Photographer David Hume Kennerly first met Photographer Ansel Adams in 1974, when Kennerly was President Gerald Ford's personal photographer at the White House. Struck by the haunting landscapes in Ansel Adams: Images 1923-1974, Kennerly brought the volume to the President's attention. Ford asked Adams for one of his prints and, at Kennerly's suggestion, invited the artist to preside over its installation in the President's private office.

Since then, Ford's two favorite photographers have met several times, both at Adams' home on the oceanside cliffs of Carmel, Calif., and at Kennerly's townhouse in Washington, D.C. Kennerly has acquired three Ansel Adamses, and Adams a David Hume Kennerly. "We once swapped one for one," recalls the younger man. But the most satisfying of their exchanges, says Kennerly, was photographing Adams for this week's cover story, which marks the publication of Adams' 35th book and the opening of a major exhibit of the work of the man who, at 77, is the nation's best-known art photographer. He is also the first photographer to appear on TIME's cover and, says his portraitist, "the most deserving subject I can think of--not only because of his contributions as artist and a conservationist. He is a celebration of the art of photography itself."

Art Critic Robert Hughes, who wrote the story, spent several days in Carmel talking with Adams and examining his archives. "The people who think of Adams as a monument of the Old West are largely right," he concludes. "He is a bluff, sweet man with pronounced opinions that he doesn't hesitate to utter." Unfortunately for the house guest, one of Adams' strongest views concerns tobacco, and his home is papered with signs reading, "Thank you for not smoking. The American Cancer Society." Says Hughes: "Blistering rows occur if he smells smoke, so I would disappear into the garden, ostensibly to contemplate nature, but in fact to sneak a cigarette and bury the butt under a shrub." As a veteran connoisseur of art, architecture and antiquity, Hughes learned long ago to treat a monument with respect.

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