Mary Street Alinder - Ansel Adams: Letters, 1916--1984

Ansel Adams: An Autobiography

Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs

Ansel Adams in the Canadian Rockies

Ansel Adams in the National Parks

Looking at Ansel Adams: The Photographs and the Man

Ansel Adams in Color

Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley: Celebrating the Park at 150

The Portfolios of Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams at 100

The Negative

The Camera

Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs

The Print

The Ansel Adams Wall Calendar

The Ansel Adams Engagement Calendar

Three authorized interactive apps: Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: An Image a Day, and Looking at Ansel Adams

Reading these letters, I am swept back irresistibly into Ansel Adams hyperactive life. He lived and worked amid swarms of peoplehis family and assistants, neighbors, friends, conservationists, politicians, other photographers, casual admirers. You never rang his doorbell that his living room and studio did not contain at least four or five people talking to Virginia and waiting for Ansel to come out of the darkroom. When he did come, still in his lab apron and with his glasses on top of his head, there would be a boom and rush of greeting and laughter, a new joke or limerick, a few minutes of impetuous talk, the answering of a question or settling of a problem or determining of a piece of conservation strategy, a regretful admission that he was chained to the darkroom for a while, an admonition to staystay to dinner, pleaseand 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 inspect the work of the assistant spotting prints there; and as he passed through the office you might hear the machine-gun tattoo of the typewriter. That would be Ansel, pausing in transit to add a line or two to the letter rolled into itperhaps one of these letters I have just been reading, punctuated with multiple exclamation points and asterisks and picturesque misspellings.

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

The most significant part of Ansel Adams, the spirit that will long outlive the man, has already been well documented. The photographs are what most people know him by; and the photographs, since they are his most profound response to his life on earth, are a form of self-documentation. If we wanted to put the nature images into chronological order, we would have a record of his travels as well as of the placesSan Francisco, Yosemite, Carmelthat he called home. If we assembled the notable portraitsAlbert Bender, Stieglitz, OKeeffe, Cedric Wright, Weston, David McAlpin, Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, Ashkenazywe would have an anthology of the strongest influences and warmest friendships of his life.

What is more important, those photographs, especially those in which he revealed the 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 who viewed nature with reverence but approached it with such discipline that some critics thought him antihuman.

It is true that his great visual anthems, for example the enlargements that look down from his own studio walls, are devoid of the presence or traces of people. It is just 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 for attention. He submits, he makes himself 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 except that he was there to click the shutter, they tell us everything about his spirit and intentions as an artist. The dawn-struck peaks and shadowed cliffs and piled thunderheads, the black skies in which for his benefit some god has pasted improbable moons, 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 and wonder and awe in the face of the worlds beauty.

The artist Ansel Adams has been before the public for more than a half century. But the man Ansel Adams, the one his family and friends and associates knew, never hid or withheld himself. Once, oppressed with obligations, commitments, and overwork, he exclaimed to Edwin Land that he wished he could live like Weston, holed up on Wildcat Hill, working only when he pleased and keeping aloof from the rat race. Land said to him, Weston lives in a shrine. You live in the world.