Master of the Yosemite

By ROBERT HUGHES

In a big redwood house above the shifting kelp beds and nocturnal sea of Carmel, an old man is playing the piano, not too well. The room is large, worn and comfortable, decked with the heterogeneous souvenirs of a long life--rows of Indian pottery, elegantly woven tribal baskets and a huge Chinese ceremonial drum. The piano player's head, a bald mass, gleams in the light. His hands, swollen from arthritis, hardened by decades of immersion in darkroom chemicals, skitter over the keys, assaulting the same phrase again and again. "Damn," he says, "I've lost it." But not altogether. Once you have practiced to concert discipline, even 50 years ago, the traces still show. "There used to be a relationship between my piano and my photography," says Ansel Adams. "I guess it's one-sided now."

Today, at 77, Ansel Adams is the most popular "fine" photographer in America. His images of landscape, and particularly of Yosemite National Park in California, have become almost indistinguishable from their subjects: to many people, Yosemite is the apparition on Adams' viewfinder. "Won't it be wonderful when a million people can see what we are seeing today!" exclaimed John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, as he gazed on Yosemite seven decades ago. Last year 2.7 million tourists went to Yosemite. One may fairly assume that most of their innumerable frames of 35-mm and Polaroid film were exposed in the hope of trapping their own Ansel Adams image, rather as tourists in 18th century Italy sometimes carried a smoked lens called a Claude Glass, through which the landscapes of the Roman Campagna could be seen in the mellow brown tone of Claude Lorrain's canvases. To that public, Adams is as American as John Wayne: the last portraitist of Western sublimity.

Somewhat like his photos, Adams is larger than life. More than a million copies of his books have gone into print. The latest, Yosemite and the Range of Light (New York Graphic Society; $75), will be published next week. The publication is timed to coincide with "Ansel Adams and the West," a two-month retrospective of 153 of his landscape photographs, organized by the Museum of Modern Art's director of the department of photography, John Szarkowski, and opening at MOMA next week. In workshop sessions over the years, Adams has personally taught at least 4,500 students. Original prints of his photos may number as high as 30,000. The most sought-after of these images, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941), exists in an edition of about 900, and the going price for each one is $8,000.

Adams' work--and his 60-year association with the Sierra Club, including 37 years as a member of its board of directors--has exerted a steady pressure on U.S. conservation and parks policy. Adams' limited-edition book Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (1938) helped persuade Franklin D. Roosevelt to shepherd a bill through Congress that turned the Kings Canyon area of east-central California into a national park.

The public for fine photographic prints is growing, and prices are soaring (see box). But it can hardly be called a large audience. Most people are immersed in a daily stream of documentary photographs from newspapers, magazines and television. The purpose of these images is information; they are scanned, milked, passed over. From that documentary point of view there is something perverse and excessive in the very idea of paying thousands of dollars for a single photo, a sum which a decade ago would have brought home three or four moderately good Rembrandt etchings.

No living photographer has done more than Adams to establish the difference between the documentary uses of photography and the aesthetic, or, as he prefers to say, "emotional." The landscapes on which his reputation rests are scarcely concerned with documentation at all. There are no people in them. They say nothing about society or history. They contain no news. The world they tell us about is exceedingly remote from ordinary experience. "It is all very beautiful and magical here--a quality which cannot be described," Adams wrote to his friend the photographer Alfred Stieglitz from Painter Georgia O'Keeffe's ranch in New Mexico in 1937. "You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro-and the micro, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago."

This sense of a miraculous, beneficent clarity, of vision ecstatically distributed between the near and the far, has permeated American nature writing from Henry David Thoreau to Carlos Castaneda. It is as central to Adams' photography as it is to O'Keeffe's painting, or further back to the landscapes of Yosemite and Yellowstone painted by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran and their followers in the 19th century. An entire tradition of seeing is inherent in the word wilderness; it is essentially romantic. As Szarkowski has observed, "Adams' pictures are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition . . . It does not seem likely that a photographer of the future will be able to bring to the heroic wild landscape the passion, trust and belief that Adams has brought to it."

The wilderness, for most Americans, is more a fable than a perceived reality. Ecologists and preservationists have made it a moral fable, an emblematic subject drenched in quasi-religious conviction. But this does not make it any less fabulous. The family in the Winnebago, lurching toward Yosemite to be reborn, cannot experience what in the 19th century used to be called the "Great Church of Nature" as it is seen in Adams' photographs: the experience has become culturally impossible. That has also worked to Adams' advantage. By now, his photographs of lakes, boulders, aspens and beetling crags have come to look like icons, the cult images of America's vestigial pantheism.

Adams' photographs are too thoughtful and rigorous to be called nostalgic. But some of their poignancy comes from the paradox of their making. The replicated image and its mechanical multiplication of fact slowly wore down 19th century romanticism and moved irony to the center of modernist culture. The camera, as Critic Susan Sontag pointed out, makes us tourists, not just in Yosemite, but within all reality. With Adams, however, the camera became the romantic's last defense. There was no irony. What you felt--scrupulously and with great technical skill--is what you got.

