by Ansel Adams
Steichen came to the Museum last Tuesday to see the show (Edward Weston retrospective). He told Edward that he was “taking over here.” Dave McAlpin called me later to say that O’Keeffe had told him that Steichen had told her that he had accepted the job and was going to start as soon as he found a place to live in New York. So that is how things stand.
I immediately telegrammed Beaumont:
LETTER RECEIVED TONIGHT FEEL YOU MUST MAKE DEFINITE STAND NO COMPROMISE REMEMBER YOU BROUGHT PHOTOGRAPHY TO MUSEUM PHOTOGRAPHY IS MORE IMPORTANT STARTING WHEELS TURNING OUT HERE AM SPOILING FOR FIGHT AM WRITING.
LOVE TO EVERYBODY.
7 March, 1946
Dear Ansel:
The Rubicon is passed. The die is cast. I enclose a copy of my letter of resignation.… After these months of indecision, after Nancy and I had talked ourselves out about the whole matter, I have at last come to a final and irrevocable decision. The Museum cannot have me if they have Steichen.
Yours as ever,
Beau
The Newhalls left, and a few months later I notified them in pseudo-telegram style:
THURSDAY, JULY 17
BEAUMONT AND NANCY:
FLASH!!!
EDWARD STEICHEN APPOINTED HEAD OF PHOTOGRAPHY AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. APPOINTMENT BECOMES EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. ROCKEFELLER SAYS, “MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS WHERE PHOTOGRAPHY IS NOT THE THEME BUT THE MEDIUM THROUGH WHICH GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS AND GREAT MOMENTS ARE GRAPHICALLY PRESENTED.” IN SHORT, EVERYTHING THAT WE FEARED * * * THE COMPLETE ENGULFING OF PHOTOGRAPHY AS YOU AND I AND N SEE IT AND FEEL IT INTO A VAST PICTURE ARCHIVE OF SUBJECTS.
ANSEL
I knew with the departure of both Newhalls there would now be capitulation to the common and the popular. I truly detested Steichen’s large exhibits primarily because they were completely subject-oriented. I refused to participate in them for many years. His “The Family of Man” that opened in late 1955 was a tremendous hit with the public. Some of the images were magnificent, but Steichen had many enlarged way beyond the point where there was any print beauty remaining.
He requested the use of my negative, Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, From Manzanar, California, 1944. I urged Steichen to let me make the huge mural he envisioned for this image, but he replied that mine then would be inconsistent with the quality of the other prints in the exhibit. I refused to part with the negative, sending him a copy negative instead. In my printing instructions (that I was very uncertain anyone would even read) I wrote on December 17, 1954:
The negative was loaded in a small, stuffy room at Manzanar during the war and there is a damp fingermark in the sky which does not show in the small print but comes through like the fingerprint of Gawd in big enlargements.
I became ill when I saw the finished mural. He had transformed Mt. Williamson from one of my strongest statements into expensive wallpaper. “The Family of Man” would have been ideal under the auspices of the United Nations but not at the Museum of Modern Art. I lost interest in MOMA for many years.
When John Szarkowski took over as director of the Department of Photography in 1962, creative photography was offered another chance, MOMA, always a focal point in the world of art, for better or for worse, finally and unequivocally recognized photography for what it is and might be: a creative art, not a sociopolitical platform.
After his separation from MOMA, Beaumont was appointed the first curator of George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in 1948. During the next two decades Beaumont developed the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House into the greatest collection of creative photographs in the world. During these years Nancy, Beaumont, and I continued to collaborate on many books and exhibitions, enjoying frequent visits and work sessions together.
The Rochester experience with the Newhalls was important to me in many ways. Rochester is known as the photographic capital of the universe because of the presence of the Great Yellow Father, the Eastman Kodak Company. I found the town itself dismal, with a climate that was difficult, to say the least. I cannot imagine anyone willfully living there. The chief urban voices of Rochester are the police and fire sirens, practicing their wailings at all hours of night and day. San Francisco has its foghorns, Rochester its sirens. But the creative spirit thrived somehow in spite of the environment. The University of Rochester is excellent, the Eastman School of Music a justifiably renowned institution, and the Rochester Institute of Technology a leader in the education of professional photographers.
