Ansel Adams (52 page)

But although he dutifully toted about his Hasselblad, Ansel saw only visual disappointments. Aside from Scotland (which he liked a lot because it reminded him of home), the only places that appealed to him were the Matterhorn (he thought it at least had an interesting shape, but not as fine as Half Dome’s) and Chartres Cathedral, mostly for its windows. The pictures he brought back were good but not especially inspired.
44

Ansel met with photographers Bill Brandt and Brassaï in London and Man Ray in Paris, and looked forward to catching up with Henri Cartier-Bresson in Arles.
45
They were both present at a festival reception, but when Ansel tried to make his way across the room, the great French photographer disappeared. Ansel thought it was an intentional snub until he received a letter of apology from Cartier-Bresson, who explained that he had become overwhelmed by the press of people and had fallen to his knees and crawled out of the room.
46
Ansel returned home to Carmel breathing a sigh of relief and vowing never again to venture to foreign shores—a promise he would keep.
47

As Bill and Ansel attempted to tie up the details of Ansel’s long and complex life, the question of what should happen to his negatives was paramount. Ansel offered his archive (comprising negatives, prints, collections of books and photographs, correspondence, awards, and memorabilia) to the University of California, but much to his embarrassment (and their later profound regret), the administration and trustees refused it, excusing themselves for lack of funds.

Word soon reached John Schaefer, president of the University of Arizona, where Ansel had enjoyed a large solo exhibition in 1973. A chemist by education but a photographer at heart, John caught the next plane to Carmel and eagerly offered to acquire the archive. Ansel agreed, provided that the university establish an archive and research center for creative photography, using his collection as its cornerstone.
48
His conditions were met, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona was born. The Center is now home to more than two hundred archival collections and ninety thousand works made by two thousand photographers.
49

It was Ansel’s wish that the Center be just one component of a broader learning program, and inspire not only students in creative photography and its history but also working photographers and the interested public. It was to be not a graveyard of long-departed photographers but a place of lively discourse that would publish and exhibit the work of photographers both living and dead.
50

It was important to Ansel to know that after his death, his negatives would be used to teach young photographers. In this respect and others, the university setting was perfect. Although the Center now cares for Ansel’s negatives, and selected students under careful supervision may study them, no one is allowed to sell prints made from them, ensuring that no more “original” Ansel Adams photographs will show up.
51

Together, Bill Turnage and Dave Vena structured the future for then and forever for Ansel, his family, his art, and his finances.
52
In 1975, the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust (AAPRT) and the Ansel Adams Family Trust were formed. Ansel himself described the former as the director of future publishing projects and reproduction rights, and the latter as the recipient of the funds generated.
53
Ansel, Bill, Dave, and Arthur Thornhill, Jr., served as the first trustees of the AAPRT. Thornhill would resign shortly before Ansel’s death, to be replaced by John Schaefer.

In addition to everything else he was engaged in, Ansel published his last three portfolios during the 1970s.
Portfolio Five
(1970),
Portfolio Six
(1974), and
Portfolio Seven
(1976) appeared in editions of 110, 110, and 115, respectively. His only portfolios of large-scale prints, each image measuring about sixteen by twenty inches, they were all accompanied by a statement proclaiming that no further prints would be made from the negatives represented therein. Ansel was as good as his word: in what he later saw as an ill-considered gesture, he ran each of the
Portfolio Six
negatives through a Wells Fargo Bank check canceler to effectively destroy them and absolutely guarantee that no more prints could be made from them. He regretted this act almost immediately, deciding that he had usurped a basic photographic property: the ability of a negative theoretically to produce an infinite number of prints. Using electronic retouching, the AAPRT has resurrected those negatives, pixel by pixel, so that new reproduction prints can be made.
54

After he came on board in 1971, in the short span of five years Bill reordered Ansel’s entire life. By 1976, Ansel was a millionaire, an achievement that he credited to Bill.
55
There had been a confluence of propitious events, and probably any good financial manager could have done as well in the same situation, given a client who was a great artist with no history of personal management, and given the coincident photography boom. Ansel may have felt overmanaged; on one occasion, he told an interviewer, “Turnage is really doing extremely well by me, but he’s doing a little more than I can handle. I have to watch things very carefully.”
56
In fact, the last years of Ansel’s life were to be a grueling treadmill of moneymaking projects, what with the huge Museum Set project, a series of finely reproduced posters, annual calendars, and a new book almost yearly.
57
Ansel Adams had become the golden goose.

The moment Ansel stopped accepting print orders was the same time that museums began serious photography collections, too late to normally order prints from him. The Museum Sets were created so that people could buy them with the express purpose of donating them to a museum or similar nonprofit. He wanted his work to be seen by many, not by a few. There would be a total of one hundred of these “super” portfolios. Each Museum Set would contain what we called the “Basic Ten,”
Moonrise, Monolith, Mount Williamson,
and so on, and the purchaser could choose fifteen more prints from the full list, or could buy all seventy-five prints. This meant Ansel had to make almost three thousand prints. It was an onerous final burden. He began working on the Museum Sets when he was seventy-seven years old.

Bill brought out both the best and the worst in Ansel. Money had always been Ansel’s Achilles’ heel, and he had had to scramble for it most of his life. Ansel’s old friend and sometime harshest critic, Dorothea Lange, once mused, “Ansel . . . has always been able to attract, to magnetize, money and people with money . . . I’m sure, I swear, that Ansel doesn’t know that he goes where the money is. Just like a homing pigeon.”
58
And now here was Bill, devising project after moneymaking project for him. The rewards were so high that it proved nearly impossible for Ansel to admit that the demands on him were just too great.

