by Ansel Adams
We hear the insistent sound of the surf, rising from the ocean two hundred thirty feet below. Its crescendos deepen into a low roar during the winter gales. Our summers are chiefly foggy, tempering the climate to an agreeable degree. I am constantly aware of how fortunate we are in the perfection of our location and how deeply we are indebted to Dick McGraw and Ted Spencer for making it so beautifully come to pass. Completed in 1962, the house has proved a magnificent partner for my daily work and living as it mellows in its surround of garden and forest.
Dick had his difficulties, but he was never a boring neighbor. He owned a rare and handsome vintage BMW sports car that he called Beastie. He became its slave and overlooked the fact it cost a small fortune to support. One night both Beastie and another identical BMW were parked in front of our house and a wag said, “You should breed them.” I brashly replied, “That would be misengination!” My one and only legitimate and original pun.
Among his friends, the “McGraw Syndrome” was a frequently observed phenomenon; if things could go wrong, they were certain to do so in Dick’s presence. One day he had his priceless Beastie parked in front of the shop where it had just been repainted with meticulous care. People were stopping to view this undoubtedly beautiful automobile. A cheerful, blowsy drunk approached and stared open-mouthed at the dream before him. He then pounded with hammy fists on the car door, exclaiming, “Thish ish the most bootifull car I’ve sheen!” making tragic dents in the delicately formed aluminum. Because Dick was sure that after the dents were removed the special orange-yellow color of the repaired door could not be matched, he had the entire car repainted.
Days later, the shop called to advise him that the painting was complete and the car would be ready the following morning. Dick encouraged them to keep some overhead vents open for better air circulation during the night. Air certainly circulated, as did millions of gnats, which lit upon the sticky paint and looked like pepper scattered on fried eggs. The morning view of the car curdled Dick’s soul; of course, Beastie had to be again completely repainted.
Records would be delivered warped, books damaged in transit; we would sometimes receive the same item and mine would be delivered in perfect shape. Endless miseries plagued him: digestive troubles, allergies, thoughtless friends, environmental insults, and so on. Perhaps there is some demon of fate that persistently transmits misfortune to certain individuals.
“Good morning, Dick!”
“What’s good about it?” Alas and alack.
He sought a local psychiatrist’s counsel, only to be told that he was beyond help.
Dick possessed great, but veiled capabilities and a touching generosity. No one truly knows the many kind gestures and how much financial support he gave to various artists and musicians, all the while insisting that his benefits remain secret. During Edward Weston’s last years, Dick made possible the printing of one thousand of Edward’s negatives by Brett, the sales of which were a major financial support for Edward.
All in all, Dick suffered a desolate and somewhat wasted life. Affluence often leads to disaster. I think we are built for work, and certain orders of physical and spiritual achievement succumb in the absence of effort and drive. Dick died in 1978, devastated by cancer. Toward the end, he refused all visitors and died alone.
Our move to Carmel Highlands brought the renewal of old friendships and the making of new ones. As my radar of memory explores the past, certain individuals emerge as guiding lights. Jehanne Salinger Carlson, living in nearby Pacific Grove, is one of these. We first met around 1930 in San Francisco; a strong rapport was established from the beginning. As Jehanne is very French and I am very Yankee, communications should have been difficult, but they were not. She is a very wise and imaginative woman, experienced in both art and politics. Widowed when her youngest boy was only eight, she raised four sons, two of whom are engaged in education, one in business, and the eldest, Pierre Salinger, is a respected journalist and former press secretary to President John F. Kennedy. A highlight of Jehanne’s rich and varied career was her service on the official French translating team to the United Nations Charter Conference held in San Francisco in 1945. Now in her eighties, she continues to be a source of intellectual stimulation and inspiration to me.
Up the hill from us in the Highlands lived Rosario and Katie Clare Mazzeo; few people have had such a happy impact on my life. I met them first in Boston in 1951. Rosy was bass clarinettist and personnel manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Katie Clare was accomplished on the piano and harpsichord. There were many gay parties at their apartment on the Fenway. A birdcage elevator brought the musical great, and the other greats as well, to their extraordinary top-floor abode. When Rosy retired from the orchestra, they recalled Carmel Highlands and acquired a large home that became a gathering place for countless friends from all over the world. It is a beautiful house and holds treasures of music, photographs, and books. Rosy displays his extensive clarinet collection upright on several large tables in his studio—each standing like a tree in the forest, I call it Clarinet National Park. Apart from his undoubted genius as a musician and teacher, Rosy is deeply interested in photography. He has traveled over most of the world and has photographed extensively with a quick and discerning eye.
