Ansel Adams (62 page)

When he died, we were still completing the proofing project, making uncorrected, rough contact prints directly from the negatives.
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Ansel saw both the autobiography and a projected book of letters as showcases for his unknown photographs, providing him with compelling reasons to make new prints.
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Chris Rainier had first come to Ansel’s attention as an eager young student (and recent graduate of the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara) in the 1980 Yosemite Workshop. After the departure of John Sexton in 1982, Chris became Ansel’s last photographic assistant. The incredibly capable John was a very hard act to follow, but Chris had his own strengths and made the job his own. While he seemed a centered presence at all times, a huge bonus for us when the pressure was on, Chris’s recurrent nightmare was of accidentally dropping
Monolith
’s
glass plate right in front of Ansel, watching in horror as it hit the floor, shattering irrevocably in slow motion.
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It was Chris’s responsibility to proof all the negatives and make most of the reproduction prints for the autobiography. Because we were overwhelmed with work, shortly before Ansel’s death, I hired Rod Dresser, a former Navy officer and photographer by avocation, to help us out. He proved invaluable during the difficult years that followed, assisting in the production of the autobiography and the letters.
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Not long after sending in the manuscript, I began reviewing the many boxes of reproduction prints, and then I tackled the proofs. Ansel had been so clear in his instructions that I felt as if he were Jiminy Cricket sitting on my shoulder guiding the selection of each image. In the end, a full 40 percent of the pictures in the autobiography had never before been seen.

Ansel had not wanted the photographs to be merely illustrative; they were also to communicate a mood, an attitude. With this in mind, for the “Family” chapter, about his difficult childhood and critical mother and aunt, I selected dark and moody images, while lyrical pictures that seemed to sing on their own found a home in the “Music” chapter that opened with a booming waterfall.

Chapter 5, “Yosemite,” began with a full-page reproduction of
The Cliff of El Capitan
,
an image that only Ansel himself could have selected (somehow I wouldn’t have heard his little voice in my ear on this one) and the sole picture that I knew he definitely wanted to include. For me, the spirit of Yosemite is best communicated in his views of the entire valley, but for Ansel himself, Yosemite was granite walls, and this image shows just that: the flat, gray cliff of El Capitan framed without its top or bottom, visually independent of both heaven and earth. There is no sense of El Capitan’s enormous scale, just of its rockness, the essence of Ansel’s Yosemite.

All of our deadlines were met, and
Ansel Adams: An Autobiography
appeared in bookstores in October 1985, in time for the gift-giving season when fully half of all books are sold. If the autobiography was not quite as handsome as Ansel’s purely photographic books, it was a milestone: four hundred pages loaded with 250 illustrations, released at a retail price of fifty dollars.

Shortly before the actual publication date, I received a phone call from the head of Little, Brown’s publicity department. He had read the manuscript and with some excitement told me, “This will make the
New York Times
bestseller list!” He had a great feel for the book, and I could tell he really liked it. (He also was privy to the book’s pre-sales.) He placed the resources of Little, Brown behind the autobiography, springing for significant advertising. Life was good. I sent him a dozen long-stemmed red roses.

The autobiography was released to coincide with a major exhibition of Ansel’s work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In his stead, I had to represent the book as best I could, giving interviews on National Public Radio and on
Today
, the most important morning television show in terms of book sales.

The only task I dreaded was lecturing at the National Gallery. The museum had scheduled a full day of Ansel-related activities, including one speech before mine, by John Szarkowski of MoMA. When W. C. Fields cautioned against following children or animals he should have added John, who was a consummate speaker and photographic intellect, to his warning list.
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I stayed in my hotel room during his lecture; I knew if I listened to him I would never have the confidence to go out there on my own. But despite my fear that the audience would walk out, my lecture went fine, although we had to surmount a major technical glitch. We had assembled the glass-mounted slides in the humidity of Carmel. Jim was my projectionist and discovered during the half-hour break between lectures that when an image was projected on the auditorium’s huge screen, dampness trapped inside the slide evaporated under the heat of the projector lens providing a distracting visual effect of some blob slithering across the surface. He ran to our room, grabbed my hair dryer, returned to the projection booth, and began hand-drying each slide. When I finished the lecture, I had nearly overtaken him, but we just made it.

