Ansel Adams (37 page)

Soon after the Newhalls’ departure, Ansel picked up his son, Michael, now fourteen, at the station. Ansel had finally sensed that he was largely a stranger to his children, and he wanted to change that. He reckoned the problem could be solved by occasionally taking one of them with him on his travels—this time Michael, for six weeks. Ansel treated his children as adults, expecting them to respond with mature language and behavior at all times. He never thought to tailor the trip around his teenage son; there was serious work to be done. After returning home for a month or so, Ansel was back on the road by himself to photograph the Smokies, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Shenandoah National Park, then it was back to Yosemite for Christmas and the Bracebridge.

In January 1948 it was Anne’s turn. She accompanied her father for five weeks in New York and an array of Eastern destinations. They stayed with friends George and Betty Marshall in their elegant four-story town house on Beekman Place. George was an important attorney who was active in both photography and environmental work, and the Marshall daughters were close in age to twelve-year-old Anne, which freed Ansel from a great deal of child care.

Near the end of this stay, Ansel arrived at the Newhalls’ front door clutching his chest. They helped him to a chair and called their doctor. Ansel was hospitalized with a diagnosis of a spasm of the coronary arteries; happily, the electrocardiogram detected no permanent damage to his heart. Forbidden to climb stairs or mountains for the next few weeks, Ansel recuperated at the home of friends whose house was equipped with an elevator. As he struggled to keep calm and still, he was tortured by the thought that he would no longer be physically able to enjoy the high altitudes of Yosemite and the Sierra.
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But a miracle of sorts occurred: it turned out that Ansel had been misdiagnosed. His heart was not the problem; he had a hiatal hernia that was producing symptoms mimicking those of a heart attack.
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Although the hernia would bother him for the rest of his life, he knew it was not life-threatening, and the mountains could still be his.

The time with Anne proved less than successful. Reacting as would most normal twelve-year-olds, she was profoundly embarrassed by her very weird father, who did not dress or act like any of her friends’ dads. Her disapproval distressed Ansel, who did not want to upset her but nonetheless could never change into the type of father she would have preferred. Anne decided that the best way to handle the situation was to keep her distance. Ansel was rarely home anyway.
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Finding it impossible to dedicate all his time to a full year of nothing but Guggenheim work, he was relieved when the trustees renewed his grant for the year 1948. In a whirlwind of productivity, Ansel published
Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada
, which featured selections from the writings of John Muir accompanied by a portfolio of sixty-four Adams photographs.
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Ansel sequenced his images in a travelogue, literally following his footsteps (or tire tracks) from San Francisco (
The Golden Gate Before the Bridge
), across the Pacheco Pass (
In the Mount Diablo Range
) to the San Joaquin Valley (
Rain Clouds over the San Joaquin Valley
), into the Sierra foothills (
Slate Outcroppings
,
Sierra Foothills
,
West of Mariposa
, and two other pictures), and then, in plate 7, to the amazing spectacle of Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point (
Yosemite Valley
).

