By William Turnage
This biography has been published by Oxford
University
Press for its American National Biography and is reprinted courtesy OUP
and the author.
Adams, Ansel (Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22, 1984),
photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco,
California, the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive
Bray. The grandson of a wealthy timber baron, Adams grew up in a house
set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate. When Adams was only four, an
aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of 1906 threw him to the
ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year
later the family fortune collapsed in the financial panic of 1907, and
Adams's father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly
attempting to recoup.
An only child, Adams was born when his mother was
nearly forty. His relatively elderly parents, affluent family history,
and the live-in presence of his mother's maiden sister and aged father
all combined to create an environment that was decidedly Victorian and
both socially and emotionally conservative. Adams's mother spent much of
her time brooding and fretting over her husband's inability to restore
the Adams fortune, leaving an ambivalent imprint on her son. Charles
Adams, on the other hand, deeply and patiently influenced, encouraged,
and supported his son.
Natural shyness and a certain intensity of genius,
coupled with the dramatically "earthquaked" nose, caused Adams to have
problems fitting in at school. In later life he noted that he might have
been diagnosed as hyperactive. There is also the distinct possibility
that he may have suffered from dyslexia. He was not successful in the
various schools to which his parents sent him; consequently, his father
and aunt tutored him at home. Ultimately, he managed to earn what he
termed a "legitimizing diploma" from the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private
School — perhaps equivalent to having completed the eighth grade.
The most important result of Adams's somewhat solitary
and unmistakably different childhood was the joy that he found in
nature, as evidenced by his taking long walks in the still-wild reaches
of the Golden Gate. Nearly every day found him hiking the dunes or
meandering along Lobos Creek, down to Baker Beach, or out to the very
edge of the American continent.
When Adams was twelve he taught himself to play the
piano and read music. Soon he was taking lessons, and the ardent pursuit
of music became his substitute for formal schooling. For the next dozen
years the piano was Adams's primary occupation and, by 1920, his
intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for
photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to
his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and
exacting craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual
artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on
photography.
If Adams's love of nature was nurtured in the Golden
Gate, his life was, in his words, "colored and modulated by the great
earth gesture" of the Yosemite Sierra (Adams, Yosemite and the Sierra
Nevada, p. xiv). He spent substantial time there every year from 1916
until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and
transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had
given him. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and
self-confidence. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent the first
of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as "keeper" of the club's LeConte
Memorial Lodge. He became friends with many of the club's leaders, who
were founders of America's nascent conservation movement. He met his
wife, Virginia Best, in Yosemite; they were married in 1928. The couple
had two children.
The Sierra Club was vital to Adams's early success as a
photographer. His first published photographs and writings appeared in
the club's 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one man exhibition in
1928 at the club's San Francisco headquarters. Each summer the club
conducted a month-long High Trip, usually in the Sierra Nevada, which
attracted up to two hundred members. The participants hiked each day to a
new and beautiful campsite accompanied by a large contingent of pack
mules, packers, cooks, and the like. As photographer of these outings,
in the late 1920s, Adams began to realize that he could earn enough to
survive — indeed, that he was far more likely to prosper as a
photographer than as a concert pianist. By 1934 Adams had been elected
to the club's board of directors and was well established as both the
artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite.
Nineteen twenty seven was the pivotal year of Adams's
life. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face
of Half Dome, and took his first High Trip. More important, he came
under the influence of Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance
magnate and patron of arts and artists. Literally the day after they
met, Bender set in motion the preparation and publication of Adams'
first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras [sic]. Bender's
friendship, encouragement, and tactful financial support changed Adams's
life dramatically. His creative energies and abilities as a
photographer blossomed, and he began to have the confidence and
wherewithal to pursue his dreams. Indeed, Bender's benign patronage
triggered the transformation of a journeyman concert pianist into the
artist whose photographs, as critic Abigail Foerstner wrote in the
Chicago Tribune (Dec. 3, 1992), "did for the national parks something
comparable to what Homer's epics did for Odysseus."
Although Adams's transition from musician to
photographer did not happen at once, his passion shifted rapidly after
Bender came into his life, and the projects and possibilities
multiplied. In addition to spending summers photographing in the Sierra
Nevada, Adams made several lengthy trips to the Southwest to work with
Mary Austin, grande dame of the western literati. Their magnificent
limited edition book, Taos Pueblo, was published in 1930. In the same
year Adams met photographer Paul Strand, whose images had a powerful
impact on Adams and helped to move him away from the "pictorial" style
he had favored in the 1920s. Adams began to pursue "straight
photography," in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized, and the
final print gave no appearance of being manipulated in the camera or the
darkroom. Adams was soon to become straight photography's mast
articulate and insistent champion. [Ed. Note: Manipulated in this
instance meaning altering the clarity or content of the photographed
subject matter. Techniques such as "burning" and "dodging", as well as
the Zone System, a scientific system developed by Adams, is used
specifically to "manipulate" the tonality and give the artist the
ability to create as opposed to record.]
