by Ansel Adams
While we awaited a trip to Glacier Bay National Monument on a National Park Service launch, I explored Juneau without much photographic success. A portion of the trip to Glacier Bay was rough and rain was continuous. Once there, I made few photographs, mostly details of grass, leaves, and rock. More distant views were hampered by the weather. One wonderful morning the clouds lifted and we could see Mount Fairweather rising fifteen thousand feet above us, a white glory in a slate-blue sky. Before I could get my camera on the tripod, clouds and mist obliterated the peak and I did not see the mountain again.
The National Park Service launch took us into several inlets, one close to the Marjorie Glacier. This location yielded a few gray negatives, for the wet weather persisted to the point of exasperation. I found the most extraordinary natural details in the interstadial forest, where a large stand of cedars, leeward of a rock ledge, had been sheared off a few feet above their bases by a recent advance of a glacier. The stumps were impregnated with glacial silt and stood firmly on the sharp rock of the shore. They were gray-white, ghostly, and of varied shape and surface, enhanced by the overcast light.
The stone of the area is hard and fresh; it shatters into clean-edged geometric shapes, which I have seen before only in the highest altitudes of the Sierra Nevada. The ice withdrew from Glacier Bay only a few thousand years ago; the Muir Glacier had receded seventeen miles since John Muir first camped near its base in 1879. This harsh land is blessed by the beautiful northern light and the constant, cleansing rain. Where there is vegetation, it is of lush, cool green; grasses and leaves glisten under rain in the soft, but revealing light. The waters of Glacier Bay are very transparent, and I could see far into their rocky depths.
My National Park Service companions had further work to do in the field; before leaving Juneau on this last and momentous excursion to Glacier Bay, I had made arrangements for a seaplane to pick up Michael and me near Bartlett Cove and bring us to Juneau where we were to board the ship for Skagway. The seaplane arrived through the overcast and we hurried to load our gear. The case holding my film of the entire Alaskan trip fell into the shallow water of the landing dock. It was quickly retrieved from two or three feet of very cold water, opened, and the water that had seeped in, was drained. There was nothing more to be done until I reached Seattle and could airmail the film to my superb assistant Pirkle Jones in San Francisco, who I knew would instantly do the best possible job of developing them. The films were packed in separate boxes for normal, normal-minus-one, and normal-plus-one development. I was naturally quite worried about them, but thanks to Pirkle’s care only a few were irreparably damaged; my prized Mount McKinley negatives were perfect.
In 1948, my Guggenheim Fellowship was renewed and I returned to Alaska, without Michael but with Glacier Bay in mind. Again, the weather was consistently hopeless for photography; only four clear days in the whole month of July! Under constant drizzle and heavy clouds, I made appropriately gray studies of leaves along the trailsides of the park, water glazing every surface. I longed for open skies. Fortunately, I became friends with the glacier study party of the U.S. Geological Survey and made two flights with them over the Juneau ice field. The first trip with the pilot was marvelous. While sitting beside him I saw much of the Coast Range, as we circled peaks and domes that rose above vast expanses of ice and snow.
Walking, we see much of the detail around us, the endless progression of the small patterns of the earth as well as the associated distant vistas. Riding a horse, we see less of the immediate detail but perhaps gain in the vistas. Driving an automobile, we see little, if any, of the detail and are confronted with unfolding vistas though with little time for appreciation. From an airplane the world recedes into unfamiliar patterns and shapes. We seldom see the shapes of the earth aesthetically interpreted with subtlety and fine craft, such as the achievements of the great aerial photographer, Bill Garnett.
On the second trip over the ice fields, I was tied to the plane with ropes in the cargo section of the Grumman Goose from which the door had been removed. I wore all the clothes I had and borrowed a heavy overcoat. It was extremely cold; I worried about how to complete the trip unfrozen and had no way to communicate with the pilot. I attempted a few photographs in spite of the cold and the buffeting slipstream. The pilot wheeled about and returned to Juneau and I was untied, unbundled, and removed from the plane in a semi-cryogenic condition. I was thawed in civilized tradition with a hot toddy or two. The pilot admitted he had not given thought to how cold it might be for me. Live and learn!
The same group flew me in the Grumman to their camp at Bartlett Cove in Glacier Bay. They were to fly me by helicopter to the summit of Mount Wright, leave me there for the day with my camera, and pick me up at dusk. The next day and for two days thereafter we were rained in. I photographed a few details about the camp but was getting restless. Each morning the geologists went off in little outboard motorboats on their appointed rounds, but there was no room for me.
On the third morning, at about two A.M., the skies were clear and crisp and the helicopter was made ready. It revved up a bit, then shut down and the pilot and copilot examined the engine. They reported that a bearing had burned out and it would take days to get a replacement from Seattle. The flight was off and I was stranded at the end of an isolated inlet, frustrated but pondering my good fortune that the bearing did not fail in flight or after I had been stranded on the top of the mountain. I could see beautiful clouds in the distance and could imagine the glitter and clarity of the high peaks; there was no way to move into photographically favorable territory.