Kodak commissioned two more projects from Ansel that he easily combined with his continuing Guggenheim trips. Both proved to be financially the best kind of assignment—that is, ongoing. One was a series of landscapes to be taken in the national parks, with each image to include a photogenic couple poised to snap a picture with their Kodak camera. The second project was to make large, colorful panoramic transparencies that the technicians back in Rochester would enlarge to an incredible sixty feet long and eighteen feet high. The Kodak Colorama, as it was named, became a New York City tradition, exhibited continuously at Grand Central Station. Using a seven-by-seventeen-inch banquet camera, Ansel made his first Coloramas in late 1948 and Kodak used about twelve of them.
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It was Ansel’s intention to photograph every single national park, and most of the monuments. He spent from mid-April to mid-May 1948 by himself in Hawaii, underwriting the trip by making pictures for the Matson Line of passenger ships that cruised from the mainland to Hawaii. He photographed on Oahu and visited Hawaii National Park on the Big Island as well as Maui, Lanai, and Kauai. He hated Hawaii. When his ship was a day away from the islands, he swore he could smell a sweet stench that pervaded the air. Nary a palm tree found its way onto his film; believing that vacations were literally immoral, Ansel saw palm trees as a symbol of indolence, shading people who lay around on beaches when they should be working.
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He found Hawaii just too soft in comparison to the Sierra or the rugged California coast: the water warm as dishwater, the skies hazy, the clouds graceless, the volcanic rock amorphous.
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For all his protests that Hawaii was not his kind of country, he did make some strong images of the crater of Haleakala and views from its heights across to the neighboring volcanoes, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on the Big Island.
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In late June 1948 it was Michael’s turn again as his companion; Ansel drove them to Seattle and they boarded the S.S.
George Washington
, bound for a six-week trip to Alaska. It was a grand tour from Skagway to Mount McKinley and then on to Anchorage, Fairbanks, Sitka, Juneau, and Glacier Bay.
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They were even feted by Alaska’s governor. Unfortunately, constant rain, that bane of the photographer, was there to greet them on their arrival and to bid adieu when they left. Most of Ansel’s Alaskan photographs were, by necessity of circumstance, forest details, with the rain’s evidence everywhere, whether in droplets resting on leaves or in heavy mist. Picture after picture from this trip was simply titled
Leaves
,
Alaska
, although each negative was exquisitely different and detailed under quiet light.

When they got to Mount McKinley, they might just as well have been in plain, flat tundra. The clouds were so dense that the mountain itself was invisible, quite a cloud cover considering that McKinley is an atmosphere-busting 20,320 feet high, or nearly three times higher than Half Dome, a fact Ansel found most impressive.
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Summer was in full swing, for Alaska. The sun set at eleven-thirty at night and rose about two hours later. Mosquitoes were the chief form of animal life; Ansel was thankful that his continuous encounters with them resulted only in welts and not in illness, as might have been the case in tropical countries. If Alaskan mosquitoes carried disease, he mused, Alaska would be uninhabitable.
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At McKinley, as elsewhere on Ansel’s Guggenheim journeys, the National Park Service, prepped by letters from VIPs in Washington, provided whatever support they could. Ansel and Michael stayed at the ranger cabin on the shores of Wonder Lake, thirty miles from McKinley’s base.

Ansel went to bed after an early dinner. Arising again at midnight to clearing skies, he hiked up the hill above the lake. He positioned his eight-by-ten-inch view camera on its big wooden tripod base and attached the twenty-three-inch component of his Cooke Series XV lens, the combination of equipment with which he made most of his greatest images, and after much personal debate added a deep-yellow filter.

Shifting the camera so that his ground glass, reflecting the scene before him upside-down and backward, defined the strongest composition, he made what would become another of his masterpieces. Fully exposed in the light of sunrise, McKinley appeared as a benign mass, a skin of snow stretched tightly over its lumpy skeleton, every nuance of form revealed in chiaroscuro. The huge mountain filled the sky but not the bottom half of the picture, its scale diminished by Ansel’s choice of a long-focus lens. In the finished print, Wonder Lake seems equal in size to McKinley, although the light on each is totally different. Wonder Lake has an amorphous, pearly glow, its edges defined by dark shoreline; though it is much closer to the camera than McKinley, its surface details are not revealed.
Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake
is sublime.
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After spending two months with his son, Ansel found Michael as difficult as he had Anne. Michael remained cool toward him throughout the trip; his inexperienced father had no idea whether it was just because Mike was a teenager or if it truly described his feelings. It dawned on Ansel that his years of neglect might be impossible to erase. He did not know that Virginia had warned her children never to trust their father.
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When Ansel and Michael returned to the lower forty-eight, Virginia joined them to deliver the fifteen-year-old to boarding school, the Wasatch Academy outside Salt Lake City. His parents hoped that the education and discipline of the military-style institution would ensure a better future for him than would the small, easygoing Yosemite Valley school.

