Ansel Adams

by Ansel Adams

  The future of my archive secured, I established two trusts in 1975 to further structure my life so that I would not have my energy sapped by uncertainty and details. One is the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Besides me, the trustees are Bill Turnage, my attorney David Vena, and my publisher Arthur Thornhill, Jr. This trust controls all future publishing ventures and the reproduction rights to my photographs. Even after my death, I know that many projects that I may not have finished will be completed in the spirit and with the attention to quality I have tried always to require.

  Since my participation in the Datsun advertisement over ten years ago, I have not allowed the association of my photographs with a commercial product. I have been offered extravagant sums of money with the intention that Winter Sunrise be splashed across magazine pages and billboards on behalf of a whiskey. I choose instead to have images reproduced on behalf of the causes I believe in: creative photography and environmental protection.

  The Ansel Adams Family Trust is the recipient of the net proceeds from the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Virginia and I are the sole trustees of the family trust. When we die, Michael and Anne will be the trustees.

  As I was organizing my life, coincidentally there was an astronomical rise in the collecting of photography in general and my photographs in particular. The demand for prints grew until I spent most of my time in the darkroom, repeatedly printing the same few negatives: January—five prints of Moonrise, two of Clearing Winter Storm, three of Monolith, one of Frozen Lake and Cliffs, two of this, lots of ones of that, done! February—another similar order. I longed to get out with my camera, write new books, and make prints from my thousands of neglected negatives. I had become a prisoner of photography’s burgeoning popularity.

  Bill Turnage suggested I set a final deadline for print orders. I agreed and publicly announced that I would not accept orders after December 31, 1975. When these orders were filled, I would make no further prints for public sale. The price would be eight hundred dollars per 16×20-inch print—a new high for my work. I expected to have a total order of fewer than a thousand prints, instead the total was over three thousand. I spent much of 1976, 1977, and 1978 filling these orders. Interestingly, the prices of my prints at auction and through dealer sales also began doubling and tripling. An order I accepted in 1975, when delivered could bring the dealer or private purchaser five thousand dollars or even more. I received only the originally agreed-upon sum. Prices hit absurd levels in 1981 when a mural-size print of Moonrise that I had sold for five hundred dollars only a decade earlier sold for seventy-one thousand five hundred dollars, the highest price ever paid for any photograph. This sale made the headlines, and it was assumed by many people and most charities that I was the recipient of the funds. Unfortunately, the photographer is paid only once for a print: at the time of the original sale.

  I began to understand the whys and wherefores of art and its promoters. The direct artist-customer relationship is somewhat different from the artist-dealer-client complex. The sincere and successful dealer can be a boon to the creative artist in any medium. Both the artist and the client seek identity, and the good dealer acts as both psychiatrist and promoter. I have been very fortunate; for the past few years my primary dealer has been Maggi Weston of the Weston Gallery in Carmel. Maggi is a strikingly handsome redhead whose enthusiastic hugs I consider proper medicine for almost any ailment. She had just opened her gallery in 1975 when I announced finis to my print orders. A good friend for many years, throughout her marriage and subsequent divorce from Cole Weston, we talked of her future. Convinced that the photographic market was just beginning, she mortgaged her house to raise the funds to place one last, large print order with me. The potential risk in doing this scared her, but I had complete confidence in her future success. It was a pleasure for me, as Maggi’s friend, to watch the escalating prices. The Weston Gallery was financially established and her house resecured.

  Maggi, along with her very knowledgeable associate Russ Anderson, has educated great numbers of people with the grand spectrum of photographs that she exhibits and sells: from Fox Talbots made in 1842 to the work of Julia Margaret Cameron in the 1870s to Stieglitz, Strand, the Westons, myself, and then on to the younger generations: Olivia Parker, Jim Alinder, Jerry Uelsmann, Don Worth, Ralph Gibson, Paul Caponigro. The Weston Gallery provides one place where the entire history of photography can be viewed and may be purchased at prices that still seem most reasonable compared to the other art media. In these few short years, the Weston Gallery has become the largest photography gallery in volume of retail sales in the world. What Maggi, Russ, and their staff have accomplished is truly amazing.