The Newhalls acquired a small wooden house, and Nancy turned it into a beautiful home-salon, certainly one of the most charming residences in the area. Beaumont, a fine chef and food critic, produced an array of great meals from his kitchen. The house, built on Rundel Park, looked out on a central area of trees that was rewarding at all times of the year.
One time I house-sat for them while they were in Europe and I worked on a project for the University of Rochester. It was pleasant living in their home, but a bit lonesome, although I was surrounded by their cats. The cats disliked me; I do not know the reason, as I liked them. They remained very unfriendly until the Newhalls returned, then were all over me with affectionate climbings and cuddlings peculiar to sophisticated cats. There was a little swinging cat-door built into the base of the front window, which the cats were constantly passing through. Occasionally a neighbor dog would chase the cats right up to the door. There would be a bang and swish as a cat came through, usually followed by a dull thud as the dog hit the door frame.
I well remember the time that the three of us visited one of our heroes, John Marin, at his home in Cliffside, New Jersey. After my experiences with that sensitive man in the beauty of the Southwest landscape, I was astonished to find him living in a drab little house in a depressed neighborhood just west of the Palisades. I recall gray, stuffed furniture, curio ashtrays from Atlantic City, and a tiny, bleak fireplace over which hung, in an assertive way, an empty picture frame.
We all went out to lunch. First we took a breezy drive along the Palisades Parkway in Marin’s Packard. He sat hunched low and far to the left in the driver’s seat, almost obscured with a broad-brimmed hat, swirling around the curves with abandon. We stopped at an Italian restaurant of Mafia-mood, overlooking the Hudson, with barren booths and jukebox decor. The lunch was good for that part of the country and the Old-Fashioneds very good indeed.
We returned at a somewhat slower pace to his studio, where we were deeply moved by his magnificent paintings. The studio was a jumble as was the house, but nevertheless vibrated with his personality and the strength of his work. I made a few casual portraits of Marin with my 35mm camera to show the spirit of the man and his environment. We returned to New York, sober and thoughtful. John Marin was a tremendous artist.
I first met Marin in Taos, New Mexico, in 1930 at Mabel Luhan’s home, the same time I met Paul Strand. We shared an evening of music. I remember playing a lot of Bach, to Marin’s delight. We discussed phrasing and the production of “clear notes.” It was difficult for me to explain to him that a single note on the piano could not be modulated other than being struck with varying degrees of intensity, soft to loud. Marin said, “Now see here, Adams, a note is a single critter and can be changed a million ways.” I could not persuade him that it was the sequence of notes that mattered: the quality of one note relating to the next and the one before and the space between (legato, portamento, staccato) and the relative intensities of the notes, to say nothing of the shapes of the phrasing. But he insisted that the “single critter” had great expressive qualities in itself. Marin loved to spin carefully detailed fables and once recounted the following:
One day I was cleaning my furnace over in New Jersey and there I was on my back digging the clinkers out of the grate when one fell on the concrete below and made the most beautiful tinkling sound! I made up my mind that if I ever got rich I was going to rent Carnegie Hall and invite everybody I knew and a lot I didn’t know, including the stupid critics. I was going to have a smo
oth concrete platform in the middle of the stage. Whenever the people stopped chattering I would slowly dim the lights except for one gorgeous soft golden spotlight on the platform. I would then come to the platform, stand by it for maybe ten minutes—everything would get very quiet and still—and then I would drop one clinker—just one—on the concrete. There would be one beautiful sound—just one—and after several minutes of darkness, to let people think about what they heard, I would turn up the lights and let them go home. It could be the most wonderful concert they ever heard: one clear and brittle singing clinker note. Don’t give me any more of that marmalade about your not being able to make a single beautiful note!