The autobiography found a huge and responsive public, and the reviews were terrific. As predicted, it did appear on the
New York Times
best-seller list and stayed there for six weeks—the most expensive book at that date to achieve that honor, and the first (and so far only) book of Ansel’s. It probably would have stayed on the list much longer had Little, Brown not sold out of books, making it unavailable in many markets for much of the holiday season. In 1990,
Ansel Adams: An Autobiography
was selected as one of the hundred most important books of the decade by the American Library Association. To my disappointment, a reduced-format paperback appeared in 1996, stripped of most of its photographs and therefore grievously missing what had been so important to Ansel, the synthesis of his images with his words.

My involvement in this book brought me great rewards, far beyond the financial. Nearly once a week someone still tells me how much he or she loved the book and was moved by it; on occasion I have even been told it was “life-changing”! I hear such comments in my heart.

The National Gallery exhibition was another Adams coup. That museum had traditionally been the stuffiest of the stuffy in terms of photography, but had lately relented and deemed the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, then Paul Strand, and finally Ansel Adams worthy of its hallowed walls. For such an occasion, a catalog was essential, but it had to be something that would neither compete nor conflict with the autobiography.

The National Gallery exhibition was sponsored by Pacific Telesis, a California communications company that had purchased one of the last complete Museum Sets just before Ansel died. (Pacific Telesis was absorbed in 2005 by AT&T.) This was not a mere matter of handing over the money: Ansel insisted on interviewing the president of the company and the president and director of their foundation to personally assess their intentions. Over drinks at his home, Ansel questioned them for more than an hour before giving his consent. They promised they would actively tour their photographs, and they kept their word: their Museum Set was the core of the National Gallery exhibition, supplemented by murals and screens chosen by Nick Cikovsky, who was then the eminent curator of American Art. Ansel’s show attracted 651,652 people, far greater than any other photography exhibition before it.
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Pacific Telesis also underwrote the catalog, a record of all seventy­-five Museum Set images with an essay on the set by Cikovsky and another on Ansel by Jim, who contributed a detailed chronology as well. A year later, it was reissued by Little, Brown in slightly different form, under the title
Classic Images.
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When Ansel died, we were just finishing the second set of deluxe posters, this time of
Monolith, Frozen Lake and Cliffs,
and
Winter Sunrise.
Dave Gardner’s reproductions had been fully approved by Ansel, but he had not yet signed them. We had AA’s initials embossed in place of the signature.

Although I again protested, this time to the trustees rather than to Ansel himself, by 1987 a desk calendar had joined the lengthening Ansel Adams publishing list. As much as I loved Ansel’s work, I thought it was proliferating ridiculously. Still, every time I began preparing for a new edition of either calendar, I would find myself once again caught up in the joy of working with his photographs. Each spring I would lay out my proposed calendar images and ask everyone present in the house to comment: Phyllis, Fumiye, Chris, Rod, our bookkeeper Judy Siria, and especially Virginia. (Phyllis is now a very active eighty-nine-year-old. Fumiye and Rod have passed away. Chris’s photographs of indigenous cultures and his work for
National Geographic
have propelled him to be one of the most respected expressive documentary photographers.) I respected all their opinions, and with Ansel no longer physically around, I wanted them to feel a part of each publishing project, much as I might later wish I hadn’t: criticism is easier to request than to accept.

Next I buried myself in the sand, in the form of
Ansel Adams: Letters and Images.
I knew the letters backward and forward from my years of research for the autobiography, and I had memorized parts of some that I found especially moving. Our publisher cautioned that books of correspondence were neither sexy nor potential bestsellers. But I hoped that in this case those rules would not apply, because Ansel’s letters were uncommonly wonderful.

