Ansel_Admas

Sylvia DeSormeau HUM-201World Culture and the Arts James Massey, Instructor October 22, 2009 Ansel Easton Adams was a renowned photographer and environmentalist. Ansel was born in San Francisco, California on February 20th 1902. Ansel was the only child of Charles Adams and Olive Bray. Since the couple had Ansel late in their lives, Ansel grew up in a home that was socially and emotionally conservative. After the family fortune was lost in the financial panic in 1906, his mother and spent a lot of the time worrying over their loss and inability to regain their financial status. His father however, always was encouraging and supportive of his son. When Ansel was five, he fell and broke his nose during an earthquake and it never quite healed right, leaving it disfigured for life. He was naturally shy and had a genius like intensity that when combined with his nose made fitting in at school sometimes difficult. Some say that he may have been slighty hyperactive and perhaps dyslexic and this was part of the reason he had trouble in school. After several failed attempts at different schools, his father and aunt began tutoring him at home. Eventually he tried public school again at Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School; this time he earned a diploma. All of his education was equivalent to an eighth grade education of today. Ansel loved nature and music and at the age of twelve taught himself to read music and play the piano. His father was impressed and began getting Ansel formal lessons instead of a more formal schooling. By 1920, being a musician was his primary occupation. The years of learning and playing the piano taught him about discipline and gave more structure to his younger years. His training also helped to develop his visual artistry, writings and eventually his teachings of photography. His childhood was good, but rather different and solitary. He spent most of hi days in nature, taking long walks in the wilderness around the Golden Gate or along Lobos Creek and the beach. Through out his life he also spent a great deal of time at Yosemite Sierra. He fell in love with the area during his first visit during 1916. He took many pictures with a Kodak No 1 Box Brownie that his parents had given him. In 1919, he joined the Sierra Club. Ansel would make many friends there, including Ms. Virginia Best. The time and enjoyment had at the Sierra club was not influential, but in many ways crucial to his early career as a photographer. In 1922, his first published photographs and writings appeared in the club's Bulletin. In the summers, the Sierra Club would have month long High Trips, usually in the Sierra Nevada. These events were very important to the club since they would attract up to two hundred members. During these trips, the campers hiked to a new campsite. Ansel had become the photographer for these summer trips and in 1927, during his first High Trip, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, was taken. This was his first fully visualized photograph. Also during this year, he had formed a friendship with Albert Bender who was a wealthy insurance tycoon as well as a patron of the arts. It was Mr. Bender who helped put together his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. Through Mr. Bender’s encouragement, influence and financial support helped to blossom his creative energy as a photographer. In 1928, he married Virginia Best and he took his first one man exhibition at the club's San Francisco headquarters. It had become clear to Ansel that he would earn a better living through photography as compared to a concert pianist. And so by 1934, Ansel had become the established photographer/artist of the Sierra Nevada, elected to the club's board of directors and had become the defender of Yosemite. As one critic, Abigail Foerstner, put it in the Chicago Tribune (Dec. 3, 1992), "he did for the national parks something comparable to what Homer's epics did for Odysseus." As his popularity and talent grew, so did the projects and opportunities. During the rest of the year, hen he was photographing the summer High Trips, he would travel to the Southwest. It was there that he met Mary Austin, the grande dame of western literati. In 1930 they published Taos Pueblo together. Also in 1930 he met photographer Paul Strand. Paul Strand’s work mad a huge impact of his own work. It was through this inspiration that Ansel went from the “pictorial" style he had been using to pursuing “straight photography." In this type of photography, the clarity of the lens is emphasized so that the final print gives no appearance of being manipulated by the camera or in the darkroom. Soon he would become the master of straight photography. Ansel stayed busy and his popularity continued to grow. Ansel did all kinds of photography work including; 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. Unfortunately, all of his work did not relieve the financial pressures he was having. In 1933 he went to New York to meet another photographer named Alfred Stieglitz. Their friendship had a big impact on Ansel; he was an avid admirer of his work as well. Later in 1933, the Delphic Gallery gave Ansel his first showing. In 1934, Camera Craft published technical articles he had written and 1935 Making a Photograph was published. Then in 1936, Stieglitz gave Ansel his first one-man show at An American Palace. Despite the shows and all the commericial work Ansel still struggled financially and still did not feel he was successful. He expressed his distress to his friend David McAlpin in a letter sent in 1938, "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 things improved slightly over time, his finances remained unstable and until late in life. Ansel Adams would continue to work and perfect his craft through out his life. In his photography you also see his dedication to the environment. Ansel Admas was a dedicated activist to the wilderness, he attended countless meeting, wrote thousands of letters about conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians. Although he wrote beautifully, his greatest influence came from his photographs. Over time the images that he captured have become symbols of wild America. Through his black-and-white images he sought not to provide a realistic documentation of nature, but to intensify the psychological experience of natural beauty. In his photographs you can sense magnificence of nature and feel that emotion 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. 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. 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