I convinced Beaumont and Nancy to join me on a trip through the Southwest. We moved from Zion to Bryce to the Grand Canyon and many other areas of this astonishing country. One evening, after a grueling day of photographing and driving over miles of beautiful desolation, we came at evening to the brink of Bryce Canyon. Before we prepared a supper-in-the-dark, I begged them to walk to the edge of the great vista that was slowly yielding to twilight. Beaumont, tired, dusty, and hungry, waited for Nancy’s glowing response to the scene and then said quietly, “Oh Gawd, more Nature.” At first startled, I became sympathetic; I recalled how he had described New England, rhapsodizing on the tranquil scenes of villages and farms nestled dozing in the blankets of flaming autumn. He loved his land just as I do mine.
In 1949 the Newhalls insisted upon showing me a little of their country: the state of Maine. I chose late October over their protests that it would be severely cold. I wanted to photograph storms and great waves along the Atlantic shore. Neither cooperated during our trip; the autumn leaves had turned and mostly fallen, the air was keen, and the vistas sharp and a bit forbidding.
One of our first stops was to be for a promised Maine lobster. Before dinner we walked about the place and I noted a large pool of a gruesome green color. On inquiry I learned that it was a lobster pound where many thousands of lobsters were stored for the New York market. It looked like liquid mold, opaque and sinister with only an occasional ripple suggesting lobster-life. At dinner we each had a large lobster, poised upright and waiting for the inevitable. It tasted like penicillin, and I had trouble consuming even a part of it. The Newhalls thought it was ambrosial; I think it was the only disagreement I ever had with them over food.
We went on to Acadia National Park. It was cold and bleak, but I became aware of the essential beauty of the Maine coast. Mount Cadillac is a high dome of stone, almost Arctic in mood, rising with hoary patience above a restless ocean. Lichens, moss, scrub vegetation, and the eastern October wind: a situation I had never experienced before. I included one of the photographs I made that trip, The Atlantic, Schoodic Point, Acadia National Park, in my Portfolio II, published in 1950.
We stopped for gas, and while waiting for the slow pump to deliver the fuel I noticed a tumor about the size of a lemon on a front tire. I looked at the other tires and saw another growth on the inner side of a rear tire. The treads were worn smooth, too.
I said to Beaumont, “We have to get new tires. These are dangerous.”
Beaumont protested, “The tires are perfectly all right!”
I replied, “I will not ride on those tires another mile—the casings have failed and anything could happen!” I knew an impasse was hovering, so I said, “Look, I will get you four tires for a Christmas present and we will put them on right now. A bubbled tire can be lethal.” Beaumont had to give in; the new tires were installed and off we went to Boston.
While an excellent driver, Beaumont does not worry about the mechanics of a car until it stops. He is always concerned that I give too much thought to machinery. Perhaps I do, but I have had very few breakdowns on the road in over a million miles of driving. With my heavy 1946 Cadillac in rough country I would sometimes lose a rear axle. I always carried two or three extra axles, to the astonishment of desert repair shops. I would be towed in to some little desert conglomerate of service–repair shop–hamburger–beer counter and say, “I lost my axle.”
They would respond, “Gee, that’s too bad. It will take three or four days to get one out of Los Angeles.”
I would reply, “I have an axle with me.” They would always be incredulous, but I would present the axle, neatly swathed in greasy paper, and in an hour or so I was back on the road.
Projects with the Newhalls grew like Topsy. There are too many to describe, but all were exciting and worthwhile. Nancy and I produced seven books together: Death Valley (1954), Mission San Xavier del Bac (1954), The Pageant of History in Northern California (1954), Yosemite Valley (1959), This Is the American Earth (1960), Fiat Lux (1967), The Tetons and the Yellowstone (1970).