Ansel dropped Virginia back in Yosemite and was soon off on his annual fall trip to the East Coast. In September 1948, Beaumont moved to Rochester, in upstate New York, to accept a position as curator of the new George Eastman House (GEH), the first museum devoted exclusively to photography. Previously the home of Kodak’s founder, in its new incarnation the building that housed GEH was to serve as a memorial to his life, as well as an institution for the collection and exhibition of photography. In 1958 Beaumont would become its director, a position he held until 1971.

Nancy stayed behind in the city to pack up their apartment. Good friend Ansel came to her rescue, carrying load after load down to the illegally parked car, filling every nook and cranny, leaving just enough space so that Euripides the cat could be squeezed in under the dome light. Hampered by traffic, then by thick fog, they stopped to call Beaumont every hour and assure him of their safety, until he finally ordered them to let him sleep.
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Ansel stayed for the opening of the Eastman House on November 19. He brought some of his national-park photographs to show Beaumont, hoping to be given an exhibition at the museum. After much deliberation, Beaumont said no. They had criticized Steichen for his blockbuster theme shows at MoMA, all aimed at the lowest common denominator, pandering to human emotions. Beaumont felt that his exhibitions at GEH must not smack of propaganda of any sort. He believed that showing Ansel’s photographs of the national parks would be pleading a cause, and he would have no part in that.
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Ansel returned to California, uneasy about Beaumont’s rejection but too busy to pay it much mind. For years he had contemplated showing a small group of his prints that would together represent the scope of his photographic vision—some details from nature, a few portraits, and at least one big thundercloud
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—and now he decided to produce just such a portfolio. Before the end of the year, he completed nine hundred small fine prints, enough to fill seventy-five portfolios. He titled it simply
Portfolio One
,
Twelve Photographic Prints by Ansel Adams
, and dedicated it to Alfred Stieglitz, whose portrait was the sole one among twelve spectacular images. Priced at a hundred dollars,
Portfolio One
sold out quickly.
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There were two architectural studies, one great landscape (
Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake
), two smaller landscapes (including the nearly abstract
Refugio Beach
and the haunting
Oak Tree
,
Snowstorm
), five details from nature, one portrait (
Alfred Stieglitz
), and the wispy, white
Clouds Above Golden Canyon
,
Death Valley
.
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The quality of the prints was unsurpassed, with each photograph the best interpretation that Ansel ever achieved of that negative; the tones were balanced, not yet betraying the sometimes overly dramatic qualities that began to appear in his work. Some of the special beauty of
Portfolio One
may be attributable to the recent death of Stieglitz, whose inspiration floated in Ansel’s memory throughout the making of the prints.
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Ansel still had not completed his Guggenheim project, and he continued to travel as time allowed, even though two more books were now added to his schedule. One was a reprint of Mary Austin’s text
The Land of Little Rain
, with a selection of Ansel’s photographs, and the other a large-format, beautifully printed picture book called
My Camera in Yosemite Valley
, which Ansel dedicated to Edward Weston. Virginia was the publisher of record, with the assurance that the distributor, Houghton Mifflin, would purchase a large number of books.

The spring of 1949 was dominated by trips to make photographs for
The Land of Little Rain
, but come summer Ansel went back to Alaska, this time alone. He hoped for better weather than they had had the year before, but he was out of luck: again it rained, day after day. To escape the wet, he eagerly accepted an invitation to take a nine-hundred-mile flight in a Grumman amphibious airplane that was to drop supplies from the U.S. Geological Survey for the Juneau Ice Field Expedition. Ansel insisted that the cargo door be removed for the flight so that he could better photograph; the result was that he almost froze to death. To make amends for that misadventure, the same crew offered to fly him to Glacier Bay and helicopter him out in a couple of days, but once they got there, bad weather socked in the airstrip, making flying impossible and stranding him for nearly a week. Damp but undaunted, Ansel returned home three weeks later with another raft of fine negatives of forest details reflecting the dismal weather conditions.
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