Ansel Adams (28 page)

Pulling this show off in such a short time, Ansel knew, would require a prodigious amount of work. First he contacted his mentor, praying for a coup, but Stieglitz declined to send his photographs even after Ansel implored him, “God, Stieglitz, this is the chance to do something. I’ll paint the gallery any way you say. We have guards; it’ll be perfectly safe. And if you’d only—”
30

It certainly helped that Ansel was friends with almost all the photographers he invited, because it was asking a lot to expect exhibition-quality prints to be shipped to him on such short notice. Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and, surprisingly, Moholy-Nagy all came through. Ansel still did not like Moholy’s photographs, but he knew they were considered important by the art establishment.
31

Ansel was forever proud of
A Pageant of Photography.
Forty-two years later, he remembered, “Boy that was an awful hard job, but it was a contribution, and that’s what brought, for the first time, photography in many of its approaches, to the attention of the people in the West.”
32
Indeed, millions viewed the exhibition—which was millions more than had seen Beaumont’s own
Photography 1839–1937
during its San Francisco run.
33

Ansel dedicated the exhibition’s handsome catalog (which modestly contained only one image by its curator) “To Alfred Stieglitz who has devoted his strength and spirit to the advancement of photography.” One major snafu occurred in printing the catalog: in Beaumont’s essay, “Photography as an Art,” a few lines were inadvertently dropped, so that instead of reading,

Alfred Stieglitz received his first medal from Emerson. He too discovered that photography has its limitations. Instead of accepting defeat, he has for over fifty years been promoting photography, trying to understand it and then overcoming the problems of photographic reproduction.

the catalog actually read,

Alfred Stieglitz received his first medal from Emerson. He too discovered that photography has its limitations. Instead of accepting defeat, he has for over fifty years been overcoming reproduction.
34

In New York, Beaumont opened his newly arrived copy of the catalog and settled down for a good read. A jolt coursed through him as he caught the error. He knew that he must go to Stieglitz immediately, before he read it for himself, and explain that it was a mistake and not in his original text. Very straightforwardly, he told Stieglitz, “A colossal mistake has been made. I can’t blame Adams, although he was responsible for the book and the printer. But look, I want to show it to you before you find it.” After reading it, Stieglitz calmly replied, “You know, I think that’s a very fine statement. Perfectly true. Perfectly true.”
35
It was a rare indication that Stieglitz actually possessed a sense of humor.

Although deeply embarrassed by this mistake, Ansel kept its importance in perspective. He remembered a historical precedent at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, where the description of the Brazilian Pavilion in the catalog had instructed readers to “Go into the patio and enjoy coffee and mate.” The crucial acute accent in the name of the beverage maté had been omitted.
36

The realities of day-to-day life continued in Yosemite. Best’s Studio was not thriving; with war in the air, few people traveled, most preferring to stay close to home. In 1940, two other businesses competed with Best’s for the same market for photographic supplies, print finishing, and print sales: Yosemite Falls Studio and Boysen Studio.
37

On each of his trips east, Ansel had visited Washington, D.C., to meet with officials in the National Park Service, building friendships and security for Best’s Studio’s continued status as a concession. Confident of the regard in which he was held in Washington, back home in California, Ansel fired off stinging letters of criticism about decisions that he felt compromised Yosemite’s integrity: stringing power lines across valley meadows, cutting additional roads through valley forests, adding more and more campgrounds to accommodate eager crowds.
38
His actions upset Virginia, who could not understand how he could place Best’s future in such jeopardy by chancing the alienation of the very people from whom they needed approval.
39

The May 1940 issue of
U.S. Camera
carried a full twelve pages promoting the
U.S. Camera
Yosemite Photographic Forum, to be held that summer under the personal direction of Ansel Adams. Next to a full-page portrait of Ansel’s face, deep laugh lines already etched about his eyes, a caption claimed, “Ansel Adams is not only one of America’s great photographers, he is also one of the few who can lucidly present his experience and ability in a way that makes him a great photographic teacher.”
40
It was all true.

Assisting Ansel would be such photographic luminaries as Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Charles Kerlee (a photo-illustrator), and Rex Hardy, Jr. (a photographer for
Life
). The cost of the workshop, not including room and board, was fifty dollars for one week, eighty-five for two, or all four weeks for $150.

But as Virginia, from her position as owner/manager of Best’s Studios, could probably have told them, Americans were not traveling. Even with the promise of such a star-studded faculty, only twelve participants signed up. The workshops proceeded in abbreviated form: only Ansel and Edward taught, with Charis serving as the photographic model.

The same summer, Nancy and Beaumont Newhall decided to vacation in California.
41
After a grueling cross-country train trip without benefit of sleeper seats, they arrived, unbathed (both) and unshaven (Beaumont), in San Francisco. They told their taxi driver that they needed a hotel, and it must have a bath. The place where he deposited them was scruffy-looking, but at least it had hot running water.

After making themselves presentable, which for Nancy meant donning a snappy white suit and broad-brimmed straw hat, they telephoned Ansel at Skyline 1-1282—a fitting exchange name, they thought. When they told him they had already checked into a hotel and gave him their address, he shrieked at them to stay put until he could get there.
42
They had landed in a notorious brothel, and Ansel feared for their lives. He drove down in his new Pontiac station wagon, scooped up the Newhalls and their luggage, and took them to the Saint Francis.