In 1927 Adams met photographer Edward Weston. They
became increasingly important to each other as friends and colleagues.
The renowned Group f/64, founded in 1932, coalesced around the
recognized greatness of Weston and the dynamic energy of Adams. Although
loosely organized and relatively short-lived, Group f/64 brought the
new West Coast vision of straight photography to national attention and
influence. San Francisco's DeYoung Museum promptly gave f/64 an
exhibition and, in that same year, gave Adams his first one-man museum
show.
Adams's star rose rapidly in the early 1930s,
propelled in part by his ability and in part by his effusive energy and
activity. He made his first visit to New York in 1933, on a pilgrimage
to meet photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the artist whose work and
philosophy Adams most admired and whose life of commitment to the medium
he consciously emulated. Their relationship was intense and their
correspondence frequent, rich, and insightful. Although profoundly a man
of the West, Adams spent a considerable amount of time in New York
during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Stieglitz circle played a vital role
in his artistic life. In 1933 the Delphic Gallery gave Adams his first
New York show. His first series of technical articles was published in
Camera Craft in 1934, and his first widely distributed book, Making a
Photograph, appeared in 1935. Most important, in 1936 Stieglitz gave
Adams a one-man show at An American Place.
Recognition, however, did not alleviate Adams's
financial pressures. In a letter dated 6 August 1935 he wrote Weston, "I
have been busy, but broke. Can't seem to climb over the financial
fence." Adams was compelled to spend much of his time as a commercial
photographer. Clients ran the gamut, including the Yosemite
concessionaire, the National Park Service, Kodak, Zeiss, IBM, AT&T, a
small women's college, a dried fruit company, and Life, Fortune, and
Arizona Highways magazines — in short, everything from portraits to
catalogues to Coloramas. On 2 July 1938 he wrote to friend David
McAlpin, "I have to do something in the relatively near future to regain
the right track in photography. I am literally swamped with
"commercial" work — necessary for practical reasons, but very
restraining to my creative work." Although Adams became an unusually
skilled commercial photographer, the work was intermittent, and he
constantly worried about paying the next month's bills. His financial
situation remained precarious and a source of considerable stress until
late in life.
Adams's technical mastery was the stuff of legend.
More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the
theory and practice of the medium. Weston and Strand frequently
consulted him for technical advice. He served as principal photographic
consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other
photographic concerns. Adams developed the famous and highly complex
"zone system" of controlling and relating exposure and development,
enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a
photograph that matched and expressed that visualization. He produced
ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most
influential books ever written on the subject.
Adams's energy and capacity for work were simply
colossal. He often labored for eighteen or more hours per day, for days
and weeks on end. There were no vacations, no holidays, no Sundays in
Ansel Adams's life. Frequently, after and intense period of work, he
would return to San Francisco or Yosemite, promptly contract the "flu,"
and spend several days in bed. His hyper-kinetic existence was also
fueled by alcohol, for which he had a particular fondness, and a
constant whirl of social activity, friends, and colleagues. As Beaumont
Newhall writes in his FOCUS: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (1993),
"Ansel was a great party man and loved to entertain. He had a very
dominating personality, and would always be the center of attention" (p.
235).
Adams described himself as a photographer — lecturer —
writer. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that he was simply —
indeed, compulsively — a communicator. He endlessly traveled the country
in pursuit of both the natural beauty he revered and photographed and
the audiences he required. Adams felt an intense commitment to promoting
photography as a fine art and played a key role in the establishment of
the first museum department of photography, at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York. The work at the museum fostered the closest relationships
of Adams's life, with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, a historian and museum
administrator and a writer-designer, respectively. Their partnership
was arguably the most potent collaboration in twentieth-century
photography. In the 1950s and 1960s Nancy Newhall and Adams created a
number of books and exhibitions of historic significance, particularly
the Sierra Club's This is the American Earth (1960), which, with Rachel
Carson's classic Silent Spring, played a seminal role in launching the
first broad-based citizen environmental movement.
Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of
wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable
meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation
philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society
colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians. However, his great
influence came from his photography. His images became the symbols, the
veritable icons, of wild America. When people thought about the national
parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, the often
envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph. His
black-and-white images were not "realistic" documents of nature.
Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the
psychological experience of natural beauty. He created a sense of the
sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the
emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual
thing.
For Adams, the environmental issues of particular
importance were Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and
above all, the preservation of wilderness. He focused on what he termed
the spiritual-emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly
resisted the Park Service's "resortism," which had led to the over
development of the national parks and their domination by private
concessionaires. But the range of issues in which Adams involved himself
was encyclopedic. He fought for new parks and wilderness areas, for the
Wilderness Act, for wild Alaska and his beloved Big Sur coast of
central California, for the mighty redwoods, for endangered sea lions
and sea otters, and for clean air and water. An advocate of balanced,
restrained use of resources, Adams also fought relentlessly against
overbuilt highways, billboards, and all manner of environmental
mendacity and shortsightedness. Yet he invariably treated his opponents
with respect and courtesy.
Though wilderness and the environment were his grand
passions, photography was his calling, his metier, his raison d'etre.