Besides money, Ansel and Bill also shared another passion: conservation of the natural environment, and in this area, too, Bill potentiated Ansel. In late 1974, Harry Lunn presented President Gerald Ford a copy of
Images
, which prompted an invitation for Ansel to visit the White House. On January 27, 1975, Ansel and Bill arrived bearing a gift print of
Clearing Winter Storm.
Realizing that this was an opportunity for more than mere small talk, however, they also brought an itemized memorandum headed “New Initiatives for the National Parks.”
59

The national parks had suffered years of neglect under the Nixon administration, but Ansel wanted to give the new Republican, Ford, the benefit of the doubt especially since he was obviously an Adams fan. Ansel was impressed with the president’s willingness to listen, but although they seemed to agree on most of the issues, nothing much came out of their meeting other than First Daughter Susan Ford’s attending Ansel’s Yosemite Workshop that summer.
60

By late 1977, Bill was well and truly bored. He believed that his work for Ansel was essentially over; the rest would be just “bean counting.” Then, too, he had broken up with Andrea. Bill left Ansel’s full-time employ on December 1, 1977, skedaddling off to the mountains of Wyoming with the Garboesque announcement that he wanted some time alone to plan his future.

The next year, championed by Ansel and California’s Senator Alan Cranston, Bill was selected to be the executive director of the Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C. Ansel was so proud that he was popping buttons on his nonexistent vest. Ansel had been a supporter of the Wilderness Society for many years, but Bill now drew him into its inner circle. His photographs were used promotionally, to increase membership and as gifts for major donors. Ansel and his images brought added prestige to an already respected environmental group, albeit one that was nominally in the shade of the giant Sierra Club.

In the early 1980s, Ansel would be a leading figure in the society’s “Stop Watt” campaign, aimed at removing from office Reagan’s destructive Secretary of the Interior James Watt. Ansel was appalled by what he saw as Watt’s fundamentalist conviction that we might as well use up all our natural resources now since the apocalypse could come at any time.
61
The wall just outside Ansel’s darkroom door in Carmel sported a dartboard with Watt as the target.

While Ansel had had the ears of politicians for many years, Bill now brought him even greater access. At the behest of the Wilderness Society, senators came calling in Carmel and responded with genuine warmth when Ansel visited Washington; one, California’s Alan Cranston, a congressional environmental hero, became a personal friend. For Ansel, such associations were incredibly satisfying.

The 1970s ended with a bang.
Images
had proved such a success that in 1976 another large-format volume,
Yosemite and the Range of Light
, was added to Ansel’s NYGS schedule. Slated for 1979 publication, the book provided a view into the heart of Ansel’s work, his wellspring: Yosemite and the Sierra.
62

The Metropolitan Museum exhibition had not satisfied his craving for acceptance by the East Coast art establishment. The Met was seen as the old guard; more energy seemed to emanate from MoMA, where Ansel still had never had a solo exhibition (discounting
Born Free and Equal
in the museum’s basement in 1944). John Szarkowski, the director of photography at MoMA since Steichen’s retirement in 1972, had never pretended that he admired Ansel’s photographs. On the contrary, he had championed a series of then-contemporary photographers whose works were about as different from Ansel’s as they could be while still being in the same medium—from Diane Arbus’s disturbing portraits to Garry Winogrand’s quickly grabbed street shots. Szarkowski declared of the enlarged color “snapshots” of William Eggleston, “As pictures . . . these seem to me perfect: irreducible surrogates for the experience they pretend to record.”
63
Ansel was well aware that his own, very different aesthetic was not held in high regard at MoMA.

In 1976, when he dedicated
Portfolio Seven
to David McAlpin, Ansel knew that McAlpin had been busy divesting himself of his art collection through gifts.
64
Ansel had already donated his one original photograph by Stieglitz, given to him by O’Keeffe after Stieglitz’s death, to McAlpin’s primary beneficiary, Princeton University; now, spreading the wealth, he sent a copy of the portfolio to MoMA in McAlpin’s name.
65
In return, he received a surprisingly cordial letter of thanks from Szarkowski, who spoke in glowing terms of
El Capitan, Winter Sunrise
and referred to the horizontal
Aspens
as an “old friend.”
66

By year’s end, Szarkowski had offered Ansel a solo show for 1979, to be called
Ansel Adams and the West
.
67
At first, the plan was to assemble the exhibit directly from the museum’s own collection, but the show expanded into a retrospective of 153 photographs after Szarkowski spent a week in Carmel sifting through boxes and boxes of prints and proofs.
68

Ansel found Szarkowski’s curatorial style a bit unnerving. He had become used to having near-total control over which of his works would be shown and reproduced in magazines and books, and also through his virtual monopoly as director—in substance if not in name—of his own exhibitions. Few museums had staff who were familiar with photography, so most gladly handed over the responsibility to him. When it came to
Ansel Adams and the West
, however, Szarkowski was clearly the boss. Taking the opposite position from McAlpin’s on Ansel’s Met show, Szarkowski resolved that the exhibition should have a single focus: landscapes and natural still lifes. By way of explanation, he stated, “I think [the landscapes] are [Ansel’s] greatest pictures and I think that’s where his most original, most intense work has been done. Ultimately that’s going to be how we remember him.”
69

And Szarkowski was right.

Since
Yosemite and the Range of Light
was in production and due to be published at the time of Ansel’s MoMA opening, Bill (at that time still working for him) suggested that a smaller-format version, including appropriate wraparound additions and a text by Szarkowski, might do as the show’s catalog. It was a match.
70