  In 1979 Maggi and fellow dealer Harry Lunn approached me with a new project. Public museums were only then beginning to collect photography seriously; many were disappointed that I had quit selling my work and that the specific images they wished were either not available or priced too severely. These two enterprising dealers suggested I print a limited number of representative sets of my photographs to be placed only in appropriate and scattered museums. I responded warmly to this suggestion. I wanted my work to be seen by many people, not just on the walls of the few who could afford it. Because of my Museum Set project, such institutions as the Stanford Art Museum, the Minneapolis Art Institute, the Australian National Museum, the Canton Art Center, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of New Mexico, Cornell University, and Boston University have a superior selection of my photographs in their permanent collections.

  I believe there is a relationship between the experiences of art and of nature, in that both have definite functions at appropriate social and creative levels. Works of art, literature, or music have little value or human benefit if held available only to the few. If such is not of general human benefit what are its reasons for being? Comprehending the natural world is, in itself, an act of creation and should be universally shared.

  I was also faced with mounting requests from hundreds of people who could not afford an original fine print but wanted one or more to hang in their own homes. Few can pay the thousands of dollars for an Adams fine photograph, and so I decided to issue a series of exquisitely reproduced posters. I had great confidence in Dave Gardner, the co-owner of Gardner/Fulmer Lithograph, who had printed the new edition of the book The Portfolios of Ansel Adams, where he had come extremely close to my own photographic values. Dave is the only printer to translate my photographs into near-perfect reproduction form. He uses a combination of a laser-scanned negative, a very fine screen, two colors of ink (black and gray, and he is not afraid to use lots of black), and, most importantly, a sensitive eye. I chose three images, Moonrise, Winter Sunrise, and the vertical of Aspens; New York Graphic Society had them designed as posters. Mary Alinder and I supervised the first press runs (either one of my staff or I are on press to personally inspect the first press run of all new projects); the resultant posters were spectacular and, at twenty dollars apiece, affordable.

  The posters met with such welcome that I also agreed to Ansel Adams calendars to begin in 1984. Each of these reproductions is beautifully reproduced by Gardner/Fulmer Lithograph. Printed inside is a full-page Adams editorial on my perceptions of the current grave threats to our environment, with the hope that:

  The photographs in this calendar may serve as reminders that something of the primal world endures, although physically and aesthetically endangered. What remains of the natural scene can be seen as symbolic of the original bounty of the earth. The natural beauty and wonder we now observe are a diminishing resource; substances vital to our physical and emotional survival are being critically depleted.

  As I cleared the decks for future projects, I found an ever-present complicating factor: health. My mind is as active as ever, but my body is falling farther and farther behind. My adult physical problems seemed to have begun in Glacier Bay in 1948 when I was vigorously pulling on a hawser to bring a launch in to dock against a tidal current and choppy
waters. My deck shoes slipped; I did not fall, but felt a strange tearing sensation under my breastbone. There was no pain. It was as if a piece of silk had ripped within. After the boat was secured, I went below deck, not feeling myself. A good platter of bacon and eggs seemed to remove my problems and the voyage proceeded on schedule.

  In New York City several months later, I had an inappropriately hasty lunch at the Cafe St. Denis and hiked as fast as I could to the Newhall apartment to join them for a trip to Blue Mountain College in North Carolina, where a photography seminar was to be held. Just before I reached the apartment, I felt a violent pain in my chest, unlike anything I had previously experienced. As I was obviously in some kind of trouble, Beaumont called his doctor. I was hospitalized with an assumed coronary attack. Considerably worried, I went through a number of tests. The cheerful diagnosis was that my heart was perfectly normal. The doctor thought that I might have a hiatal hernia and I was trundled off to X-ray for a barium picture. It was observed that I had a three-centimeter shift of the diaphragm, meaning that a meal, no matter how agreeable, could very effectively press my stomach up into the chest cavity. This can cause pain very closely simulating that of coronary insufficiency. Ever since, I have had frequent occurrences of this troublesome effect, mostly after eating.