Perhaps Adams' most striking record of nature in full terribilit`a is his nose. It was broken in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, when he was four. An aftershock tumbled him, face first, into a brick wall. "The family doctor said, 'Fix it when he matures,' " Adams chuckles. "But of course I never did mature. So I still have the nose."

The Adams family was well off then, but not as rich as it had been. Much of late 19th century San Francisco was built with lumber from the Washington Mill Co., which Ansel Adams' grandfather owned. But around the turn of the century the family lost six mills by fire and 27 lumber ships at sea, all of them woefully underinsured. After 1912, faced by the ruin of his timber interests, Adams' father, a mild, benevolent man with a deep amateur interest in astronomy, made a career at life insurance. He continued to raise his only child in Edwardian respectability, in a chalet-like house overlooking the Golden Gate.

Here, between the ocean, the fog banks and a coast still innocent of condominiums, the child's interest in wild nature began. "I was a hyperactive brat," Adams recalls. He was educated at home by tutors, and he ascribes his lifelong habit of keeping meticulous records of every motif, exposure and chemical mix to an early taste for algebra. But the main obsession of his youth was music.

Adams' house, like most middle-class homes before the dawn of stereo, had an upright piano, and Adams practiced on it assiduously. By 14, endowed with a nearly perfect memory, he could take a score to bed with him, study it, and play it in the morning. His teacher was a very Prussian octogenarian named Frederick Zech, formerly professor of music at the conservatory in Potsdam. "He was a great disciplinarian," recalls the pupil. "He turned me from a Sloppy Joe into a good technician. If it hadn't been for that, I don't know what would have taken its place." But the effect of music on his later photography went deeper than inculcating a habit of technical excellence through discipline. "I can look at a fine photograph and sometimes I can hear music, not in a sentimental sense, but structurally," he says. "I don't try to do it, it just sometimes comes. It's a synesthetic reaction." His preferences in music are in line with his predilections as a photographer: a preference for large structures, commanding themes and plenty of orchestral color. "I've always liked heroic music. I can't stand Debussy and Ravel. I like Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Scriabin--anything architectural and big has much more appeal to me."

Adams' photographic career began with the first trip he took to Yosemite, with his father in June 1916. He brought along a Kodak Brownie box camera. The trip was "a tremendous event," he recalls. From that moment, the Sierra--"that great earth gesture"--dominated Adams' life, changed his vocation, gave him his subjects. He was married there, to fellow Californian Virginia Best, a marriage that has lasted 51 years. One of his two children was born there, and not a year has passed since 1916 without his making at least one return visit. Often the visits have been elaborate affairs. Adams, working for the Sierra Club as a photographer and guide, would lead as many as 200 people trekking stubbornly across the landscape. He even staged mock Sophoclean dramas in the woods, written by himself. A photo from 1931 shows Adams, in a white sheet, cavorting as "the Spirit of the Itinerary" in a play entitled Exhaustos, featuring King Dehydros and a Chorus of Sunburnt Women.

In Adams' album from his 1916 trip, with its tiny sodium-browned prints of the Merced River, Half Dome and the scarps of the great valley, one can see the latent images of his work, struggling to become photographs. But as yet they were just vacation snapshots. "They couldn't have meant anything at all to anyone else," he says. "But as I kept doing it over several years, it began to mean more. I was seeing more. Then I got better cameras. Then I began to separate things, to see them more clearly." The first picture he took that he thinks of as "fully visualized" as a photograph was in 1927: a view of Half Dome from the west ridge, which he caused "to look how it feels--a huge, monumental thing" by means of a dark red filter. "Visualization"--deciding in advance how a photo will look, rather than clicking away in the hope of a fortunate accident--is the essence of Adams' work. It is the difference between approaching a trout with a dry fly and dynamiting the brook.

When Adams' first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, was privately published in 1927, he was a fine technician who did not know much about the history of his own medium. He had not seen, or at any rate had not noticed, the work of his 19th century predecessors, Western landscape photographers like Carleton E. Watkins and Timothy H. O'Sullivan. He was still influenced by the so-called pictorialists, photographers given to arty blurs and poses. He also disliked the canonical painters of the American sublime, Bierstadt and Moran. "Indians and bears walking out to the edge of cliffs!" he snorts. "They'd paint the Half Dome as though it were chewing gum. No essence, no spirit--just scene painting." Adams' problem was to find a modernist vision in photography, one that corresponded to the postimpressionist avantgarde, whose works he had glimpsed at the San Francisco Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. In 1930 he saw that vision in the work of a photographer twelve years his senior, Paul Strand.

