by Ansel Adams
“How about a refill?” We all had a refill.
Then, “We have your estimate of what this job will cost us and it is much too high for us.” Sinking feeling.
“Let’s have another snort.” Rising feeling because I knew their technique and I was still doing fine.
“Look, Adams, let’s get this settled before we go to lunch, have another sip and we’ll sign on the dotted line.” I had another sip and was feeling quite serene—they were a bit woozy. Praise the Lord for the buttery hamburgers!
I said, “Look, I figured this to the bone and I cannot cut it one dollar.”
As they refilled the glasses, they said, “Let’s get this settled right now. We will be late (hic!) for lunch.” No, they needed all the listed pictures made. No, they did not question my honesty. No, the budget would not allow that much money to be spent on pictures (another refill).
“Can’t you listen to reason?” they said.
“No, it’s the best I can do for you!”
“Oh, well. Let’s sign the damn thing and have lunch. I’m starved (hic!).” Agreement thereupon signed, then one more snifter of brandy and we all went out to a fine lunch. I remained as cool as the proverbial cucumber while my clients gracefully accepted defeat.
News of my capacity quickly went around town. I had put away a tremendous amount of brandy and had not batted an eye. While this strategy worked well, I do not advise it as a regular approach. Happily, the job was very successful, and considerably more work was requested, but without the brandy tactic.
My old friend George Waters, Jr., an excellent engraver and printer, deserves a place in photographic history because of his valiant struggle to bring creative photography to the attention of that monolithic corporation Eastman Kodak. In the 1940s Kodak was supreme in photo-technology and dominated the market even more than it does today. In the area of aesthetics they were sorely lacking, as are too many corporations. They were devout in the chapel of sales; advertising was their Holy Spirit.
George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak (who died by his own hand, leaving the message, “My work is done; why wait?”), was a remarkable and difficult person. Completely honest, he applied his great wealth to charitable and educational purposes. Although he could not tolerate Bach, he endowed the Eastman School of Music. He installed a fine concert organ in his palatial home and employed a personal organist, who performed light popular classics as requested. The story goes that the organist became ill and delegated his best student to appear for the routine breakfast concert. Eastman had a pressure switch installed under the carpet near the top of the staircase; as he came down the stairs to the dining room, the organist was automatically signaled to begin. This student, fired with the responsibility of performing before the great Rochester tycoon and patron of the arts, began with a Bach aria and continued on with a fugue. Eastman sat at his table, obviously distressed and rattling his newspaper, but endured the ordeal and later sent a command to his organist never again to play Bach in his home. I mention this because it suggests the limitations of his taste in art, and he set the style for the company.
George Waters was employed in the photo-illustrations department of Eastman Kodak and was charged with providing photographs for the general advertising programs of the company. Disturbed by the routine, commonplace qualities of the pictures demanded by the advertising and sales executives, he ventured to invite such photographers as Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, and me to produce some photographs for possible use in their advertising program. I received color sheet film from George in 1947 to use on my first Alaskan trip and again on my trip to Hawaii in 1950. Some of the work was accepted.
Paul Strand was less fortunate; he followed the exposure suggested by his Weston light meter and used a lens mounted in a new shutter with incorrect lens-stop indications on its dial. Most of his work was underexposed, and Paul became terminally disenchanted with color photography.
Edward Weston did some magnificent photographs, following his usual creative approach to his subjects. Fortunately he was successful in adapting his intuitive technique to the color process, and some were purchased for use by Kodak.
The primary film was Ektachrome. It is a great loss to photography that Kodak did not make separations (archival black and white negatives of each prime color image) of these handsome 8xio-inch transparencies by these great artists, for many have faded ruinously. If separations had been made, fine color prints and color press reproductions could be made at any time, and this important work would have been secured for the future. My early Kodachromes have lasted fairly well; the Kodacolor and Ektachrome colors have proved fleeting.