Indeed, it seemed that a prerequisite of Monterey Peninsula citizenship was being a photographer. Rosy, Wynn Bullock, Brett Weston, myself, and others dreamed of establishing a center where creative photography could flourish in Carmel. I have had a constant urge to do something to foster the creative photography movement: Group f/64, the Ansel Adams Gallery, the massive photographic exhibition at the 1940 San Francisco Golden Gate Exposition, the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Fellowship, and the Department of Photography at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Cole Weston, Edward’s youngest son and a truly capable extrovert, was manager of the Sunset Center. A former school complex situated in the heart of Carmel, it had been purchased by the city to be developed as a cultural center, and Cole was active in assembling appropriate tenants. In late 1966 Cole called me and said, “You have been making noises about starting a creative photography group ever since you moved here. Now you better go out and start one, because I have a wonderful gallery space here in the center that would be just right for such an activity.” This served as a trigger for action, and within a week or so the bones of The Friends of Photography were fleshed out with enthusiasm and energy, dressed in the proper legalisms of a not-for-profit endeavor.
After our first election, I became president of the board of trustees, Brett was vice president, Rosy, secretary, and Arthur Connell, treasurer. It was an entirely volunteer organization. I remain perplexed as to how we survived and why those many wonderful people gave so much of their time. Donations and dues helped keep us precariously afloat. We assembled a surprising roster of excellent exhibits over the first years, with a wide range of historical and contemporary photography.
As The Friends membership grew, the volunteer workload inflated. I felt The Friends to be an important concept, and a few of us doggedly held on. We employed a full-time professional staff, but problems expanded as fast as programs. Needing better financial and managerial assistance, Bill Turnage and William Rusher entered the fray and calmed the storm. The trustees appointed the Committee on the Future of The Friends to study our ongoing role. Their determination was that there was an important need for this organization and they outlined a series of steps to begin the future.
The most exciting chapter in the history of The Friends of Photography began with the hiring of James Alinder as executive director in 1977. I had known Jim over the previous decade as a professor of photography, as an editor and chairman of the Society for Photographic Education, and as an important young photographer. Jim was the beacon, a dynamic leader who propelled The Friends into the forefront of active creative photography organizations. He has built The Friends into an internationally recognized instituti
on. The largest and most effective of its kind in the world, we now have twelve thousand members, are financially sound, and have an impressive record of over two hundred exhibitions of serious photography, an award-winning publishing agenda, and each year we contribute importantly to the education of photographers through our workshop program.
In 1978, The Friends held an exhibition of my portraits and published the book Ansel Adams: 50 Years of Portraits as one of their Untitled series journal issues. It was very rewarding for me to have this rather unknown aspect of my photography seen for the first time. The publishing program of The Friends has done great service to the field by presenting books by many important photographers whose work greatly deserved public attention, such as the volumes on Roy De Carava, Marion Post Wolcott, Ruth Bernhard, and Carleton Watkins.
Alinder leads an excellent professional staff, with important editorial and curatorial contributions made by David Featherstone. The superb quality of The Friends workshop staff, including Mary Virginia Swanson and Claire Peeps, was a major reason why I transferred the administration of the Ansel Adams Workshop to The Friends. A growing grant and awards program provides worthy recognition to our finest photographers.
Under the guidance of an outstanding board of trustees, with Peter Bunnell as its very capable president, The Friends’ purpose has continued to be to support and encourage creative photography. The Friends has given me the opportunity to understand my medium better in relation to the photographic community at large. It has been the most rewarding and important association during the Carmel chapter of my life.
Shanghai and San Francisco are sister cities, and after viewing a major San Francisco exhibition that Jim and Mary Alinder had curated, Mayor Dianne Feinstein requested a similar show of my photographs to be prepared for China. I was especially pleased because an exhibit of this kind may do something to help with international relations and soothe the saber-rattling of our current national defense posturing. The Friends constructed the exhibition, fully framed and ready to be pulled out of sturdy packing cases and hung. Pan American Airways donated the shipment of the prints. The BankAmerica Foundation generously funded the preparation of the exhibition as well as the accompanying American team: the Alinders and Robert Baker, all three of whom lectured on photography and critiqued the work of Chinese photographers. Accompanying them were Julia Siebel, an important Friends trustee, and the three Alinder children. I am told the exhibition was so popular in Shanghai that people began waiting in line at six each morning; five thousand people attended each day. It was then installed in Beijing at the National Museum of Art. From the photographs of the installations I could observe that the Chinese curators had done an admirable job; the photographs were hung spaciously on seemingly endless walls. I regret not traveling to China, but concerns of health were then dominant.
Because Virginia and I want The Friends to thrive through the years, we have pledged to give our Carmel home and studio to The Friends to become their property after our lifetimes. I have two ideas about its use. One is, in a limited way, to keep it a working studio. A master photographer would live and work there for six months or so, printing a portfolio or perhaps working with several students in the master class tradition. The darkroom would continue to be alive and a place of creation. A more probable and valid use of the house to sustain the growth of The Friends would be the passing on of the material wealth the house represents. I would encourage them to sell it, with the proceeds designated for a permanent home for The Friends. The construction of a new building on the Monterey Peninsula to serve as its national headquarters is one of my fondest dreams and one of my next projects.
