by Ansel Adams
“Hi! I’m just back from Gandhi’s funeral!” We assembled to hear her describe the turmoil of the preceding weeks. She spoke with riveting energy, and if she was fatigued she certainly did not show it.
Though we never shared an assignment, we would meet often in New York, and once she joined our family in Yosemite for Christmas. I had a moving last visit with her in her home in Darien, Connecticut, when she was suffering during her final years with Parkinson’s disease. I photographed her with my Polaroid camera, and she took the camera from me and returned the gesture. She was bravely active and outgoing until near the end.
As with Bourke-White, most of my journalistic assignments came from Life and Fortune. During the 1950s Dorothea Lange and I became partners for a number of stories. Dorothea, who also lived in the Bay Area, had established her fine reputation while working as one of the photographers in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project during the Depression.
In 1935 President Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration, to aid the thousands of farmworkers unemployed because of the great quantities of land that had become a dust bowl, unable to produce crops. Within this organization was the FSA, led by Roy Stryker, which assembled photographers to record American rural life. Dorothea was, in my opinion, the superior artist in that group. Her great photograph, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1938, is as compelling aesthetically as it is as a document.
My associations with Dorothea were both rewarding and perplexing. No one could dispute her gifts and her extraordinary energy. Her political/social views were quite definite, yet discreetly restrained in her professional and public contacts. I recall many discussions among our close friends and colleagues as to whether she leaned to Leninism or Trotskyism and whether she was a Communist Party member or not. She implied her sympathies in her work, but usually did not make obvious images or pronouncements along any party line. There was great integrity in her beliefs and opinions, and great skepticism about the complacent society around her and the avowed “Good Old Boy” attitudes of industry as well as the general machinations of politics.
Dorothea’s first husband was the painter Maynard Dixon. He was very creative and, to say the least, individualistic. The West was his spiritual domain. He loved the Indians and the cattlemen and, above all, the country. He painted simple, stylized, and heroic images of the West, some of which have great beauty and power. He did not receive the support due him from the intelligentsia of San Francisco, who were then following the shimmering mirage of modern art. What bothered Dixon was not the qualities of good modern art, but the assumption that all avant-garde art was de facto superior.
I had been introduced to many of the artists of San Francisco in 1926, as Albert Bender took me under his wing. This was an extraordinary community; there were no giants of art, but the creative ambience was positive and reasonably healthy. Modern art came late to the American West; late-nineteenth-century modes slowly gave way to expressionism, but the conservative painters fought it tooth and nail.
While Maynard achieved less acclaim, Dorothea became recognized as a powerful and perceptive artist, one of the great photographers of our time. During the 1920s, she had been a professional portraitist and did quite well, but when the Great Depression began, Dorothea turned her convictions and her eye to the problems of society. Her photographic studies of farmworkers came to the attention of Dr. Paul Taylor of the University of California, an authority on agricultural labor problems. From the start it was obvious they made a most effective team; Dorothea left Maynard for Paul. It was a sad situation for Maynard, but he managed it well, as he did many other shattering problems throughout his life, eventually finding a happy marriage to Edith Hamlin, an excellent San Francisco painter.
I recall one joint assignment with Dorothea for Fortune: a story on the agricultural situation in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Dorothea and I were instructed to stress agribusiness, because, after all, Fortune was a business magazine. She stoutly protested; she wanted to depict the far less privileged small farmer, many of whom had been absorbed by the huge corporate farms. Those who remained were having increasingly difficult times; rising costs, strong competition, and the problems of selling their produce presented a dim future. Paul Taylor was a staunch supporter of the Federal Water Project by which each member of a farmer’s bona fide family was entitled to enough free water for one hundred sixty acres of land. The huge corporate farms claimed the same advantage, and that battle continued for years. The Fortune project was resolved by Dorothea’s working with the small farmers and their farm-labor problems while I was left with the large farms and the corporate spirit. She was capable of making one feel a bit conscience-ridden, and this adventure in partnership offered no exception. After this session with agribusiness, I had a clearer vision of what the struggle was all about: overexploitation will exhaust our soil and water and is certain to impoverish California within foreseeable time.