Always a pleasure to work with, Nancy possessed the ability of structured anticipation to a remarkable degree: projects from their inception would be beautifully conceived in their entirety. If we discussed a book or article, she could visualize the completed work with precision in content, format, and design. In laying out an exhibit or a book, I wondered how she could memorize the various placements and sequences without notes or apparent effort. She had a permanent visual memory for what she saw in the world, in a work of art, or on a page of type.
Nancy could also thoroughly research a subject, study maps and pictures, listen to verbal descriptions, and then produce an article that had the intensity and accuracy one would expect from a direct experience with the subject. One example was an article she wrote for Arizona Highways on the Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona. Our first collaboration was a series of articles for them on the Southwest, and we visited and photographed many places together except one, the Canyon de Chelly. However, after seeing early photographs plus the ones that I had made, and reading up on the area, she produced an article that was both fully accurate and emotionally valid. It was difficult to believe she had not physically experienced this marvelous place and absorbed its spiritual qualities.
One of her finest literary efforts was organizing Time in New England, combining the photographs of Paul Strand with selections from the writing of preachers, poets, and politicians that reflect the life-quality and spirit of the enduring early American culture. All went well with Time in New England until Paul stated he would not enter Boston, which he considered to be the seat of American Imperialism. How to do a book on New England without including Boston? Texts posed no difficulty, but the lack of photographs presented a problem. Nancy solved this dilemma by selecting some of Strand’s most sensitive and expressive images of New England people and close-up objects that were used as symbolic statements of the Boston spirit.
This was probably the first book of its kind where photographs and text maintain a synergistic relationship; the pictures do not illustrate the text, nor does the text describe the pictures. I prefer the term “synaesthetic,” as two creative elements join to produce a third form of communication. Wright Morris’s pictures among his text in the books The Home Place and God’s Country and My People are not truly synergistic, as they replace verbal descriptions. More recently, Picture America with photographs by Jim Alinder and words by Wright Morris is a rare book of synaesthetic quality; the pictures animate the short texts and the words heighten sensitivity to the photographs.
Possibly the most worthwhile of my projects with Nancy was the exhibition and accompanying book This Is the American Earth. In 1955 the Sierra Club still had the LeConte Memorial as its headquarters in Yosemite, but the National Park Service requested that it be put to better use for the public good. I suggested that the Sierra Club mount a magnificent exhibit of photographs related to our environment and install it at the Memorial. This idea met with great enthusiasm from the other Sierra Club trustees. I asked Nancy to help in the design of the show and to provide literary material. We gathered the work of thirty-two photographers, myself included, and assembled it with Nancy’s poetic text. Nancy, assisted by Dave Brower, also designed the exhibition into a book, the first of the Sierra Club’s
exhibit format series. The devoted conservationist Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas described it as “one of the great statements in the history of conservation.”
A strange anachronism persists in most conservation literature. I do not understand how such a fundamentally emotional subject—our natural world—can be so bleakly interpreted and discussed. I have read few conservation books that gave me an honest thrill. Whenever I wish to refer to a brilliant stylist, I think of Wallace Stegner. The photography of such fine artists as Eliot Porter and Philip Hyde are all too often submerged in the weight of indifferent texts. The facts may all be there, but the spirit wanders forlorn.
Typical of such writing is, “The writer ascended the northwest ridge to an altitude of 8760 feet. He then traversed the gully to the west ridge and continued to an altitude of 9500 feet. He then attacked the southwest face and reached the 11,740 foot summit at 2:45 P.M. The view was extensive. He returned to his camp by the southeast slope.” I am sure the experience was far more luminous than the remarks that I doubt would stir the spirits of even the most devoted mountaineers.
Nancy’s text for This Is the American Earth is, for me, a sublime poem, paeonic and evocative. She illuminated profound thoughts with explicit and miraculous words and phrases. Her lines should be read as though they were parts of Genesis, each word for the words that live around it, each thought for the other thoughts comprising its matrix, in a structure of imagery, history, and prophecy.
You shall know the night—its space, its light, its music.