ansel saw Yosemite Valley as a great eight-square-mile concert hall with a fixed number of seats; he knew the performance had been oversold when bumper-to-bumper cars poked their way up and down the narrow valley floor. Automobiles, he felt, must be banished, and the number of visitors limited. The most important thing was that the Yosemite experience be preserved for those who sought it. Crowds may trample the central trails, and high heels occasionally, somehow, make it up the Mist Trail, but still, on most summer days, few hikers can be found on the many miles of trails that branch out from the valley in all directions.
Over four million people, more than the population of twenty-eight states, annually pass through the park’s entrance gates, staying on average only a day and a half, and most never venturing beyond the valley’s flat bottom.51 Finally, in 2014 the National Park Service decided to limit daily entry to Yosemite to 18,710 people, raised to 21,000 during peak visitation times.52 In the not-distant future when advance reservations will be necessary for all visitors, an idea that seemed radical to many when Ansel first espoused it in the 1950s but whose implementation is vital to perpetuating any semblance of a contemplative Yosemite. Former Yosemite superintendent B. J. Griffin said, “What I would hope for this park one day is a very quiet experience.”53 Ansel would have been her most vocal supporter.
Unwilling to miss any opportunity to publicize the cause, in 1970, when cars were banned from the extreme eastern corner of the valley at Mirror Lake, Ansel set up his camera and tripod to record a bulldozer tearing up the asphalt of a no-longer-needed parking lot. His presence made the event newsworthy: the San Francisco Examiner sent out a reporter and photographer to do a story, in which Ansel was quoted as saying it was an act of historic importance.54 He had great hopes that this would be just the first step. Ansel joined the years-long effort to create a master plan for Yosemite. One such plan, completed by 1980, called for automobiles to be replaced by shuttles and all commercial operations to be minimized. Falling victim to the change of administrations from Carter to Reagan, caught up in the tangle of bureaucracy, it was never implemented.55 Finally in 2014 there is a plan to return two hundred acres back to meadows by removing some roads and trails. 56
Until the end of his life, Ansel loved to stand at Inspiration Point with the valley’s length stretched before him. In some respects, Yosemite was cleaner and better than it had been when he first saw it, in 1916. From this vantage point, there was still no sign of the hand of man, and there were no more pool halls, bowling alleys, or golf course. All in all, for him, Yosemite was largely an example of what was right with our national parks.
Although his photographs were used as banners to rally the public for the protection of Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Big Sur, and Alaska, Ansel clearly and repeatedly stated that he never directly made a picture for an environmental cause.57 He resented the implication that photography had no value unless the artist’s underlying motivation was to use his or her art as a tool to solve social and political problems.58 For Ansel, it was an added benefit if photographs could be used in the service of mankind, but aesthetic response must be the photographer’s primary motivation. By his definition, artists created beauty and, through it, affirmed life. It was here that the purposes of the artist and the environmentalist joined: in the affirmation of life on this planet.59
Ansel did, however, provide photographs to promote tourism in Yosemite and places like it, even as he worked to preserve its essential qualities. At Best’s Studio, Virginia struggled for many years to make a living dependent upon the Yosemite tourists; when visitation was down, so was income. In the end, Ansel was as culpable as John Muir had been before him, attracting ever larger numbers of people bent on witnessing for themselves what was revealed in his pictures, most of them not realizing that those images were the essence of the scene, not the reality, which, however splendid, was not the same. Ansel’s photographs have spurred thousands to visit, with all their subsequent impact.
Chapter 19: Price Rise
In late 1970, still nursing fresh wounds from the Brower war, Ansel was awarded a Chubb Fellowship at Yale University. He spent his required days on the New Haven campus in late November, meeting with students and presenting a formal lecture to the School of Forestry titled “The Aggressive Persuasion: A Credo for Survival,” in which he emphasized that the value of the wilderness could not be measured or really explained but instead must be experienced.1 Ansel drew vital nourishment from the young Elis, who hung on his every word and, in so doing, reassured him that as a conservationist, he still had important things to say and do.
William A. Turnage, a graduate student in the School of Forestry, was responsible for Ansel’s care and feeding during his visit. In 1970, with Vietnam much on America’s mind, students were advised not to trust anyone over thirty, but Bill listened raptly to the sixty-eight-year-old Ansel, finding in him a real-life hero as devoted to environmental concerns as himself. In turn, Ansel was complimented by the young man’s admiration and attention. Always insecure about his lack of even a high school diploma, Ansel was impressed by Bill’s Ivy League education but even more impressed that he had not allowed it to afflict him with effeteness; instead, Bill was a rugged man who loved the outdoors. For Ansel, it was almost like going out on a first date and discovering so many shared interests that he could move immediately into a serious relationship.