In 1948 the concept of the Colorama for Grand Central Station in New York City was developed and George Waters invited me to participate in the making of some color photographs for it. The Colorama was a giant transparency, eighteen feet high and sixty feet long. It dominated one end of the vast concourse of Grand Central Station with impressive effect. Prepared in Rochester, it was composed of twenty-inch strips of positive color film, enlarged from the original with extreme accuracy, taped together with transparent tape, rolled as a large rug, and transported to New York where it was installed in front of a huge bank of fluorescent tubes, properly diffused and filtered for optimum effect. Over the years Colorama images have been seen by uncounted millions of commuters and tourists.
For the Colorama assignments, I first used one 8xio-inch and two 5x7-inch color transparencies, properly proportioned in the camera to comprise a triptych. Later I used two 8×10 overlapping transparencies that were properly joined and proportioned. I had a device called a “breadboard” that attached to the tripod and supported the camera so that the center of the lens remained over the tripod socket when the camera was swung from one position to the other, thereby assuring no displacement of near objects in the subject. For my last Coloramas I used a 7x17-inch banquet camera with my 13-inch Zeiss Protar lens. The actual film format used in the camera was 4¾×16½ inches, and the Protar lens covered this area perfectly. The severe proportions of the format made it rather difficult to find appropriate subjects, especially in a location such as Yosemite.
The Coloramas became something of a landmark in Grand Central Station, and I happily made quite a number of them. They were aesthetically inconsequential but technically remarkable. In a sense they presented the “real” world but with commercial motivation; there were usually two figures, one photographing the scene with a Kodak camera and the other giving eager attention to the subject or to her companion. The figures were small and the message conceived to create interest in color photography rather than stress a particular camera. I am sure that if George Waters had had his way, the pictures would have been more imaginative.
Don Worth and Gerry Sharpe were my assistants at this time. When in the field they would set up my camera and attend to the many details of each assignment, which included acting as models when necessary. An excellent photographer, Don is also a very fine pianist and composer. While a graduate music student he became interested in photography: a life pattern similar to my own. Our paths crossed in Yosemite, and he assisted me from 1956 to 1960. In 1958, he composed the music for the documentary film Ansel Adams, Photographer. He continues to work intensely in his own creative photography and has produced a very beautiful body of photographs that places him in the front rank of American artists. Gerry Sharpe was truly gifted; her photographs were of highly imaginative quality. After working at Best’s Studio for Virginia and on occasion for me, she received a Guggenheim and traveled to Ghana with high ideals and enthusiasm, producing some superb images. Gerry died tragically in 1968.
One of my memories of both Don and Gerry involves a trying time in 1958. We had spent nearly a month attempting a Colorama in Monument Valley, waiting patiently for the necessary dramatic clouds that never materialized. The hired professional models finally had to return home and I simply gave up, deciding to travel on to Santa Fe. In the hills outside of Sa
nta Fe we happened upon a grove of aspens that immediately captured my imagination. Gerry, Don, and I quickly set up our cameras, and all three of us went to work. We found both Eliot Porter and Laura Gilpin photographing in the same grove at the same time. My creative results made me forget the unobtained Colorama—two photographs, both titled Aspens, Northern New Mexico—one horizontal and one vertical, each different in image and mood, though the groupings of trees were within feet of each other.
Following his term with Kodak, George Waters set up a printing business in San Francisco with considerable success. He engraved and printed a book that I was very pleased with, the large-format Images, 1923–1974. This project also benefited greatly from the elegant design created by my dear friend Adrian Wilson. In the face of growing competition from big printing firms it became financially impossible to operate a one-man plant, and George closed shop after the production of the remarkable facsimile edition of Taos Pueblo in 1976 and the first edition of Photographs of the Southwest. Happily he agreed to assist me with the printing of Yosemite and the Range of Light in 1979.