Andrea, now living in New York with her new husband, was my coeditor. She and I agreed that the letters should tell their own story, so we included some to Ansel as well as from him, reasoning that this would better communicate the quality of his relationships with such greats as Stieglitz, Weston, Strand, and the Newhalls, along with presidents and senators. We imposed as little of our own editorial presence as possible. Through the careful chronological sequencing of letters, whole stories naturally developed intact, allowing the reader to experience firsthand the making of photographic and environmental history—to my mind, exciting stuff. This approach necessitated the elimination of some important, although not crucial, events and friendships. Other decisions were made for more delicate reasons; for example, because Ansel had declined to mention his romantic wanderings in the autobiography, we included no letters to Patsy English. The book is an excellent read, but as Little, Brown had warned, there was far less interest in it than there had been in his memoir.

The proofs arrived for the letters book in May 1988. It was my duty to read them with attention to every detail, from typos to dust spots in the reproductions, and make any last-second changes. Signing off on these was the final job I was contracted to complete. I finished, shipped the bluelines to Dave Gardner, left the Trust’s employ, and crashed, falling into a eighteen-month-long depression, an unbelievable turn of events for someone known as Little Mary Sunshine. I had not let up since I had begun working for Ansel almost a decade earlier. I had had no idea that I was under such extraordinary stress.

Ansel Adams: Letters and Images
was the last book personally planned by Ansel. Since then, the AAPRT has launched a steady stream of new Adams titles:
The American Wilderness
, 1990;
Our National Parks
, 1992;
The Ansel Adams Guide: Basic Techniques
, 1992;
Ansel Adams in Color,
1993;
Yosemite and the High Sierra
, 1994;
Yosemite
, 1995;
Ansel Adams: California
, 1997;
The Grand Canyon and the Southwest
, 2000;
Ansel Adams at 100
, 2001;
Ansel Adams: Trees
, 2004;
Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail
, 2006;
Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs
, 2007;
Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities
, 2008;
Ansel Adams in the National Parks
, 2010;
Looking at Ansel Adams
, 2012; and
Ansel Adams in the Canadian Rockies
, 2013. Ansel Adams is still a big business.

Ansel’s posters, wall calendars, and engagement calendars appear dependably each year. Since they began in 1984, the wall calendars had sold more than five million copies by 2013, averaging more than one hundred thousand every year.
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Ansel’s images may be the most widely available and frequently purchased by any visual artist in history.

In celebration of his hundredth birthday in 2002, PBS aired the ninety-minute
Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film
, written and directed by Ric Burns. I talked with his staff many times over the months before shooting and then made a brief appearance in the movie. Somehow Burns missed the mark. Slow-paced, with a background of slow, somber music—none of those qualities reflect Ansel. Ansel was a live wire, fueled with abundant and productive energy, the life of the party, the first and the last with a joke, not the meditative old man of the mountain as portrayed in this documentary.

The year 2002 marked the beginning of a difficult cascade of events. I received an excited telephone call from a Mr. Rick Norsigian. A year earlier he had bought two boxes containing sixty-five glass-plate negatives at a flea market. He was told that they had been discovered in an abandoned warehouse in Los Angeles. Norsigian had read the first edition of this book, my biography of Ansel, and with what he learned he concluded that he had found some long-lost Ansel Adams negatives. I told him to send me a letter with photocopies of everything he had and I would get back to him. He wrote that the negatives measured six and a half by eight and a half inches, and their negative envelopes bore dates ranging from 1923 to 1931. Ansel’s Korona view camera, his favorite from 1923 until about 1929—the one that he used to make
Monolith
—required that identical size of glass plate. Norsigian also sent a glossy proof sheet with thirty-seven small black-and-white 35mm contact prints (one by one and a half inches), mostly of Yosemite with a few seascapes and a couple from Carmel. The negative envelopes had been dated and titled in more than one hand. I looked at everything he sent with a completely open mind. After years of haunting flea markets, Norsigian believed he had found a one-in-a-million treasure. Employed as a painter in the maintenance department for the Fresno public school system, he was hoping for an
Antiques Roadshow
home run. Here was a tale that would warm hearts everywhere, an underdog finally becoming a top dog.
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