  Around 1970 the sensations increased and my good friend and excellent doctor, Mast Wolfson—still practicing medicine today at the age of ninety—determined that my heart was not behaving properly. Further consultations revealed that one of my heart’s valves was damaged and that my coronary arteries were most likely clogged. After a needed weight loss of fifteen pounds, I entered Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco for a valve replacement and triple coronary bypass to be performed on February 14, 1979.

  I had always assumed that I would be fearful of such invasions of my system, but when the time came I was completely at ease; wheeled into the operating room, I was in a blissful, euphoric condition. Without surgery I was fast reaching an embarrassing state of inactivity; I could not walk a hundred feet without the crippling symptoms of chest pains and shortness of breath. I do not recall many of the events surrounding or following the surgery, save that a pig valve and other miscellaneous surgical additions had repaired my heart on Valentine’s Day.

  I had a favorable recovery and was soon moved from the hospital to the home of our dear friends Otto and Sue Meyer. I convalesced scarcely one hundred feet distant from our old home in San Francisco. The foghorns groaned, the waves on Baker Beach crashed slowly and decisively—all familiar sounds from the past. The Meyers gave me the attentions usually reserved for a potentate. Their royal treatment, I am sure, hastened my recovery.

  We had met the Meyers when they moved into our neighborhood in the 1950s. A member of an important German family with major interests in the Rhine district wine industry, Otto had escaped the Nazis in the late 1930s. Eventually establishing himself in San Francisco, he brought great expertise and imagination to California winemaking, becoming the president of Paul Masson Vineyards, which he built into one of America’s leading quality wine producers. Otto has also become one of the most respected civic leaders of San Francisco. He is deeply concerned with the arts; he serves on the boards of The Friends of Photography, the San Francisco Opera, where he was the longtime chairman of the company’s Spring Opera program, and also, from its earliest beginnings, the board of the Merola Opera Training Program.

  Sue is equally remarkable. Sparkling, energetic, extremely capable, she is also one of the great supporters of the arts and charities in San Francisco. She was one of the founders of the innovative craft gallery, Meyer, Breier, Weiss. Sue entertains with great joy and open arms. We truly call their home the Hotel Meyer—the best in San Francisco!

  I returned home to Carmel two weeks later. I could immediately walk farther than was possible before the surgery, and I felt as good as ever, with the sort of energy I had thirty years before and with a firm pulse and no chest sensations. My only complaint was a pestiferous vertigo: a side effect from the anesthesia. In two months the vertigo vanished and I was able to drive the late Congressman Philip Burton to Big Sur for his first view of that marvelous region; he soon became one of the leaders in the fight for its preservation.

  My new pig valve functions splendidly: however, my bypasses became plugged up within a year. I now exist on collateral circulation to the heart and have a pacemaker that comes in at every lapsed beat like a small mouse working out with a tiny punching bag.

  I consider myself fortunate; on several occasions I have faced extinction, only to be reestablished by the art and science of the medical profession. As if being my executive assistant and the head of my staff were not complex enough, Mary Alinder, who holds a degree in English, is also a registered nurse. Her personal intervention and quick actions have added years to my productive life. The Great God Photon was surely smiling on me when I was able to talk Mary into directing my activities—saving my life three times was a very important side benefit.

  In my next life I might be an architect, photographer, doctor, or writer. “De Lawd” will decide on this for the sanity of the world to come. I may come back as a doorman at the Algonquin with a simple home in Queens, a wife who has my slippers ready along with a bit of the old martini, and an interest in nothing in particular and resentment of everything in general. De Lawd forbid!