Adams never made a creative photograph specifically for environmental
purposes. On 12 April 1977 he wrote to his publisher, Tim Hill, "I know I
shall be castigated by a large group of people today, but I was trained
to assume that art related to the elusive quality of beauty and that
the purpose of art was concerned with the elevation of the spirit
(horrible Victorian notion!!)" Adams was often criticized for failing to
include humans or evidence of "humanity" in his landscape photographs.
The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known
comment that "the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston
photograph is rocks and trees" (quoted by Adams, Oral History, Univ. of
Calif., Berkeley, p. 498). Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a
photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists. On the
contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions,
precisely those wilderness and park areas that have been preserved for
all time. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness
in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his
colleagues.
Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams
was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of
nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography. Adams
always claimed he was not "influenced," but, consciously or
unconsciously, he was firmly in the tradition of Thomas Cole, Frederic
Church, Albert Bierstadt, Carlton Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge. And
he was the direct philosophical heir of the American Transcendentalists
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. He grew up in a
time and place where his zeitgeist was formed by the presidency of
Theodore Roosevelt and "muscular" Americanism, by the pervading sense of
manifest destiny, and the notion that European civilization was being
reinvented — much for the better — in the new nation and, particularly,
in the new West. Adams died in Monterey, California.
As John Swarkowski states in the introduction to
Adams's Classic Images (1985), "The love that Americans poured out for
the work and person of Ansel Adams during his old age, and that they
have continued to express with undiminished enthusiasm since his death,
is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even unparalleled in our
country's response to a visual artist" (p. 5). Why should this be so?
What generated this remarkable response? Adams's subject matter, the
magnificent natural beauty of the West, was absolutely, unmistakably
American, and his chosen instrument, the camera, was a quintessential
artifact of the twentieth-century culture. He was blessed with an
unusually generous, charismatic personality, and his great faith in
people and human nature was amply rewarded. Adams channeled his energies
in ways that served his fellow citizens, personified in his lifelong
effort to preserve the American wilderness. Above all, Adams's
philosophy and optimism struck a chord in the national phsyche. More
than any other influential American of his epoch, Adams believed in both
the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and
balance with its environment. It is difficult to imagine Ansel Adams
occurring in a European country or culture and equally difficult to
conjure an artist more completely American, either in art of
personality.
Adams's vast archive of papers, memorabilia,
correspondence, negatives, and many "fine" photographic prints, as well
as numerous "work" or proof prints, are in the John P. Schaefer Center
for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. A portion
of his papers relating to the Sierra Club are in the Bancroft Library
at the University of California, Berkeley. Adams's Ansel Adams: An
Autobiography (1985) was unfinished at the time of his death and was
subsequently completed by Mary Street Alinder, his editor. An
Autobiography offers a somewhat rose-colored and selective view of
Adams's life. A selection of correspondence, Letters and Images (1988),
contains a small but interesting fraction of the estimated 100,000
letters and cards that Adams wrote during his lifetime. He wrote and
contributed photographs to hundreds of articles and reviews from 1922
until 1984. He published eight portfolios of original photographic
prints (1927, 1948, 1950, 1960, 1963, 1970, 1974, 1976). Nearly four
dozen books bear Adams's name as author and/or artist. Those not
mentioned in this article include Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail
(1938); Michael and Anne in Yosemite Valley (1941); Born Free and Equal
(1944); Illustrated Guide to Yosemite Valley (1946); Camera and Lens
(1948); The Negative (1948); Yosemite and the High Sierra (1948); The
Print (1950); My Camera in Yosemite Valley (1950); My Camera in the
National Parks (1950); The Land of Little Rain (1950, new ed. with
Adams's photographs); Natural Light Photography (1952); Death Valley
(1954); Mission San Xavier del Bac (1954); The Pageant of History in
Northern California (1954); Artificial Light Photography (1956); The
Islands of Hawaii (1958); Yosemite Valley (1959); Death Valley and the
Creek Called Furnace (1962); These We Inherit: The Parklands of America
(1962); Polaroid Land Photography Manual (1963); An Introduction to
Hawaii (1964); Fiat Lux: The University of California (1967); The Tetons
and the Yellowstone (1970); Ansel Adams (1972); Singular Images (1974);
Ansel Adams: Images 1923-1974 (1974); Photographs of the Southwest
(1976); The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (1977); Polaroid Land Photography
(1978); Yosemite and the Range of Light (1979); a new technical series,
including The Camera (1980), The Negative (1981), and The Print (1983);
Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (1983); and, posthumously, Andrea
G. Stillman, ed., The American Wilderness (1990); Stillman and William
A. Turnage, eds. Our National Parks (1992); Harry Callahan, ed., Ansel
Adams in Color (1993); and Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: Yosemite and the
High Sierra (1994). More than a decade after his death, there was still
no biography covering his entire life. Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams: The
Eloquent Light (1963), is a relatively short and adoring biography of
Adams's first thirty-six years, written with zest and insight, as well
as Adams's full collaboration.
— William A. Turnage
