by Ansel Adams
Yours,
Ansel Adams
I was surprised when he refused me, stating:
October 14, 1933
… Your new venture of a gallery in San Francisco does interest me for I feel whatever you try to do will be in an honest and unarty way. Nevertheless I cannot say yes to an exhibition of my things at the present time. Actually I have little interest in exhibitions because at the basis they… exploit the artist to entertain the public free of charge. I can never get used to the idea that pictures are free entertainment in the U.S., elsewhere too, that the people who claim to enjoy a thing never support the individual who makes what gives them pleasure.… But in addition I don’t like to let these prints go out of my hands. (They exist for the most part in only one example.)… to be handled by express or mail carriers—custom inspectors etc. They are not the usual tough gaslight prints and a scratch means ruination.… Perhaps some day I will get to Frisco again and that would be different. All this I hope you understand and not feel me to be merely uncooperative.
I replied:
October 31, 1933
I understand perfectly your refusal to send an exhibit to me. You have many good and sufficient reasons. I must admit that I do not fully understand your attitude about exhibitions in general. I think there are always a few people in any part of the land that would react completely to truly fine things—that would make those things functional in a social sense. After all, should we not be resigned to the naked fact that there is only a very, very small real audience for anything worthwhile? And should we not trust that in almost any group there will be a few—perhaps only one—who will perceive the significance of a great expression? And if there is only one, wouldn’t that justify an exhibit?
I have always had things happen to me—psychologically, even physically—when I have seen your things. I believe you have made the one perfect and complete definition of photography.…
Strand and I remained friends, corresponding and visiting each other when possible. One March day in Yosemite in 1944 I received a phone call from a secretary at Selznick Productions in Hollywood asking if I could talk with Mr. Selznick about a very important matter; if so, please hang on. After a long wait, a tight, strained voice came on the other end. “Mr. Adams, we are in a crisis! This is Selznick speaking!” Pause. “Mr. Adams, our still photographer for the great film I have been working on, Since You Went Away, was drunk all the time and we have no production publicity pictures.” Pause. “Mr. Paul Strand and Mr. Leo Hurwitz, who are working with me on this film, say you can make prints of anything—so I am calling you. Please come down right away and help me out.”
I checked to see if it was Mr. Selznick and then drove to Los Angeles the next day. Nobody at Selznick headquarters had heard about me. I finally found Paul, and he confirmed he had recommended me. Confused, I finally arrived in the inner chambers of David O. Selznick. He explained again how and why he did not have any black and white publicity prints and how vital it was that he possess them. With rising emphasis he said, “Mr. Adams, you and I can revolutionize the still photography part of the industry!” He then got out of his chair and started to pace around the room while he expounded the great future of our new approach.
I was bewildered and stood up, thinking he might be leading me on a visit to another office. He gestured to me and said, “Of course, you can pace too!” We then both paced the room while he talked on about this coming miracle in the movie business.
Finally he picked up the phone and told someone, “Mr. Adams will be over to select the frames from the master film negative to make prints from. This is very important. I am going to New York tomorrow for a week and I want to be sure Mr. Adams has everything, note everything, he needs.” He hung up briskly, shook hands, and darted out the door.
I finally found the master cutting room and immediately observed that the editor there was seething. “What in hell does he think he’s doing—letting you cut up the master negative to print frames that will be no good anyway? IMPOSSIBLE!!!”
I could hear the wisdom in what he was saying. What to do? It was decided to go through acceptable outtakes—many of them paralleled the frames in the master reel. First I had to sit in a small theater and go through the entire film, asking them to mark selected frames. This took a full day. Since they would not cut out individual frames, I had to take a suitcase full of footage to Yosemite for printing. It took another week of selection to find the exact frames before I was ready to print. I made about twenty final prints and, if I do say so myself, they were pretty good. I sent off two sets to Selznick who telegraphed, “MARVELOUS, WONDERFUL, A NEW ERA, ETC., ETC.”
A week later I received a letter from Selznick’s publicity department:
Dear Mr. Adams:
The prints are very beautiful. Unfortunately we cannot use them for publicity as none of the scenes have light backgrounds.
Finis to my role in the revolutionary concept of still photographs taken from the original negative film. All was not for naught, however, as I received seven hundred and fifty dollars for the job, and that financed several months of my own creative work in Yosemite!
Following our Hollywood adventure, Strand came to visit us in late May 1944. As luck would have it, during his week-long first visit to Yosemite, the cloud cover never lifted more than a thousand feet above the valley floor. Only the lower third of the cliffs was visible. In the constant mist or rain, Lower Yosemite Fall thundered out of the clouds.
Strand enjoyed the mood but was photographically inactive. He appeared depressed. He took a walk in the morning, returned for lunch, rested an hour or so, and had another walk in late afternoon. He would bundle up, secure from the chilly air and penetrating drizzle, and walk several miles on the valley roads and trails, all on level ground. He seemed appreciative, but remote. I offered him any camera I had, but he declined, saying, “I must get used to the place first.” At the end of his visit he remarked, “I saw a stump I want to photograph sometime.”