Throughout the week, their discussions kept returning to Ansel’s circumstances. A frustrated Ansel confided that though he was working as fast as he could, financial security still eluded him; he then listened as Bill began brainstorming and came up with various business plans. Bill had the combination of high energy and organizational skills that Ansel lacked, and this was just the opportunity that would make the most of his abilities. In no time, Ansel hired Bill to manage his career.2 They agreed that he would be paid only a nominal salary but would receive a commission on any income he produced.3
Bill left Connecticut for California in April 1971. Ansel wrote to Beaumont and Nancy of his hopes that by some divine intervention, Bill had been sent to assume some of his heaviest burdens. And assume them Bill did, within days relieving Ansel of the day-to-day business, permitting him for the first time to concentrate on just his own work (such was the plan, at least). By September, with incredible efficiency and speed, Bill had become central to all of Ansel’s projects.
Ansel soon applied the “Turnage treatment” to every aspect of his life.4 In 1972, Bill was appointed the first executive director of the Friends of Photography.5 He held this position for only a few months, just long enough to set up administrative procedures and employ a successor before leaving Carmel for Yosemite, where he became resident manager, charged with the challenge of moving Best’s Studio succ
essfully into the future.6 After analyzing the situation, Bill convinced Ansel that Virginia should relinquish ownership to their son, Michael, and daughter-in-law, Jeanne, and change the name to the “Ansel Adams Gallery, operated by Best’s Studio, Inc.,” to take advantage of Ansel’s burgeoning fame.7
Virginia Adams felt pushed out. She had spent every summer of her childhood at her father’s studio in Yosemite, and then most of the year after it was winterized. It had been her business since Harry’s death, in 1936, and she had raised her children there, almost by herself. But if she was hurt by what was happening, she could not begrudge handing the business over to her beloved son. Since Michael was understandably busy with his medical practice, Jeanne took over the newly renamed Ansel Adams Gallery and proved to be a dedicated and savvy manager. For his part, Bill saw himself as a devoted Ansel advocate; he was concerned with doing what was best for his boss, and if that meant he must tread on family members, so be it.
The backbone of the gallery’s inventory is its special edition prints, or SEPs, a selection of Ansel’s Yosemite images printed by an assistant as a high-quality souvenir.8 Measuring approximately eight by ten inches, each carries a stamp on the back of the mount identifying it as a Special Edition Print. Up until 1972, Ansel signed all prints and probably made most of them himself. He shifted to simply initialing them when an assistant began to print all of them from 1972 to 1974. In 1974 he stopped initialing them.9 SEPs are worth but a fraction of what prints made and signed by Ansel himself bring; when articles appear touting the prices of Ansel’s original prints, many people get excited, mistakenly thinking they own one of these very valuable photographs rather than a much more common SEP.
Sold exclusively by the Ansel Adams Gallery, the price of an SEP eventually rose to $15, then $25, $50, $75, $125 in 1996, and is still a very good value at $295 today. Each print is made from the original negative. These are not investment pieces but enjoyment photographs. Alan Ross, who served as Ansel’s photographic assistant from 1974 to 1979, has printed all of the SEPs since 1975, a total of many tens of thousands, including some five hundred each year of Moon and Half Dome. This one aspect of the business has grossed impressive amounts. An excellent printer himself, Alan consistently matches Ansel’s high standards.10
Having seen to Ansel’s peripheral worries, Bill moved to Carmel to set to work as his business manager. Shortly thereafter, the Datsun (now Nissan) automobile company signed Ansel to star in a television commercial; as an enticement to consumers, Datsun promised to plant one tree for every test-drive taken.11 This was the first real evidence of the branding of Ansel, encouraged by Bill: the ad used not a famous Ansel Adams photograph but the old man of unquestioned principles himself.
Chatting on the nation’s television screens about the need to reseed our imperiled national forests with trees, even if in a car advertisement, did not strike Ansel as something to be ashamed of.12 He believed that his participation in the commercial did as much for the U.S. Forest Service as it did for Datsun.13 Ansel was told that 160,000 seedlings were planted thanks to this ad campaign.14
Although Time praised “Drive a Datsun, Plant a Tree” as being in particularly good taste, Ansel took a lot of heat from others for his role as an automobile advertising spokesperson.15 He was hurt and puzzled by the chorus of criticism.16 To the accusation that he was now promoting the very thing he had been working to eliminate in Yosemite, Ansel responded that almost all of us depended on our cars and that the Datsun was less polluting and more fuel-efficient than most.17 Because he needed huge cars to carry all his camera equipment, he himself always drove gas guzzlers, among them a big Pontiac, a Cadillac, and, at this time, a Ford LTD.