The next day it was decided that I was not being treated well, and the leader said, “You and Harry and I will take one of the boats for a trip up the coast.” We started out with good weather and renewed expectations. The Evinrude motor performed well for about ten miles, then failed completely. With two pairs of oars we undertook to row south back to camp; the wind and current were against us, and though rowing arduously, we lost more ground than we gained. The only thing to do was beach the boat on the rocky shore and await rescue. We had no radio, but I was assured that “the boys will find us in good time.” It began to rain and continued into the next day. It was a long and dismal time under the persistent drizzle on that barren beach. As high tide can be twenty feet or more above low tide, we would pull the boat farther on shore every few hours. There was nothing to secure it to but hard, sharp-edged, and heavy rocks. There was nothing to sit on, or lie on but those unforgiving rocks, anatomically nonconforming and wet with rain. As expected, around ten o’clock the next morning a rescue boat appeared and we were towed back to camp, a long, choppy trip under increasing rain.
After two more gray, rainy days, we flew back to Juneau. A few days in Juneau—a bit lonely, because the governor and his wife were in Washington—I gave up and flew directly to San Francisco. Such may be the experiences of summer weather in Alaska.
During that wet and quiet month I had a lot of time to think and to consider fully my beliefs about conservation and the environment, prompted by the great problems facing Alaska. While Alaska’s population was only a few hundred thousand people, the land area was immense and its potential wealth enormous. Governor Gruening was aware of the dangers of uncontrolled exploitation and wisely balanced the pressures. I agreed with his position that Alaska must not stagnate; its development should be carefully regulated; its wildness and beauty preserved and its principal assets and resources utilized with great care.
William Colby felt that those who loved the land should be able to enjoy it in appropriate ways and that such lands should be increased in number and area throughout the country. He was not averse to service facilities in national and state parks provided they did not impose activities and ambience foreign to the spirit and intention of the reserved areas. I remember Colby describing a talk with John Muir at Glacier Point in Yosemite in about 1908. It was a glorious day, and Muir said to Colby, “Bill, won’t it be wonderful when a million people ca
n see what we are seeing?” Since then many millions have stood at Glacier Point and experienced the vast view of Yosemite Valley that remains nearly free of evidence of human presence.
As I spent the quiet days in the wild regions of Alaska, I clarified my own concepts of re-creation versus recreation. I saw more clearly the value of true wilderness and the dangers of diluting its finest areas with the imposed accessories of civilization. In Alaska I felt the full force of vast space and wildness. In contrast, the wild areas of our other national parks in the Lower Forty-eight are relatively confined and threatened with increasing accessibility and overstressed facilities. With the usual bureaucratic opacity, national park trails are valued in relation to their degree of use. Little stakes are driven into the ground, usually in the middle of a fine vista, with names or numbers of “educational” value, shattering the moods of simple reaction and contemplation. Roads had been built across the center of some meadows in Yosemite Valley so that the public could see more of the cliffs with less interruption of the forest upon the views. Not only did these roads damage the drainage and ecology of the meadows but they imposed an artificially managed and measured experience upon the public. In Alaska, the little towns were ugly but minuscule in relation to the wilderness around them. Occasional mines and timber cutting were worrisome only when I thought of their possible expansion. The full impact of industrial development introduced by the oil pipeline across Alaska had not yet appeared.
The quality of place, the reaction to immediate contact with earth and growing things that have a fugal relationship with mountains and sky, is essential to the integrity of our existence on this planet. On this rainy trip to Glacier Bay, I realized the magnitude of the problem and resolved to dedicate as much of my time and energy to it as I could. I regret that my accomplishments could not equal my intentions.
In 1950 in My Camera in the National Parks, I set down my beliefs:
We have been given the earth to live upon and enjoy. We have come up from the caves; predatory and primitive ages drift behind us. With almost the suddenness of a nova’s burst to glory we have entered a new dimension of thought and awareness of Nature. The earth promises to be more than a battlefield or hunting ground; we dream of the time when it shall house one great family of cooperative beings. At least we have the promise of such a world even if the events of our immediate time suggest a return to tooth and claw. We hold the future in a delicate and precarious grasp, as one might draw a shimmering ephemerid from the clutches of a web. The heritage of the earth, direct or synthetic, provides us with physical life.…
One hundred years ago the larger part of our nonagrarian land was a complete wilderness. Miners were just penetrating the foothills of the Sierra Nevada; hunters, trappers, and explorers had combed the mountains, plains, and backwoods of the continent but had left little permanent impression on the more comely features of the land. True, vast forests had fallen before the axe and plough, and wildlife was sorely depleted. Myriads of buffalo bones bleached on the great plains, hides and pelts piled into the millions, the oceans were drained of the leviathans. These human invasions were as a great wind, wreaking certain havoc, but permitting certain revivals. Machines had but slightly supplemented hands. Man lived close to Nature—a raw and uncompromising Nature—and he was a part of the great pageant of sun, storms, and disasters. By the turn of the century the Nation came into its adult strength, industrialization had launched its triumphant final campaign, and men turned upon the land and its resources with blind disregard for the logic of ordered use, or for the obligations of an ordered future. The evidence is painfully clear; entire domains of the Pacific Northwest—once glorious forests—are now desolate brushy slopes. Thousands of square miles of the Southwest, once laced with green-bordered streams prudently secured by the groundcover of ample grass, are now a dusty phalanx of desert hills, starving the pitiful sheep and their shepherds that wander over them. We all know the tragedy of the dustbowls, the cruel unforgivable erosions of the soil, the depletion of fish and game, and the shrinking of the noble forests. And we know that such catastrophes shrivel the spirit of the people.