The next year I found him back in New York preparing a major exhibit for the Museum of Modern Art. He was given work space in the subbasement for mounting his photographs. I was occupied on the fourth floor with Department of Photography affairs. Over several days Strand frequently called me, asking that I come down and help him with a print mounting decision. I was flattered.
When I arrived Strand would say, “Good of you to come. I have another problem.” Placing a print, already accurately trimmed and mounted on a thin card, on a larger mount board, he would say, “Do you like it here?” Then, moving it up or down a scant eighth of an inch, he would ask, “Or here?” For the life of me I could not feel any real difference, but I would take a careful stance, look, and reply, “I think I like the last [or first] position.” He would then lightly define the corners of the print on the mount with a very sharp, hard pencil, then set the print and mount on the shelf and say, “I will make my final decision tomorrow.” This extreme precision both interested and irritated me, but all was forgiven because the images were so beautiful.
Strand took active interest in the American Communist movement during the 1930s. His teacher at New York’s Ethical Culture School had been Lewis Hine, the great photographer who documented America’s new immigrants earlier in the century. Paul, following the lead of Hine and many other New York artists, was what is termed “leftist-leaning.” Paul fervently believed that pure socialism was the best hope for mankind.
Most creative people are strongly humanistic. Artists must be free to create and offer the products of their imagination and emotion to the world. They resent the restrictions of the unimaginative—the impulse to take, consume, and produce little except material things, and to profit thereby. Stieglitz was independently a rebel; Weston remained aloof to political involvement, but was a devout liberal in spirit; Strand required the support of group political activity to affirm his stand.
The happy and optimistic Paul that I first knew in the 1930s became morose. Because
he no longer believed in a healthy future for America, Strand moved to France in 1949. He chose not to live and work under the impending fascism toward which he believed America was headed. Luckily, he escaped the witch trials led by Joseph McCarthy that horribly scarred the lives of many American artists.
I am glad that my dedication to him in my book Photographs of the Southwest came to his attention shortly before he died in 1976. It was a small tribute to a man who was a very important influence on my creative life.
10.
Stieglitz & O’Keeffe
WITH VIRGINIA’S FIRST PREGNANCY IN THE WINTER of 1932 came the realization that our lives were soon to change. Virginia’s father generously gave us a gift of one thousand dollars to take a trip to the East Coast and to see a bit of America before our family life began. We left San Francisco by train in early March 1933 with almost all of our money safely in traveler’s checks. As the Great Depression was flourishing, our Pullman car was practically empty. To save money, we were tucked away in a single upper berth, much to the consternation of the conductor and porter.
Our first stop was Santa Fe, where we found that President Roosevelt had closed the banks and our traveler’s checks were temporarily worthless. We stayed with friends, and the anticipated few days turned into two weeks. After an extended series of telegrams between us, Harry Best, and Albert Bender, Albert, in some miraculous way, manipulated our checks into cash and we were back on our way.
Armed with letters of introduction from Mrs. Sigmund Stern and Albert, we arrived in a freezing Chicago and were invited to an elaborate dinner at a sedate home in Winnetka. I was seated next to a very gushy lady, who cooed comments and questions.
“Mr. Adams, I know you have been all over Europe. What are your favorite places?”
I said, “No, I have never been to Europe.”
She cooed again, “If you did go, what would your favorite places be?”
I replied, “I guess I would be most enthralled with the Gothic cathedrals.”
And then she asked me, “And what would interest you most about the cathedrals?”
I said, “I guess it would be the flying buttocks.”
End of conversation. I noted one guest practically choking to death while a general stony silence prevailed until someone spoke of a divine Cézanne just given to the Chicago Art Institute.
We went on to Detroit. The full effects of the Depression hit us there. It was such a sad city; the stores were open but empty. As I finished reading the nickel newspaper in the lobby of our hotel and put it down, a well-dressed man sitting near me got up and snatched it. We went to see Diego Rivera’s newly completed frescoes at the Detroit Institute of Art and thought they were grand. The people of Detroit were already arguing over whether to have them painted over, with opinion divided among whether they were true art, Communist propaganda, or just plain ugly.
Then it was on to Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and Rochester to visit the Eastman Kodak factory. Visiting Kodak was a remarkable experience—from the laboratories with their complex equipment to the final shipping stations. Materials were moved about the extensive factory by little steam locomotives that puffed about with dispatch. I recall the large piles of silver ingots waiting to be dissolved into the emulsion compounds and the impressive ranks of huge rolls of paper awaiting coating. In those days photographic film had a nitrate base and was highly flammable and potentially explosive. Accordingly, the danger was clearly proclaimed throughout the factory.
Our most important destination was New York City, where we arrived on March 28. We were recommended a hotel, the Pickwick Arms on East 51st Street. It was the last resting place of the “denizens of the inferior stage” (quoting Lawrence). In the depths of the Depression, its dismality was exponential. While in New York we planned to visit the museums and attend plays and concerts, but my prime goal was to show my photographs to the greatest photographic leader in the world, Alfred Stieglitz.