Imogen Cunningham felt it was just one more instance of Ansel’s selling out. In 1969, he had allowed one of his winter views of Yosemite Valley to be printed on three-pound cans of Hills Brothers coffee. With her trademark caustic wit, she had sent him one of the cans filled with manure and sprouting a very healthy marijuana plant, terming it “pot in a pot.”18 Now collector’s items, these Adams coffee cans have sold for up to $1,500, without Imogen’s embellishment.19
Negative reactions of friends and the public to “Drive a Datsun, Plant a Tree” hurt Ansel, and he swore he would never again permit himself or his work to be used to promote a commercial product.20 He stuck to his word, though not before completing the contract that Bill had arranged for him with Wolverine Worldwide, an American manufacturer of hiking boots that paid him seventeen thousand dollars in 1972 and fifteen thousand in 1973 (plus some swell shoes) for the commercial use of his photographs, along with some prints for the corporate offices.21
As the decade of the seventies progressed, interest in fine photography skyrocketed. As a hobby, photography exploded, with sales of photographic equipment doubling over the course of the decade. Newsstands offered a wide variety of specialized magazines, and most colleges added photography courses to their curricula, producing thousands of photo majors.22
This newfound popularity, combined with a booming economy and the fact that an original photograph by an important photographer still cost far less than comparable works in most other media, contributed to the first broad interest in the purchase of photographs as art. Sales picked up as a handful of new galleries opened their doors, including Witkin in New York City, Siembab in Boston, Halsted in Detroit, and Focus in San Francisco, soon followed by such galleries as LIGHT in New York, Lunn in Washington, Weston in Carmel, Grapestake in San Francisco, A Gallery for Fine Photography in New Orleans, and G. Ray Hawkins in Los Angeles. Major auction houses such as Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Swann, and Butterfields (now Bonhams) began to conduct biannual photography auctions.
Photography collecting rapidly gained momentum, and Ansel was perfectly positioned to benefit. Immediately, his photographs led the market, with sixteen-by-twenty-inch prints selling for $150 each in the early seventies—certainly a significant increase from their 1932 price of ten dollars, but still very affordable.23
There was a big downside to the new demand for Ansel’s prints, however: Ansel had to make them. The more popular the image—one of the group he called his “Mona Lisas”—the more prints he had to make, and the more depressed he got, chained to his darkroom trying to keep up with orders. Even when Bill raised print prices to five hundred dollars on September 1, 1974, sales, far from slowing, only soared.24 The Collectibles Market Report pronounced, “Nothing goes up forever, but [an] Adams has the qualities of a blue chip like [a] Renoir.”25
In the spring of 1975, Bill issued a press release announcing that as of December 31 of that year, Ansel would accept no more print orders. Until that time, all sixteen-by-twenty-inch prints would be priced at eight hundred dollars, except Moonrise, which would cost twelve hundred.26 The idea was to give individuals and dealers one last opportunity to buy Ansel’s work and then free him to move on to other projects.
By the deadline, they were stunned by orders for thirty-four hundred prints, 1,060 from Lunn Gallery alone.27 “[Harry Lunn] got his mitts on Ansel Adams . . . and the rest is history,”28 a newspaper article later asserted. Within four years, Lunn could report that he had fewer than 250 prints remaining.29 By that time, Ansel’s photographs were selling for many multiples of their original price, and major money was being made in the secondary market.30
Harry Lunn was a fabled art broker, a dealer’s dealer who often acts as middleman in the sale of spectacular nineteenth-century photography albums. For many years, he was also the major player in the Ansel Adams market. From the 1970s until his death in 1998, few photographic projects of the highest magnitude were carried out without Harry’s involvement in one stage or another.
A tall, rangy man with a full beard and imperious bearing, Harry looked just a bit like a stern Amish farmer who dressed in impeccably tailored suits. It was commonly understood (and never denied by Harry himself) that he was at one time a CIA operative, which certainly added to his mystique.31 Once, Jim and I met Harry for
dinner at Au Trou Gascon in Paris. We arrived first and were seated, but Harry insisted on trading places with me so that his back would not face the door. It made me a believer in what I had thought was simply a myth. When Harry suffered a fatal heart attack in 1998, his New York Times obituary revealed that he had served undercover in the CIA from about 1955 until his identity was blown in 1967 by an article in Ramparts magazine. He had been based in Paris and was involved with the international section of the National Students Association, a CIA front.32
Harry was anything but shy about his methods of building up a market for a particular artist. In Ansel’s case, he held a huge inventory with multiple copies of what he believed were the best pictures. He selected nine images as Ansel’s masterpieces and refused to sell them, promoting the other images and building a market and prices. After he had established those, he finally released his top nine, at “marvelously enormous prices. That’s when you make all your money,” he boasted.33
Some of the Ansel Adams prints that he worked his best magic on, the ones that he tantalizingly listed on his gallery’s August 8, 1978, inventory sheet followed by the notation NFS (not for sale), were Moonrise, Mount Williamson, Clearing Winter Storm, Moon and Half Dome, Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Oak Tree, Snowstorm, Tenaya Creek, Dogwood, Rain, Aspens (horizontal), and Sand Dune, Sunrise, each one an Adams masterpiece.34 Harry and other dealers set prices based on the photographs’ individually perceived comparative value, as determined by auction results, buyer demand, and their own personal taste.
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