Strand and Adams had met in Taos, N. Mex., in a friend's house. Adams saw no prints, only negatives. He remembers looking over Strand's shoulder as he checked and sorted them: "It nipped me out. That was the first time I saw photographs that were organized, beautifully composed. Strand was the turning point. I came home thinking, 'Now photography exists!' " Soon afterward he met Edward Weston and saw his work. What came out of these meetings was Group f/64, formed in San Francisco in 1932, consisting chiefly of Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and Adams.

The term f/64 designates the smallest lens opening on cameras then used, the one that gave the greatest depth of focus and hence produced images that were sharp from foreground to background. To these photographers, f/64 also stood for "straight" photography, as against pictorialist fuzz. Instead of continuous tone, they went for high contrast. They also cropped and isolated their subjects: driftwood, seashells, worn rocks at Point Lobos, or the polished interior of Weston's Mexican toilet bowl.

The other big influence on Adams was Alfred Stieglitz. Adams made a pilgrimage to his New York gallery, An American Place, in 1933. There was a terrifying hour of silence; Stieglitz inspected the prints while his visitor writhed on a steam radiator, there being nowhere else to sit. Stieglitz gave Adams his benediction and, three years later, his first show. Stieglitz appeared to him (as to many other American artists, including Georgia O'Keeffe, whom Stieglitz married) as a father confessor of unfailing probity. "I am perplexed, amazed and touched at the impact of his force on my own spirit," he wrote to Strand. "I would not believe before I met him that a man could be so psychically and emotionally powerful."

In the '30s, Adams made a living from commercial work of every kind: advertising photography, industrial brochures and journalistic work for magazines like FORTUNE and LIFE. His letters to Stieglitz were full of scorn for his commercial patrons. But in the meantime he was earning, among other colleagues, a reputation as the least socially committed of serious American photographers. As Henri Cartier-Bresson once remarked, "The world is falling to pieces--and Weston and Adams are doing pictures of rocks!" Adams refused to deal with the standard subjects of post-Depression America, the breadlines, Okies, rallies and bums. When he photographed a Japanese American internment camp in California in 1943-44, the results showed not a hint of outrage. "I am ready to offer my services to any constructive government, right or left," he complained to Stieglitz, "but I do not like being expected to produce propaganda."

Adams has never repudiated his commercial photography. Like his teaching, or the extensive researches that led to his invention of the "zone" system of exposure calculation, or his 30-year association with the Polaroid Corp., commercial work helped him perfect his craft. And craft is central to Adams' achievement. The negative is the score," he likes to say. "The print is the performance."

Today Adams spends far more time on the performance than on the score. He virtually stopped taking pictures for public consumption in 1965, and rarely lifts a lens outside Carmel any more. He can occasionally be seen roaming that photogenic seaside town, a Hasselblad camera in hand, but the images he snaps are put aside for his private collection. Instead of turning out new works, Adams devotes most of his working days to making prints of his earlier ones. He spends about four mornings a week in his darkroom and devotes the afternoons to updating the series of books on photographic technique that he began in 1948.

Adams' entire career represents a sustained, meticulous effort to order the jumble of the natural world, its colors, its erratic tones and shifting values, into a precisely tuned structure of differing grays. Some of his color photographs are beautiful. But they do not have the sense of a convention transformed and upheld that animates his black-and-white prints. The "feel" of Adams' monochrome work is utterly distinctive. It conveys an intense reverence for material: the density and solidity of rocks, the cannonball moon floating in a dark-filtered sky over Half Dome or the New Mexico desert, the way a geyser's spume becomes solid, a thick blade of water. There is an extraordinary distinctness and variety of detail, held in coherence by Adams' sense of tone.

To isolate Adams' contribution to the language of photography, the show at MOMA concentrates on his landscapes. (The only human artifact in the exhibit is a low stone wall in front of an early view of Yosemite Valley.) The show enables one to see Adams' early and late prints from the same negative, and the difference is interesting. The early ones are of ravishing delicacy; they have a subtlety of discrimination, a continuity of surface tone that are essentially lyric. But by middle age, Adams' work began to shift. In the darkroom, he was conducting from the negative's score--pushing the image to its tonal limit, infusing it with a Wagnerian moodiness. The late prints are public declamations, cast in an epic mode. To Adams, change is simply a matter of knowing more. The later the print, in his eyes, the better. "I like my prints full of beans now," he says. "I guess I get more belligerent as I get older."

For MOMA's Szarkowski, the reasons run deeper: "Ansel likes to look simpler than he is. He prints differently because he's a different man. In some contexts he'll admit that printing isn't ultimately a technical problem. But when you say that the changes in his prints imply changes in him, he denies it. He's a more interesting artist than he knows."

To see the range of Adams' achievement as a printmaker is to realize that no photographer in the history of the medium has managed to combine the monumental with the fugitive, the simultaneous awareness of vulnerability and endurance, more concisely. Yet even as they are praising nature, Adams' late prints speak of anxiety. For what is this perfectionism about, if not the desire to refine and perpetuate a sense of paradise that continually slips away, recorded only in silver particles and the memory of old men?--Robert Hughes

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