Another joint project was an article for Life on the Mormons in Utah. I had suggested this story to Dorothea as one she would revel in, and she eagerly pursued it with the insistence that I collaborate with her. We agreed to produce also an exhibition of our photographs.
Utah is a unique area of America, both in scenic and human terms. It is disarmingly beautiful country, possessed by a strangely conservative population. The Mormon religion is a strict dogma that binds the people together as no other group in our land. The Mormons have an exemplary family life, their honesty is proverbial, there is little or no crime, they take care of their aged and indigent. They are also an intensely private people.
Dorothea and Paul went to Salt Lake City to obtain permission for our project from a suspicious Board of Elders of the Mormon Church. Apparently, Dorothea and Paul only spoke of the exhibition and not a word about the Life magazine story. I discovered this unfortunate circumstance at the close of the project, and I confess to a real sense of guilt at what I considered our betrayal of their trust.
Although the Life article turned out to be quite short because of the demands of fastbreaking war stories, we felt that the exhibit could tell the story of the three towns we photographed and their people. The exhibit started as a beautiful concept, and the first picture selection was stunning. Then, Dorothea applied her doctrinaire attitudes, which sucked dry the potential spirit. The exhibition garnered little interest and was displayed only briefly.
In spite of the occasional difficulties I had while working with her, I wish to affirm Dorothea’s extraordinary qualities as a photographer. I learned much from her devotion to the art and the severe application of discipline and effort in everything she did. I used one of her photographs, White Angel, Bread Line, San Francisco, in Making a Photograph as an example of powerful creative photography applied to a social situation.
Dorothea and I had a lively correspondence, freely expressing our philosophical disagreements about photography and life in general. This letter, written in 1962, can stand for many.
Dear Dorothea,
Photography, when it tells the truth, is magnificent, but it can be twisted, deformed, restricted, and compromised more than any other art. Because what is before the lens always has the illusion of reality; but what is selected and put before the lens can be as false as any totalitarian lie. While it is true that we get from pictures pretty much what we bring to them in our minds and hearts, we are still restricted by the content and the connotations of the image before us. If the picture is of a clam I don’t think about flamingos! The connotations of much of documentary photography are—to me—quite rigid.…
I resent being told that certain things have significance; that is for me, as spectator, to discover. I resent being manipulated into a politico-social formula of thought and existence. I resent the implications that unless photography has a politico-social function it is not of value to people at large. I resent the very obvious dislike of elements of beauty; our friend Steichen has shocked me time and again by a self-conscious fear of t
he beautiful. Does he feel that way about a painting, about sculpture, architecture, literature and just plain nature? He does not. I am not afraid of beauty, of poetry, of sentiment. I think it is just as important to bring to people the evidence of the beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a document of ugliness, squalor and despair.…
Is there no way photography can be used to suggest a better life—not just to stress the unfortunate aspects of existence or the tragic/satirical viewpoint of the photographer? There must be.…
You happen to be one of the very few who has brought enough deeply human emotion into your work to make it bearable for me. I wish you would try and think of yourself as a fine artist—which you are; that is a damn sight more important to the world than being merely an extension of a sociological movement.
Love,
Ansel
18.
National Parks
WHILE I HAVE SPENT CONSIDERABLY MORE TIME IN Yosemite National Park than in any of the others, my devotion to the natural scene has drawn me to the parks and monuments of nearly every state. I have traveled from Acadia National Park in Maine to Hawaii National Park, from Denali National Park in Alaska to Big Bend National Park in Texas. I consider myself to be supremely fortunate to have had this opportunity. The photographic potentials were magnificent and the sources literally inexhaustible.
