Ansel Adams - Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, 1916-1984

Adams, Ansel, 1902-1984

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... In making (he choice between music and college,I still think I did the right thing, but others seemnot to think so.... My family said, What!! youdont want to be anything else but a photographer!!... I was talked about because:

I could play AND photograph...

I wore a beard...

I dared to question the status-quoI became engaged to VirginiaI became dis-engaged to VirginiaI had too many girlfriendsI did not have enough girlfriends...

I married VirginiaI did not live in a garretI moved to Yosemite...

-from a letter, July tgqq

Ansel Adams moved to Yosemite and scaledfor all time the topmost peaks of the photographers art.

And here, as in no other book, is AnselAdams, not simply true to life but alive, livingand breathing in these letters that span a lifetime. Here is the voiceprint, the heartbeat, themindscape of genius, the profound, impetuous,life-loving man, reminding us time and again,with disarming irony, that the written word isoften more intimate, more revealing thanspeech. On page after page he is here, rushingto greet us with a joke or roguish rhyme, sharing the mysteries of his art, and, in defense ofendangered wilderness, raising a shout thatcould crack the vault of heaven.

In his early years in Yosemite, Adamsformed the habit of writing letters at everyopportunity. His correspondence, therefore,virtually provides the full record of his life.Through the years, wherever he went, fromthe Southwest to Maine to Alaska, he wroteliterally thousands of letters and postcards.Among the family, friends, fellow photographers, environmentalists, and politicians withwhom he corresponded rank such eminent

Continued on back flap

ABIQUIU, NEW MEXICOTelegraph: Espanola, N. M.

September 21st, 1937

Dear Stieglitz,

By a miraculous sequences of circumstances and the kindness ofDavid HcAlpin I am in New Mexico with three cameras, a case of films, a bigappitite, and a vigorous feeling of accomplishment.

It is all very beautiful and magical here- a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breath it,let tne sun bake it intoyou. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisitethat wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro-and the micro-, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and theclocks stopped long ago.

O'Keeffe is supremely happy and painting, as usual, supremelyswell things. When she goes out riding with a blue shirt, black vest and blackhat, and scampers aroubd against the thunderclouds - 1 tell you, its something!

All that is heeded to complete the picture is to have you out in the gardens atsix AM in your green cape. I am quite certain you would li/

1 think l am getting some very good things - quite different, Ibelieve. I like to think of my present stuff as more subtle, more 1 i ft ing-up-the-lid, if you know what I mean. I did some new things in the Owen's Valley inCalifornia that I want you to seej I hope I will have things from here that 1would want you to see, too.

Nothing important has happened to me, except a glimmering ofwondering what it is all about - work, and living in general. Perhaps I am onthe edge of making a really good photograph. I hope so. I have a growingawareness of the insufficiencies of my work. 1 hope its a good sign.

O'Keeffe tells me you are in good shape and-have had a bearablesummer. I am glad - you deserve the best of good health and peace of mind. Aseason such as yours in New York must be a very wearing thing for the strongestperson.

Its trite to say it, but 1 wish you were here. Gawd knows when Iwill get to New York again - but I hope it will not be in the too distant future.McAlpin send you his very best. He is a good man, with a precious mixture ofcaution and enthusiasm.

all good wishes to you

LETTERS AND IMAGES 1916-1984

Reading these letters, i am swept back irresistibly intoAnsel Adams hyperactive life. He lived and worked amid swarms ofpeople - his family and assistants, neighbors, friends, conservationists, pol-k.iticians, other photographers, casual admirers. You never rang his doorbellthat his living room and studio did not contain at least four or five people talking toVirginia and waiting for Ansel to come out of the darkroom. When he did come,still m his lab apron and with his glasses on top of his head, there would be a boomand rush of greeting and laughter, a new joke or limerick, a few minutes of impetuoustalk, the answering of a question or settling of a problem or determining of a pieceot conservation strategy, a regretful admission that he was chained to the darkroomfor a while, an admonition to stay - stay to dinner, please - and an apologetic departure through the studio and office on his way back to his trays of hypo.

On the way he would probably pause long enough at the studio table to inspectthe work of the assistant spotting prints there; and as he passed through the officeyou might hear the machine-gun tattoo of the typewriter. That would be Ansel,pausing m transit to add a line or two to the letter rolled into it - perhaps one ofthese letters I have just been reading, punctuated with multiple exclamation pointsand asterisks and picturesque misspellings.

Then he would be gone for a while, closeted alone, locked in his wrestle withabsolute truth.

The most significant part of Ansel Adams, the spirit that will long outlive theman, has already been well documented. The photographs are what most peopleknow him by; and the photographs, since they are his most profound response to hislife on earth, are a form of self-documentation. If we wanted to put the nature imagesinto chronological order, we would have a record of his travels as well as ot theplaces San Francisco, Yosemite, Carmel that he called home. If we assembled thenotable portraits Albert Bender, Stieghtz, OKeeffe, Cedric Wright, Weston, DavidMcAlpin, Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, Ashkenazy - we would have an anthologyof the strongest influences and warmest friendships of his life.

What is more important, those photographs, especially those in which he revealedthe grandeur and delicacy of the earth in moments of miraculous weather and light,are intensely personal statements. Whether known through prints, portfolios, screens,posters, or books, they show us the mystical, romantic, larger-than-life Adams whoviewed nature with reverence but approached it with such discipline that some criticsthought him antihuman.

It is true that his great visual anthems, for example the enlargements that lookdown from his own studio walls, are devoid of the presence or traces of people. It isjust as true that Ansel Adams the artist can never be caught hanging around in or just

off the edge of the picture, mugging and hoofing tor attention. He submits, he makeshimself invisible. That does not mean he is not there.

Distant he could be called. Removed. Objective. Cold or absent he is not.Though the great nature images properly tell us nothing about his external life exceptthat he was there to click the shutter, they tell us everything about his spirit andintentions as an artist. The dawn-struck peaks and shadowed cliffs and piled thun-derheads, the black skies in which for his benefit some god has pasted improbablemoons, contain and express him. They are, and were intended to be, equivalents,in the word that Ansel liked and borrowed from Stieglitz, of his own respect andwonder and awe in the face of the worlds beauty.