Ansel appointed himself their tour guide and bodyguard, convinced these New Yorkers were babes in the woods in his particular forest. He took them home to meet the family: Virginia, Michael, Anne, and, next door, Charlie, Ollie, and Aunt Mary. They had cocktails at the Top of the Mark and watched the fog creep in through the Golden Gate, cloaking the city beneath them as the sun set. They visited Ansel’s
Pageant of Photography
show and judged the content excellent but the installation rather boring: none of the brightly colored walls that they preferred, and the photographs hung à la Stieglitz, all in a line, rather than in various patterns, as Beaumont arranged images at the museum. On exhibition design they continued to be at odds with their friend.
43

Ansel escorted them down to Carmel to meet Edward and Charis, and on the way followed the slow and scenic Highway One along the coast. Just about noon, north of Santa Cruz, he pulled the car off the road and suggested that the Newhalls join him for a spate of photography. They stood on a sheer cliff that dropped cleanly to a small rocky beach below. Entranced by the white surge of surf as it moved with each wave across the dark, wet sand, Ansel tilted his four-by-five-inch camera steeply downward. Moholy’s influence had spread to Ansel, even if unconsciously.

Deciding that only a sequence of images could provide an adequate equivalent to what he was seeing, he exposed nine sheets of film using a long-focus lens (a 250mm Dagor). Because of the telescoping of visual planes caused by the lens, and because there was no horizon to serve as a reference, each exposure revealed a two-dimensional and nearly abstract pattern of light and shadow. Anticipating the resolution of each wave proved difficult, but back in his darkroom, Ansel concluded that five negatives were suitable for the sequence.
44

And what a pain it was to print! This is why there are so few sets of
Surf Sequence
, probably twenty-five at most. Ansel required that each finished print appear to be graced by the same light, although over the twenty minutes it took to make the negatives, the sun’s intensity and position changed. Ansel had to call on all his darkroom skills of legerdemain to make the values consistent. Each print in the sequence also had to have the same measurements as all the others; Ansel began with the image that needed the most cropping and then cropped the rest to those dimensions, with little compromise to any photograph.
45

Surf Sequence
(1940) was a continuation of the aesthetic that Ansel had discovered with
Monolith
(1927) and expressed again in
Frozen Lake and Cliffs
(1932). With these photographs, he transcended his role as respected conduit of America’s landscape and became the interpretative oracle of a higher dimension.

Ansel would not let Beaumont and Nancy miss Yosemite, although they regarded it as a place of postcard pretensions that they believed they could do without.
46
But Yosemite took them by surprise. As the car rounded each new bend, they were staggered by fresh marvels: Half Dome, El Capitan, waterfalls, forests, the Merced River. Nancy found that Virginia had transformed Best’s Studio into an extraordinary shop. Classical music played, a fire burned in the big stone fireplace, and the glass cases held a tempting array of fine Indian silver and turquoise jewelry alongside the expected photographic equipment. Piles of Navajo rugs lay next to cases of fine books all germane to the location, on subjects ranging from Yosemite to the national parks to environmental concerns. Ansel’s folding photographic screen of
Fresh Snow
concealed the stairway to the family’s simple living quarters behind the studio. Through its windows wafted the deep voice of Yosemite Falls, not far distant, and the perfume of incense cedar.
47

After each day’s exploration of Yosemite with Ansel, they returned to long hours of drinks, dinner, and conversation. The main subject became MoMA and photography, as together they constructed a plan for a formal Department of Photography. There was no precedent; it would be the first of its kind in a museum.

Early one evening, soon before the Newhalls were to depart, Ansel drained the last of the bourbon in his glass, rose from his chair on the porch, flung the remaining ice cubes into the bushes, and announced that he was going to telephone McAlpin, who not only was the money man but the man with connections.
48
Ansel’s excitement carried without diminution over the transcontinental line to New York, there to catch fire.

Chapter 12: A Department of Photography

Events progressed rapidly following the Newhalls’ return to New York in the late summer of 1940. With the museum’s consent, McAlpin donated money to found a department of photography, with himself as chair of the advisory committee and Beaumont as curator. But McAlpin’s agreement was conditional: he would do it if, and only if, Ansel consented to be his vice chairman and came to New York for six months to get things going.
1
McAlpin would pay his expenses, plus a stipend.
2
Eager to continue this particular adventure, Ansel accepted, although for only two, not six, months.

Everyone believed that America’s entry into the war was exceedingly close. Ansel, McAlpin, and Newhall were determined to open the department and mount its first exhibition as soon as they could, fearing that if war came it might be quite some time before they would have another opportunity. On short notice, they succeeded in reserving 150 running feet of museum space for two weeks, from December 27, 1940, to January 12, 1941.
3

McAlpin asked Ansel how much money he would need to be paid while working on setting up the department. Ansel answered that three hundred dollars a month should suffice; he was hoping just to break even.
4
Although he was always near desperation for money, Ansel would accept no more than an equitable sum for the equivalent amount of work.

Ansel’s train pulled into New York just past dawn on October 14, 1940, after three nights of cross-country travel. A taxi dropped him and his considerable luggage at the curb in front of the Newhalls’ apartment, where he was to stay. Glancing at his watch and glumly deciding it was too early to wake them, he sat down on his suitcase to wait, his overcoat, typewriter, briefcase, tripod, flash equipment, and four cases full of cameras and film piled about him. Meanwhile, the Newhalls were wide awake inside and wondering where Ansel could be. One look down from their window told the story.
5
They ran down the stairs, greeted him with hearty hugs, and trudged back up with his accoutrements.

Ansel settled in comfortably with the Newhalls. For one thing, they were all three “cat people.” Ansel’s San Francisco domicile was ruled by the imperious Bill and the unruly Thunderpot, while the Newhalls shared their quarters with a feline genius named Euripides, who preferred to use the toilet, not a litter box, completing each visit with a futile paw-thrust toward the toilet paper.