I had photographed in Yosemite and the surrounding Sierra Nevada for two decades before I applied my photography to the country beyond. In 1941, I received a letter from Harold Ickes requesting that I photograph the national parks under the aegis of his Department of the Interior. It sounded perfect to me—one of the best ideas ever to come out of Washington. My pictures would be reviewed by Ickes, and together we would select a reasonable number of images, for enlargement to mural size; these would be hung in the corridors and principal offices of the Interior Department building in Washington. The ownership of the negatives was to remain with me, and there would be no restrictions on the future prints I could make from them.
I was appointed at the maximum annual salary then allowed for any position not subject to congressional approval: twenty-two dollars and twenty-two cents a day for no more than one hundred eighty days’ work a year, plus five dollars per diem expenses and a reasonable amount of travel vouchers. This excellent arrangement would allow me the remaining one hundred eighty-five days each year for other photographic endeavors.
My travels on behalf of the mural project began in October 1941, and I was accompanied by my eight-year-old son, Michael, and Cedric Wright. I planned to work on two other projects at different times during this trip: a commercial assignment for the U.S. Potash Company in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and some inner assignments for myself in the stimulating landscape of the Southwest.
I wrote to Beaumont and Nancy:
Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado
October 26, 1941
Dear Beaumont and Nancy,
We have had a spectacular and dangerous trip. All went well through Death Valley, Boulder Dam, Zion, North Rim, South Rim. Then we spent the night on Walpi Mesa, proceeded to Chinle and had two spectacular, stormy days at Canyon de Chelly. I photographed the White House Ruins from almost the identical spot and time of the O’Sullivan picture! Can’t wait until I see what I got. Then our troubles began. They have had the worst rainy season in 25 years and the roads through the Indian Country are unbelievable! The road from Chinle to Kayenta was so terrible that it took us fifteen hours to go sixty miles; then we ended up at midnight flat on our chassis in the worst mud hole you ever saw—with lightning and thunder and rain roaring on us. We slept in the car that night and worked from 5 A.M. till noon getting the old bus rolling again.
[In Utah we] encountered the Butler Wash. It was running 15 inches deep, so we thought it was safe. I set the car in low and proceeded to barge through as I have many such affairs. When the front wheels touched the far bank the motor stopped—water was thrown on the block by the fan belt. I should have removed it first. Well, there we were with the backside of the car actually under water. In a moment of panic I decided to reverse and get out of it all; I could not budge the car ahead after getting it started because the rear wheels had found a hole and no advance was possible. I put it in reverse, gunned it, got half-way across, and the entire ignition passed out. Here I was, with the muddy water running over the floor board and within two inches of cameras and films in the back. A storm was coming up; things looked black indeed because those washes can rise five feet in fifteen minutes. We stripped and moved everything out of the car onto a high bank. [With the help of a large state truck] we just did get the car out; the storm broke and the wash went up. We were so completely lucky—timed almost to ten minutes!… Breathed a vast sigh of relief when we struck the pavement in Colorado. Never such a trip! We have only 4000 more miles to go!!
Affectionately yours,
Ansel A.
Happily, our journey proceeded without calamity from there on, and we arrived in northern New Mexico on our way to Carlsbad, the next national park and the site of my commercial job with the U.S. Potash Company. I decided to stay in the Santa Fe area for a few days in search of personal photographs. One bright autumn afternoon found us in the Chama River Valley. Cedric was not too fond of arid landscapes, and that day he was frustrated and weary. I struggled with several obdurate subjects, losing in battle to a stump that refused visualization, and decided it was just one of those unproductive days. We unanimously agreed to call it quits and return to Santa Fe.
