“Ruins of Old Church,Taos” Taos Pueblo, a collaboration between a young Ansel Adams and feminist writer and bohemian Mary Austin, was published in 1930 in a small edition of 108 copies. Limited and hard to find, it is considered one of the greatest books produced by San Francisco’s renowned Grabhorn Press. The project was exceptional for its time - not only the intersection of two careers, photographer and writer, but of the American environmental movement and a movement by white women to promote Pueblo arts.

If it doesn’t meet my standards, tear them up,” Ansel Adams tells his chief assistant Mary Alinder. It’s 1979, and Alinder sits at a table with a stack of 22 prints of “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” in Adams’ photography studio in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California and begins to seek out the photographic qualities that merit Adams’ approval. But by the time lunch was called, she hadn’t trashed one.