Ansel Adams (51 page)

Imogen Cunningham felt it was just one more instance of Ansel’s selling out. In 1969, he had allowed one of his winter views of Yosemite Valley to be printed on three-pound cans of Hills Brothers coffee. With her trademark caustic wit, she had sent him one of the cans filled with manure and sprouting a very healthy marijuana plant, terming it “pot in a pot.”
18
Now collector’s items, these Adams coffee cans have sold for up to $1,500, without Imogen’s embellishment.
19

Negative reactions of friends and the public to “Drive a Datsun, Plant a Tree” hurt Ansel, and he swore he would never again permit himself or his work to be used to promote a commercial product.
20
He stuck to his word, though not before completing the contract that Bill had arranged for him with Wolverine Worldwide, an American manufacturer of hiking boots that paid him seventeen thousand dollars in 1972 and fifteen thousand in 1973 (plus some swell shoes) for the commercial use of his photographs, along with some prints for the corporate offices.
21

As the decade of the seventies progressed, interest in fine photography skyrocketed. As a hobby, photography exploded, with sales of photographic equipment doubling over the course of the decade. Newsstands offered a wide variety of specialized magazines, and most colleges added photography courses to their curricula, producing thousands of photo majors.
22

This newfound popularity, combined with a booming economy and the fact that an original photograph by an important photographer still cost far less than comparable works in most other media, contributed to the first broad interest in the purchase of photographs as art. Sales picked up as a handful of new galleries opened their doors, including Witkin in New York City, Siembab in Boston, Halsted in Detroit, and Focus in San Francisco, soon followed by such galleries as LIGHT in New York, Lunn in Washington, Weston in Carmel, Grapestake in San Francisco, A Gallery for Fine Photography in New Orleans, and G. Ray Hawkins in Los Angeles. Major auction houses such as Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Swann, and Butterfields (now Bonhams) began to conduct biannual photography auctions.

Photography collecting rapidly gained momentum, and Ansel was perfectly positioned to benefit. Immediately, his photographs led the market, with sixteen-by-twenty-inch prints selling for $150 each in the early seventies—certainly a significant increase from their 1932 price of ten dollars, but still very affordable.
23

There was a big downside to the new demand for Ansel’s prints, however: Ansel had to make them. The more popular the image—one of the group he called his “Mona Lisas”—the more prints he had to make, and the more depressed he got, chained to his darkroom trying to keep up with orders. Even when Bill raised print prices to five hundred dollars on September 1, 1974, sales, far from slowing, only soared.
24
The
Collectibles Market Report
pronounced, “Nothing goes up forever, but [an] Adams has the qualities of a blue chip like [a] Renoir.”
25

In the spring of 1975, Bill issued a press release announcing that as of December 31 of that year, Ansel would accept no more print orders. Until that time, all sixteen-by-twenty-inch prints would be priced at eight hundred dollars, except
Moonrise
, which would cost twelve hundred.
26
The idea was to give individuals and dealers one last opportunity to buy Ansel’s work and then free him to move on to other projects.

By the deadline, they were stunned by orders for thirty-four hundred prints, 1,060 from Lunn Gallery alone.
27
“[Harry Lunn] got his mitts on Ansel Adams . . . and the rest is history,”
28
a newspaper article later asserted. Within four years, Lunn could report that he had fewer than 250 prints remaining.
29
By that time, Ansel’s photographs were selling for many multiples of their original price, and major money was being made in the secondary market.
30

Harry Lunn was a fabled art broker, a dealer’s dealer who often acts as middleman in the sale of spectacular nineteenth-century photography albums. For many years, he was also the major player in the Ansel Adams market. From the 1970s until his death in 1998, few photographic projects of the highest magnitude were carried out without Harry’s involvement in one stage or another.

A tall, rangy man with a full beard and imperious bearing, Harry looked just a bit like a stern Amish farmer who dressed in impeccably tailored suits. It was commonly understood (and never denied by Harry himself) that he was at one time a CIA operative, which certainly added to his mystique.
31
Once, Jim and I met Harry for dinner at Au Trou Gascon in Paris. We arrived first and were seated, but Harry insisted on trading places with me so that his back would not face the door. It made me a believer in what I had thought was simply a myth. When Harry suffered a fatal heart attack in 1998, his
New York Times
obituary revealed that he had served undercover in the CIA from about 1955 until his identity was blown in 1967 by an article in
Ramparts
magazine. He had been based in Paris and was involved with the international section of the National Students Association, a CIA front.
32

Harry was anything but shy about his methods of building up a market for a particular artist. In Ansel’s case, he held a huge inventory with multiple copies of what he believed were the best pictures. He selected nine images as Ansel’s masterpieces and refused to sell them, promoting the other images and building a market and prices. After he had established those, he finally released his top nine, at “marvelously enormous prices. That’s when you make all your money,” he boasted.
33

Some of the Ansel Adams prints that he worked his best magic on, the ones that he tantalizingly listed on his gallery’s August 8, 1978, inventory sheet followed by the notation NFS (not for sale), were
Moonrise
,
Mount Williamson
,
Clearing Winter Storm
,
Moon and Half Dome
,
Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake
,
Oak Tree
,
Snowstorm
,
Tenaya Creek
,
Dogwood
,
Rain
,
Aspens
(horizontal), and
Sand Dune, Sunrise
, each one an Adams masterpiece.
34
Harry and other dealers set prices based on the photographs’ individually perceived comparative value, as determined by auction results, buyer demand, and their own personal taste.