Driving south along the highway, I observed a fantastic scene as we approached the village of Hernandez. In the east, the moon was rising over distant clouds and snowpeaks, and in the west, the late afternoon sun glanced over a south-flowing cloud bank and blazed a brilliant white upon the crosses in the church cemetery. I steered the station wagon into the deep shoulder along the road and jumped out, scrambling to get my equipment together, yelling at Michael and Cedric to “Get this! Get, that, for God’s sake! We don’t have much time!” With the camera assembled and the image composed and focused, I could not find my Weston exposure meter! Behind me the sun was about to disappear behind the clouds, and I was desperate. I suddenly recalled that the luminance of the moon was 250 candles per square foot. I placed this value on Zone VII of the exposure scale; with the Wratten G (No. 15) deep yellow filter, the exposure was one second at f/32. I had no accurate reading of the shadow foreground values. After the first exposure I quickly reversed the 8x10 film holder to make a duplicate negative, for I instinctively knew I had visualized one of those very important images that seem prone to accident or physical defect, but as I pulled out the slide the sunlight left the crosses and the magical moment was gone forever.
I knew it was special when I released the shutter, but I never anticipated what its reception would be over the decades. Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is my most well known photograph. I have received more letters about this picture than any other I have made, and I must repeat that Moonrise is most certainly not a double exposure.
During my first years of printing the Moonrise negative, I allowed some random clouds in the upper sky area to show, although I had visualized the sky in very deep values and almost cloudless. It was not until the 1970s that I achieved a print equal to the original visualization that I still vividly recall.
To the despair of biographers and historians, and with my usual mistreatment of chronology, I misdated the making of Moonrise for many years, variously labeling it 1941, 1942, 1943, and 1944. The true date was recently discovered because Beaumont Newhall had been more bothered than I by my lack of precise dating. He asked a friend and astronomer, Dr. David Elmore, if a computer could be used to solve the mystery of Moonrise. Elmore welcomed the opportunity to apply celestial mechanics and computer technology to a problem in the photographic world. Using geological survey maps, he determined the elevation and azimuth, entering these facts into his computer along with a drawing of the basic components
of Moonrise. The computer graphics program worked minute by minute through the possible years before its screen finally showed the moon arching toward the position in the photograph. Elmore said, “When it lined up it was like bang, bang, bang. Lights went off in my head. Everybody looking on cheered.” Moonrise had been made at between 4:00 and 4:05 P.M., October 31, 1941. It is too bad I can never date so exactly my thousands of moonless pictures!
After the experience in Hernandez, Cedric, Michael, and I rested in Santa Fe where I developed my negatives in a borrowed darkroom. We were invited to several memorable evenings. Michael would have a juice or cola drink and go to sleep in an Indian blanket while the less sensible adults engaged in high jinks and endless talk. On an afternoon that I knew was going to be a real bash, I said to Cedric, “There is going to be a lot of imbibing tonight and I think we should protect ourselves.” Accordingly I bought a small bottle of olive oil and we swallowed several gulps just before we left for the party. This action was based on the legend that olive oil would coat our innards and prevent absorption of alcohol. Michael was both perplexed and amused at this ritual, and I explained to him why the unappetizing intake would prevent the effects of coming liquids. It did work surprisingly well—we had a grand party and then we were up at dawn, our heads clear as a bell.
The next evening we arrived at another party and were immediately confronted with a large tray of martinis. Michael piped up with alarm, “Look out, Daddy! You haven’t had your olive oil!” This remark had to be fully explained to everyone, and for several years a party never began without “Have you taken your olive oil tonight?”
After leaving Cedric in Albuquerque for a bus ride back to Berkeley, Michael and I continued our trip, driving south. We arrived in Carlsbad, where Michael had an attack of appendicitis, but was well taken care of at the local hospital while I photographed for the U.S. Potash Company. I worked long and hard in the depths of the potash mines with my 5×7-inch Linhof camera, Kodachrome sheet film, and a large supply of foil flashlamps—a technically and physically difficult job. When finished, I mailed the film off for processing and entered Carlsbad Caverns National Park to size up the situation for a possible Interior Department mural.