  As I grow older I become less interested in travel to other parts of the world. There is so much absolute beauty along the California coast that I could work for a century, exploring with eye and lens. Photographers who frequently travel photograph with less than full knowledge of their subjects. I believe one must live in a region for a considerable time and absorb its character and spirit before the work can truly reflect the experience of the place. In my own case, hasty visits have usually resulted in inconsequential images; perhaps an occasional flash of insight, or a remembrance of an earlier place or time helped in visualizing a photograph. But most often I have grasped for some evanescent image only to find it a hollow recording of the subject because I really did not see or understand what was before me.

  My experiences in Europe ran true to my visual prophecies. I did not care for what I saw of France, but I felt very much at home in England and Scotland. I have had many exhibits in foreign lands, but the only ones I have attended in person were those at the Arles Festival in 1974 and 1976 and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1976.

  The Arles exhibits, organized by my good friend and photographic colleague Lucien Clergue, were beautifully hung in an elegant building in that ancient Roman town. The lighting was inferior, as is to be expected in old structures and unfortunately is still the case in many new ones. Happily, the human element was superb. I was able to meet many of the great French photographers, including Jacques Henri Lartigue and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Traveling twice to Arles, I did not respond to the southern landscape; the air was hot and thick with haze. When asked to return to Arles in 1982, I asked the Alinders to lecture on my behalf.

  Of the sights I saw in France there was but one that thrilled me: Chartres Cathedral. I was greatly impressed with the rich, glowing colors of the stained-glass windows. They were of a soft and deep hue, in accord with the encompassing great poem of stone. I walked toward the altar, then turned to view the entire vault. To my shock and astonishment, a few windows in the entrance wall were harsh and bright, even garish. For the moment I wrongly assumed that they were replacements after World War II. I was told, “No, they have just been cleaned.” When the glass was first installed, it was as bright as the laundered panes appeared. My romantic palette was shattered. The grime of centuries had created an illusion of frusty splendor and I had to adjust to a thirteenth century brighter than I had imagined it to be.

  The exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert was one of the best installations of my work I have seen. Replying to some questions from their curator, I had requested they paint the walls to achieve the preferred twenty percent reflect
ance—and in any color except pink. When I arrived in London, the curator came to my room at the Connaught, looking very worried. He said that he hoped I would like the wall color when I saw it: chocolate brown. Then I was the concerned one. I entered the museum the next morning with heavy foreboding of the effect of my photographs on such a wall color. To my absolute delight, the color of the walls was just the right value and made the prints float in space. My London visit also personally introduced me to my respected European colleague Bill Brandt, who attended the opening along with my old friend Brassai. It was a joyful occasion.

  The Connaught is a very British hotel: righteously stuffy, with everything and everyone impeccable. On this trip Virginia and I had quite an entourage: our granddaughter Sylvia, Bill Turnage, and Andrea Gray. I presented my American Express card to pay our considerable bill and was politely informed that the Connaught accepted no charge cards. This had happened to us a few days earlier at the Tour d’Argent restaurant in Paris. There we were forced to pass the hat, and everyone had to empty his pockets to cover the stupendous bill. We did not have enough cash left between us to pay for the Connaught, however, and since it was Sunday, all banks were closed. I stood in that fancy lobby, Stetson in hand, no resolution in sight, when the manager discreetly informed me that they would, of course, accept my personal check. I was duly impressed.

  We drove out of London and up to Scotland. I photographed an old cemetery in Edinburgh, a city to which I would love to return. But even with those fine European experiences, I was glad to return home to Carmel.

  In 1977 John Szarkowski proposed the organization of a large traveling show of my work to open at MOMA in the fall of 1979. John spent one week with us in Carmel, in a firsthand curatorial search through thousands of proof sheets as well as fine prints. Eventually he selected one hundred fifty-three photographs, limiting his choices to my western landscapes and thus titling the exhibition “Ansel Adams and the West.”