I struggled with a great variety of assignments through the years. Some I enjoyed and some I detested, but I learned from all of them. The professional is subject to pressures and adjustments that sometimes seem impossible. But learning how to complete just such impossible assignments on time is rewarding, because it develops discipline and a reputation for dependability. I have little use for students or artists who, from their particular plastic towers, scorn commercial photography as a form of prostitution. I grant that it is not difficult to make it so, but I learned greatly from commercial photography and in no way resent the time and effort devoted to it.
Of my last commercial jobs, two have strange links to one of my dearest friends, Imogen Cunningham. I was first introduced to Imogen at about the same time I met Dorothea Lange and many of the other Bay Area photographers in the late 1920s. Imogen’s husband was the etcher Roi Partridge whom I had already met at Albert Bender’s. Roi was a good artist, a solid craftsman, and a fine teacher. Imogen and Roi raised three sons of force and character. But Roi became more alkaline and Imogen more acid and, in human chemistry, one condition did not neutralize the other and they separated.
Imogen was from Seattle, well educated and had studied basic photographic procedure in Germany. From our first acquaintance I was aware of the immense versatility of her talent. I did not especially warm to her early work, such as her nudes of Roi in the mountains of the Northwest, romantic with glooming mist and appropriate diffusion. They seemed to me to be a combination of sincere personal expression and pictorial mannerism. I have never trusted art that seemed “arty,” but in the first years of the century when she began photographing, straight photography was shunned as a matter of principle. To me the first of many important photographs were her remarkable compositions of plant forms, beautifully seen and executed.
Imogen supported herself as a commercial photographer, working with an arduous professional schedule: architecture, portraits, advertisements, and such projects as serving as photographer for Mills College in Oakland, where Roi was professor of art. My first contact with Imogen’s wrath was when Albert Bender, with enthusiasm for his newly discovered protégé Adams, secured me an assignment to do a small catalog for Mills. Little did I realize that I had trod upon very sensitive toes; I had violated territory sacred to Imogen, who left no bones unpicked about it. I declined the college catalog and the fires died down in time. We became good friends and mutual admirers and soon were cofounders of Group f/64.
Imogen was fearless, acrid, opinionated, capable, and, in her particular way, affectionate and loyal. She had an enormous roster of friends, personal and professional, throughout the country, if not the world. On her famed trip to the East Coast to photograph personages for Vanity Fair, she made a magnificent portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, one of the best ever done of that difficult subject. Classic Imogen: she borrowed his camera to take it! Stieglitz liked her work immensely but admitted he had difficulties with what he considered her astringent personality.
Once Imogen and I met at the Newhalls’ in Rochester, New York. I was driving to an assignment in Pittsburgh and offered her a ride; from there she was to take the train back to San Francisco. She reconsidered the situation and decided to take the bus, enabling her to stop off at various cities and towns to see friends and clients. I understood she made more than a dozen stops on the return trip and arrived in San Francisco with more energy than she had on leaving. She must have been at least seventy-five at the time.
Imogen was warmly attracted to young people and sympathetic to their problems and uncertainties. She became closely associated with the flower children of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco but turned away when drugs took over. She loved to go on camping-photographic excursions with her young friends in her Volkswagen camper, roughing it at eighty with enviable energy and enthusiasm. She proudly wore a peace symbol pendant and fended off with stubborn humor the protests of conservative friends that it was Communist propaganda. She had no use for dictatorships of any variety.
In 1969, for one of my last commercial jobs, I selected a photograph, Yosemite Valley, Winter, Yosemite National Park, for reproduction on a Hills Brothers coffee can. The idea was to produce something of lasting attractiveness after the original contents of the can had been consumed. The type on the can did not intrude on the picture and the image had a certain dignity. Potentially corny: actually reasonable. There were thousands of three-pound cans filled with coffee sold nationwide in grocery stores for $2.35 each.