When the deadline for orders passed, Ansel issued a form letter to answer the requests for prints that continued to flood his studio. He listed as the reasons for his decision 1) his desire to proof and print the thousands of neglected negatives of his that had yet to see the light of an enlarger; 2) the need to write a new series of technical books; and 3) the obligations of lecturing and teaching his annual Yosemite Workshops.
35

Ansel knew that to fill the orders in hand, he would have to devote all of his time and energy for the next few years to making prints. He hired a second photographic assistant so that the darkroom could be in operation seven days a week and set a daily production goal of forty sixteen-by-twenty-inch prints or sixty eleven-by-fourteens.
36
Only such a darkroom virtuoso as Ansel could meet those numbers with no diminution of print quality.

Continuing to put Ansel’s business house in order, in 1974 Bill presented the idea of an exclusive publishing agreement to Tim Hill, editor in chief of the New York Graphic Society (NYGS) imprint of Little, Brown and Company. The contract would give NYGS the right of first refusal on any of Ansel’s publishing projects. Hill knew immediately that this was an opportunity not to be missed. Recently hired to improve NYGS’s bottom line—its historical emphasis on books about painters and painting had put it on thin ice financially—Hill had presciently switched the imprint’s thrust from painting to photography, which he saw as less elitist and appealing to a much larger market. Eastern and erudite, the hardworking Hill proved his mettle. With a careful analysis in hand, he approached the revered president of Little, Brown, Arthur Thornhill, Jr., and reminded him that the company already had Robert Frost in poetry, Norman Rockwell in illustration, and Andrew Wyeth in painting. Ansel Adams would, he argued, make a fitting and prestigious addition to their distinguished roster. Thornhill readily agreed.
37

With David Vena, the attorney he had hired on Ansel’s behalf, Bill devised a favorable contract that assured his boss a fair royalty share, gave him the power to select the designer, printer, paper, and binding to be used, and allowed him actively to supervise the printing.
38
This was an unusual requirement for an author to make of a publisher, and even more unusual for a publisher to accept, but these were extremely important considerations to Ansel, who insisted on the highest-quality reproduction and ensured that he got it by personally checking printed sheets as the presses rolled. From his earliest efforts, Ansel had been committed to producing the best books possible; the association of excellence with the name Ansel Adams had been hard earned.

Images: 1923–1974
, his first volume with NYGS, was published that very year. In full control, Ansel produced his ideal book, comprising his personal choice of pictures, state-of-the-art reproduction, and graceful words. He selected the 115 photographs that he believed best represented the range of his vision, choosing (as he always did when it was up to him) a wide spectrum of portraits, details, abstracts, and occasional quirky subjects, as well as a smattering of his grand landscapes.

He invited close friends to join with him in the project. Adrian Wilson created a design of expansive white borders and spare, clean typography, all in service to the photographs. The foreword was finely crafted by Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, good friend, and former Sierra Club director Wallace Stegner. George Waters, Ansel’s old comrade from his years working for Kodak, supervised both the making of the plates and the actual printing.

Physically,
Images
was ponderously large, nearly a yard long when opened. Good old Imogen complained that she could peruse it only when propped up in bed with pillows supporting both the book and her. Released at sixty-five dollars and soon raised to seventy-five,
Images
was both a great aesthetic and commercial success, elected as one of the 50 Books of the Year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts and awarded first prize at the World Book Fair in Leipzig, Germany.
39

In the early planning stages for the retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974, David McAlpin warned Ansel that the New York audience was different from that of the West Coast; few Easterners had actually visited a national park.
40
He also suggested that portraits were more interesting than empty, if beautiful, landscapes.
41
Although Ansel heeded his advice and included more people pictures, the New York critics generally raked him over the “Nature Boy” coals. The critic for the
New York Times
sniffed, “For myself, the look on the face of Georgia O’Keeffe—in the 1937 photograph included here—is worth all the views of Yosemite Valley ever committed to film.”
42

During the production of the Metropolitan exhibition, Ansel and Bill worked closely with the young assistant to the curator of prints and drawings. Andrea Gray Rawle was intelligent, dynamic, and beautiful. Bill swept Andrea off her feet; by June 15, 1974, she had moved to Carmel, assured of a job with Ansel.

Andrea proved to be a godsend to Ansel. She was a meticulous organizer and served as an excellent buffer between him and much of the rest of the world, which seemed to want something from him every minute of the day. She had such amazing vitality that just being around her made Ansel feel more alive; she was fun and ready to do anything that needed to be done or to travel anywhere at the drop of a hat. They developed a wonderful relationship, and she was quickly promoted from secretary to chief assistant.

Ansel did not believe in vacations and proudly declared that he had never taken one (those months spent on Sierra Club Outings, he reckoned, were nothing less than serious work). When Bill learned that his boss had never been to Europe, he came up with an important excuse for a trip: in July 1974, the two went to France for a week so that Ansel could participate in the annual Arles Festival of Photography (Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie). Ansel enjoyed the festival itself—an event unsurpassed by any other in the medium, founded and directed for many years by the engaging photographer Lucien Clergue, who welcomed his American colleague with Gallic kisses on both cheeks and a full itinerary laced with good times—but Ansel did not enjoy much else during these travels, especially his one morning in Paris, when he was flabbergasted at the price of a simple cup of coffee.
43

Two years later, Andrea and Bill, now married, convinced Ansel to give Europe one more try. Ansel and entourage—Andrea, Bill, Virginia, and Anne’s youngest child, the teenage Sylvia—sallied forth. Since this could not smack of the word
vacation
, their heavy schedule included yet another stint at the Arles Festival and the opening of Ansel’s important solo exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, perceptively curated by Mark Haworth-Booth. Ansel was surprised that the exhibition’s walls had been painted a warm maroon. He found the color to present his prints very effectively, and decided it was refreshing after so many years of gray or white walls. The Turnages were also hoping that Ansel would find some exciting new subjects, so the group did some touring in France, England, and Scotland as well.