I have never dictated to The Friends; rather, I believe it is its role to enlarge my experience of creative photography by presenting a wide variety of aesthetic possibilities. I attend as many photographic exhibits as I can; the current location of The Friends gallery in Carmel has been tremendously helpful in keeping me current.
I suppose I have seen hundreds of art exhibitions during my lifetime. Some exhibits speak to me and others do not; I cannot explain why I immediately feel positive or negative. I do not react negatively simply because the work is not similar to mine; I am not chauvinistic about my f/64 inclinations. I trust the first impression, the initial glance at an image seems to reveal its inherent qualities. I pass through a collection, or scan a wall quite swiftly in my initial viewing. It seems that the image is fixed in my memory as an overall experience. I then return to the prints with a more penetrating attitude and refine my first impressions. Usually I find little in an image beyond what my first glance offered. I am surprised how much of the image is grasped and evaluated by my cerebral computer: form and content, disturbing edge and corner intrusions, bad mergers of line and value, and general print quality.
When I am in the presence of a work of art I find myself in a particular state of mind that does not exist under normal conditions of environment. It is also different from my state of mind while visualizing a photograph. Some inner creative mechanism appears to take command in either case. The secret of art lies in the incomprehensible capability of mind and spirit to perceive and create.
It has occurred to me that art has progressed by a series of oppositions to an established earlier style. When sufficient time elapses there may be a return thereto, but such is classified and described in quite different terms. I strive to comprehend many of the philosophies that are belabored at their inception, and I do not mean to suggest that such are not valid. Certainly it is the privilege of the artist to express himself with total freedom. Exceptions would relate to any expression that would result in physical harm. The Constitution does not oblige me to observe anything against my will. It is my responsibility to provide the filtration of the hideous or the obscene if I believe such exists in any work of art. One man’s grace may be another’s obscenity.
I am weary with the multitude of styles and dominations of modern art, literature, and music. I am naïve enough to believe that art has a definite relation to what may be called beauty, rather than being limited to the fashionable or political. I wonder how many more semantic designations for art styles are available. The latest I know in photography is post-modernism. While it must be something more than that which follows modernism, exactly what has eluded me. Conceptual photography is another term for which I have no comprehensible definition, except possibly when the idea gets in the way of the image. Every photograph any serious photographer makes is based on some degree of concept. Hence, we are all conceptualists except those who believe they have found a niche in the critical pantheons, bonding themselves to another particularly sacred word.
One summer I returned to Yosemite from Utah with a magnificent fossil of a shell: an ammonite attached to part of a sphere of rock. It is one of the most exciting objects I have ever seen. I placed it in the center of our dining room table. A young couple, a painter and a sculptor, came for lunch. They expressed amazement and delight over it, “Who did it?”
I said that, as it was fifty million years old, I had no idea who.
They immediately lost interest. “Oh, you mean it is just a natural object?” For them, art can physically be created only by an artist, not by the viewer’s creative perceptions.
I confess to a limited appreciation of all art, even less the contemporary statements. In other words, I am limited and exclusive in my response to much of art, and I know it. To be fully committed, an artist has to believe so strongly in his own art that it is difficult to have strong affinities to other artists’ production. If I truly believed in the art of another artist, I would be making it rather than what I am making. The few examples of art in any media that I respond to bear close relationship to the personalities that have produced them; this colors the levels of my appreciation. When I rashly express such thoughts, I feel as if I have questioned Scripture in the time of the Inquisition. I tread as softly as I can and carry a gentle twig.
However, these observations relate to my
personal appreciation. I am perfectly aware that art, in all forms, is vastly greater than I am. While I may reject most of what I experience in the art world, I feel obligated to do what I am able to do to keep this world going. I know the pendulum will swing; but it does not have to swing precisely back to its original track. I believe it is the obligation of all creative people to keep creativity moving.
It is increasingly clear to me that my art relates more and more to a sublimation of my closeness to the natural world, its events, light itself, and the positive. What I do seems natural and simple to me; to others it may appear as a miraculous performance. It is neither simple nor miraculous; it is a personal expression based on observation and reaction that I am not able to define except in terms of the work itself. If mankind progresses, we are certain to attain heights undreamed of now. We might trust that we will become a mirror of the creative background of the Universe. For me, God is a three-letter word representing the goals of creation.
22.
Presidents & Politics
I HAVE BEEN LUCKY TO OBSERVE, IN SOME CASES AT CLOSE range, history in the making: political, photographic, and scientific. Since the 1920s I have met numerous government officials from Presidents to park rangers and have found that most are good human beings, dedicated to their work.
I respect the office of the President—a person selected by the citizen stockholders to serve as chairman of the board of the largest democratic corporation on our planet. The Presidency of the United States is an awesome job, requiring wisdom instead of cleverness and compassion above rigid objectivity. I stand when the position enters the room; I do not for the man. I would certainly stand for Einstein, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and others who have brought such splendor and succor to mankind. I am intensely loyal to the earth and the constructive societies and movements that have flourished upon it.