Possessions, both material and spiritual, are appreciated most when we find ourselves in peril of losing them. The National Forests were established just in time to prevent unimaginable disaster. Through the far-seeing efforts of men such as John Muir and Stephen Mather the concept of the National Parks was solidified and vast areas set aside in perpetuum against the ravages of diverse forms of exploitation. Then, through the device of Presidential Proclamation authorized by the Antiquities Act, many National Monuments of exceptional worth and interest were added to the growing system of conserved areas. Add to this the belated controls of other natural resources, and we cannot feel altogether planless and drifting—although almost every protective regulation was effected too late to achieve the ideal measure of success.…
The National Parks represent those intangible values which cannot be turned directly to profit or material advantage, and it requires integrity of vision and purpose to consider such impalpable qualities on the same effective level as material resources. Yet everyone must realize that the continued existence of the National Parks and all they represent depends upon awareness of the importance of these basic values. The pressures of a growing population, self-interest, and shortness of vision are now the greatest enemies of the National Park idea. The perspectives of history are discounted and the wilderness coveted and invaded to provide more water, more grazing land, more minerals, and more inappropriate recreation. These invasions are rationalized on the basis of “necessity.”
And this necessity may appear quite plausible on casual examination. People must have land, and land must have water. Cattle and sheep must have forage. With the establishment of reservoirs—great man-made lakes often reaching far into the wilderness domain—come diverse human enterprises, roads, resorts, settlements. The wilderness is pushed back; man is everywhere. Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere. Certain values are realized; others destroyed.…
The dawn wind in the High Sierra is not just a passage of cool air through forest conifers, but within the labyrinth of human consciousness becomes a stirring of some world-magic of most delicate persuasion. The grand lift of the Tetons is more than a mechanistic fold and faulting of the earth’s crust; it becomes a primal gesture of the earth beneath a greater sky. And on the ancient Acadian coast an even more ancient Atlantic surge disputes the granite headlands with more than the slow, crumbling erosion of the sea. Here are forces familiar with the aeons of creation, and with the aeons of the ending of the world.
19.
Edwin Land
I FIRST MET EDWIN LAND IN 1948 AT A PARTY AT HIS HOME in Cambridge, Massachusetts, soon after his announcement of his Polaroid Land instant photographic process. The next day, as I visited him in his laboratory, the brilliant scientist made a portrait of me with his prototype camera. As it was peeled from its negative after just sixty seconds, the sepia-colored print had great clarity and luminosity. We were both beaming with the satisfaction of witnessing a photographic breakthrough come alive before our eyes. For Land it represented confirmation of a dream; for me it was a thrilling experience relating to the future of my craft and my first adventure with instant photography.
From our first meeting, I responded warmly to Land’s intellect and personality; we seemed intuitively to understand each other. Land has an extraordinary curiosity about everything and the discipline to satisfy it. I am not a scientific genius as is he, but I have a compelling interest in the developments of science and technology.
I soon wrote to him, expressing my reactions to what I had witnessed in Cambridge:
February 5, 1948
Dear Dr. Land,
My interest in the new camera and its aesthetic potentials is, as you know, considerable. I have a few questions to ask which will have practical benefit to me in the future—provided you choose to give the answers at this time. I will
thoroughly understand if you feel certain aspects of the process cannot, or should not, be discussed at this time. My questions are:
1. Permanency. Are the prints, as they are now produced, permanent? Would some metallic toning treatment (of the gold-protective bath Kodak GP-1) be advisable—whether or not the print is to be toned in selenium or by the Nelson Gold-toning Process? Will the prints also stand the heat of dry-mounting?
2. Considering normal use of the materials as being a Weston speed of 125° F and a processing time of 1 minute, what may one say the difference in effect will be with more-or-less exposure, and/or more-or-less processing time?
I would, of course, make for myself a series of practical tests placing various brightnesses on different zones of the exposure scale; I believe I could determine simple working effects that way. But, of course, I realize there may be chemical and physical effects involved in changes of processing time that might have serious effects on the quality, color, and permanence of the image.
3. Being orthochromatic, I presume the emulsion will respond to the usual filters employed with that type of emulsion. And will it also respond to Polaroid filters?
4. Have you any idea of the reciprocity departure of the emulsion? That is, have you found a low point in image-brightness in which the characteristics of the emulsion are appreciably changed?
Cordially,
Ansel Adams
Land and his wife Terre responded with interest in my work, and the next year they purchased my Portfolio I. I received a most encouraging letter.