Within hours of our arrival in New York, I sallied forth with my photographs under my arm to visit Stieglitz at his gallery, An American Place. I threaded my way through multitudes of garbage cans soaked with cold drizzle and shuddered at what I saw as the typical New York sidewalk scene, only later to realize that it was garbage collection day in that part of town. The buildings towered around me, soaring to oppressive heights. The traffic groaned, honked, sputtered, and roared. I brushed another pedestrian and said, “Excuse me.” He glowered in return. I moved on to Madison Avenue and turned right, passing interminable shops of infinite variety until I found 509 Madison Avenue.
Elevated to the seventeenth floor, with trepidation I pushed open the door of An American Place and found no one in sight. It was a beautifully barren room filled with expectant space, enclosed by walls of an indescribable tone on which a few paintings were hung, thrusting like jewels into the cool light. Four doorless apertures led to other spaces. Light came from windows looking west and north, and ceiling troughs emitted a blue-white glow. The radiators were knocking, and I could hear a crisp rustle of papers through one of the doorways.
I walked through that doorway and entered a small room filled with paintings, photographs, books, papers, frames, letters, pens, blotters, gum drops, leaflets, and a telephone. At its center was a small elderly man, enrobed in a large black cape, with silver hair and mustache and tufts of hair bristling out of his ears, his full attention on a book open before him on the desk. Stieglitz looked up at me with a glower.
“What do you want?”
“I came to meet you, Mr. Stieglitz, and show you my work. I’m a California photographer.”
I presented him with my letter of introduction from Mrs. Stern.
He opened it and said, “All this person’s got is money, and if this Depression keeps on much longer she’s not going to have that. What do you want?”
My sense of chivalry toward my dear friend, the enlightened and generous Mrs. Stern, was bruised. “I just would like to show you my prints,” I sputtered, hardly able to conceal my anger.
“Come back at two-thirty.”
I stormed out of An American Place and pounded up and down Madison Avenue. I met Virginia for lunch and told her I wanted to go back to California. “Why should I take this kind of treatment?” I had found this first meeting very distasteful, and the ambience of New York, dreadful. Virginia calmed me down and convinced me to return, stating, “After all, what did you come all this way for?”
So I straggled back to 509 Madison, and as I entered Stieglitz said, “Come in, come in. Now, let’s see what you’ve got.” I gave him my portfolio and he opened it. It contained a number of small photographs, all recent contact prints that I felt were my best.
He sat on the one and only chair so I sat on the radiator. He looked at each print with the greatest care. Each time I started to say something he would imperatively gesture for silence. He put the prints back in the portfolio, tied up one end, tied up the other end, tied up the front, then looked at me. Then he opened the portfolio again and studied them as carefully as he had the first time. By now the steam heat was pouring out of the radiator and I could not sit there anymore; my bottom had baked into corrugation. I was extremely nervous, but Stieglitz finally spoke, “You are always welcome here.” He liked my work. He felt my photographs were what he called “straight” and seen with “sensitivity.”
Jubilantly, I returned to Virginia at the Pickwick Arms. I decided I now had the courage to also show my work to Alma Reed, who owned the respected Delphic Studios, one of the very few art galleries that dared to show photographs at the time. She expressed interest in my work and promised me my first one-man show in New York later that year.
Alma Reed represented the great Mexican painter Orozco, to whom she introduced me. Orozco was a very intense man who affected large dark eyeglasses, thereby creating the impression of some slightly wrathful Mayan god. Behind this fierce exterior he was gentle and sympathetic. Her permitted me to photograph him on Alma’s back porch, glasses a
nd all. I caught some of his intensity. Unknown to me at that time, in 1930 Edward Weston had made an excellent portrait of Orozco, glasses and all, that provided one of those occasions for historians to assume plagiarism, amusing both Edward and me.
My exhibition of fifty photographs opened at the Delphic Studio in November of 1933. I paid for the announcements and the shipment of my prints. A few were sold, for which I received nothing; the times were tough for all galleries and artists. It did receive a favorable paragraph written by Howard Devree in the November 19, 1933, New York Times, which was cheering.
Three shows are on at the Delphic Studios. Photography by Ansel Adams, a Californian, strikingly captures a world of poetic form. His lens has caught snow-laden branches in their delicate tracery; shells embedded in sandstone; great trees and cumulus clouds. It is masterly stuff.
I returned annually to New York to visit Stieglitz, and show him my latest photographs. In January of 1936 he told me he would give me a show. I was totally elated and worked for months to make just the right prints.
My exhibition at An American Place was mounted in November of 1936. I wrote to Virginia from New York:
November 16, 1936
… The show at Stieglitz is extraordinary—not only are they hung with the utmost style and selection, but the relation of prints to room, and the combination in relation to Stieglitz himself, are things which only happen once in a lifetime.