Imogen thought I had sold out to Mammon in a big way. To point up her scorn, she asked a young friend who was driving south from San Francisco to deliver me a marijuana plant in one of the cans. She called it “pot in a pot.” It arrived in good condition without being apprehended by the law. I enjoyed Imogen’s joke, but when my good friend and fellow photographer Henry Gilpin, then deputy sheriff of Monterey County, dropped by and spotted the plant he quietly suggested that I destroy it. I did.
Imogen took me to task again in 1973 when I participated in a project for the Nissan Motor Corporation in U.S.A. I was to do a television commercial for them: the theme was “Drive a Datsun, Plant a Tree.” If a person test-drove a Datsun, the company would pay the U.S. Forest Service to plant a tree. Each person also received a poster of one of my photographs. In the commercial I worked with my camera near a Datsun car parked on a forest road and stated:
A forest can rebuild itself, but the same type of trees may not grow back. And it takes a long time… sometimes as long as eighty years. When man gets involved, nature needs a helping hand.… Companies like Datsun, the car company, are paying for thousands of seedlings to be planted in National Forests throughout our country.
Through programs like this, we can help nature rebuild.…
I am told that more than one hundred and sixty thousand seedlings were planted. Imogen was quite vocal when she saw this television ad: “Adams, you’ve sold out again!” There was no escape from her righteous judgments!
After fifty years I cannot recall all my experiences with this extraordinary woman. Although she was frequently entertained, she returned each night to her solitary little house on Green Street, set amid a charming garden that seemed to prosper and flower just for her. I think it was then that she came face to face with herself and her health and what the coming years had in store. I talked with her shortly before she died: grim at first, she brightened into brilliant and penetrating conversation. Then she went to the hospital for a checkup. In a few days her son Ron phoned to tell me she had “flown the coop.”
I took this to mean she had simply walked out of the hospital and I said, “Ron, you should have used stronger chicken wire.” In fact he meant that the impossible had happened; Imogen had died.
It is difficult for me to think of photography without continuing reference to Imogen and the vitality she spread around her. At eighty, I do not consider myself a
s young as Imogen at ninety. Her last book, After Ninety, was a challenge to the future. She will remain a patron saint of photography for as long as the history of our era endures.
13.
YPCCO
YOSEMITE’S AHWAHNEE HOTEL, COMPLETED IN 1926, IS a vast pile of steel and granite with huge concrete beams simulating timbers. Reflecting typical national park tastes, the architect had tried to compete with the environment. He lost. One of the directors of Yosemite Park and Curry Company (YPCCO), the business that runs the public concessions within Yosemite National Park, visited the completed structure and was appalled by the plans for the yet unfinished interior decoration. The main hall was to be furnished with black leather-covered sofas and buffalo heads were to be hung on the expansive walls. In dismay he turned to Albert Bender for advice. “Whom do you know who could save this mess in Yosemite?” Albert recommended Dr. Arthur Pope, an expert in Persian arts, and his wife, Phyllis Ackerman, a tapestry authority. They accepted the challenge and prepared colorful and highly imaginative plans for the salvation of the Ahwahnee interior.
In search of capable assistants, Phyllis was referred to Jeannette and Ted Spencer. The Spencers were architects, though Jeannette concentrated on interior decoration and stained glass. First trained in Berkeley at the University of California, they went to Paris in 1921, he to the École des Beaux Arts and she to the École du Louvre. Jeannette’s research for her thesis on the stained glass at Sainte-Chapelle in Paris dated the glass, and her definitive findings were published by the French Archeological Society.
From their first meeting Phyllis and Jeannette worked together with great effectiveness; Jeannette did most of the detail design and the stained-glass windows as well as painting the charming abstraction of American Indian basketry in the foyer. Arthur Pope successfully combined Indian and Persian rugs of exceptional quality. While the exterior of the Ahwahnee remained “in the megalithic mode” (as Jeannette described it), the interiors acquired an extraordinary beauty, a rare example of tasteful and functional design.