Ansel Adams: Photographer

ANSEL ADAMS

Suppose that Ansel Adams, as a 14-year-old youth with his first Kodak #1 Box Brownie camera, had vacationed with his family at the Grand Canyon instead of at Yosemite. Might a lifelong love affair with Arizona's magnificent scenic wonder have arisen, similar to that which drew Adams back to Yosemite every year for the remainder of his life? And, if so, might he have left behind a major body of photographic art devoted to what many believe is the most challenging camera subject in North America? Adams did photograph the Grand Canyon, of course. But his published images are from various viewpoints on the rim rather than from the depths where true canyon lovers experience their spiritual highs. Nevertheless, the great camera artist did have enough of a special relation-

ship with Arizona, and with Arizona Highways, that the state can claim a share of his photographic legacy.

The connection is established for all time in the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography, which Adams helped conceive and which is the repository for his own archives.

But the link had been forged much earlier, through the relationships between Adams and Raymond Carlson, the great editor of Arizona Highways, and between Adams and his favorite Arizona locations - among them Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and Mission San Xavier del Bac.

As for the Grand Canyon, an Adams in his mid-20s wrote to his future wife following a visit there: "It is a terrific thing, but for some reason, I was not moved at all. Mere vastness does not indicate beauty. There is no sense of depth or distance; it is immense, barren, and forlorn."

Years later, he wrote a contrasting appreciation of Arizona's Canyon de Chelly, describing it as "an extraordinary experience, made more intense by the presence of its Navajo residents, who demonstrate that man can live with nature and sometimes enhance it.... Its stone is largely solidified sand dunes, which accounts for the beautiful flowing patterns revealed on the eroded cliffs. The floor of the canyon is almost entirely a sandy riverbed that in times of rain becomes of quicksand instability. In autumn, the cottonwoods take on a vibrant hue that blends with the warm colors of the cliffs. Some of my best photographs have been made in and on the rim of the canyon."

Adams was already a major figure in photography when he made his Arizona Highways debut in March, 1946the first postwar issue assembled by Carlson - with a double-page color view of Mon-ument Valley. It is among Adams' entries in the book Timeless Images from Arizona Highways, published last fall, and was cited by Arizona photographer Carlos Elmer as an example of how Adams worked. "One photographer told of shooting fifty 4x5s in a day at Monument Valley," Elmer said. "Ansel Adams went to Monument Valley and was there a day and a half before he exposed his first sheet of film. His was a classic."

The following month saw publication of his color image of Walpi Village on the Hopi Indian Reservation, and Carlson wrote that "the work of Ansel Adams, one of America's most distinguished photographers, will appear in these pages regularly from now on."

A month later, Adams' dramatic Grand Canyon skyscape was the magazine's front cover, and he had a two-page spread on Lake Mead inside. Curiously, for a photographer known primarily for his masterful renditions in black and white which he preferred - Adams' first 10 or so contributions to Arizona Highways, spanning a little more than two years, were all in color.

In late 1951, Adams moved to broaden and deepen his relationship with the magazine. With "literally thousands" of what he considered his best negatives lying unprinted, he and writer Nancy Newhall proposed that Arizona Highways purchase enough pictures and articles on various Southwestern subjects to finance a series of books on the same subjects. Some of the pictures would be "stoppers" Adams promised.

"I have a far-flung reputation now which I am anxious to cash in on in a thoroughly dignified (and profitable) manner," he wrote Carlson. Among portfolio subjects proposed were sunrise on the desert, Jerome, Tombstone, the Grand Canyon, Sunset Crater, Monument Valley, and the cottonwoods of Tucson.

ANSEL ADAMS

Carlson leaped at the offer. “As editor of the magazine,” he wrote to Adams, “I have never been as proud as when I have had the opportunity, on rare occasions, to present your work. The name of Ansel Adams in our magazine adds worth, character, and value to our publication..

In the end, six portfolios, really “photographic essays” with photography by Adams and text by Newhall, materialized. The first was on Canyon de Chelly in the June 1952 issue, including two color views and 10 black-and-whites, the first Adams monochromes published in Arizona Highways. In his editorial send-off, Carlson paid full tribute to both Adams and Newhall, “whose husband is curator of the George Eastman House at Rochester, N.Y., and in her own right a recognized authority on photography.

(Beaumont Newhall had been first curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City after he, Adams, and collector David McAlpin had succeeded in organizing that department. He preceded his wife in the pages of Arizona Highways with an authoritative article on early Western photography published in May, 1946.) Portfolios followed, on Sunset Crater in July, 1952; Tumacácori in November, 1952; Death Valley in October, 1953; Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in January, 1954; and Mission San Xavier del Bac in April, 1954. When one of the world's most renowned photographers comes calling, on assignment from a prestigious magazine known for artistic merit, most doors swing wide in welcome. But not even the name of Ansel Adams could guarantee a warm reception at the historic San Xavier mission near Tucson. Adams had made photographs there previously. But this was to be something more, the forerunner of a book which the photographer himself conceived as “the definitive work on San Xavier.” And it may well be, even though Mission San Xavier del Bac, published in 1954 by 5 Associates, is out of print.

To appreciate the Adams-Newhall conquest of San Xavier, remember that, even seven years after his death, Adams may be the most readily recognized, enthusiastically praised visual artist in America. He was also an accomplished musician, a dynamic environmentalist, a thoughtful and articulate essayist, a wildly witty writer of verse, and, fortunately for his friends and admirers, a prolific correspondent.

Newhall found the friars unreceptive when she attempted to arrange interviews. “Circumstances make it impossible for me to advise you when to come,” wrote Father Celestine Chinn. Describing the pressure of his official duties, the Franciscan underscored that he “wouldn't give even the Pope a week of interviews.” In fact, he wrote, he made a practice of avoiding interviews and predicted the Papago (now known as the Tohono O'odham) Indians would be “sullenly hos-tile to interviews and photographs. In a masterfully soothing letter, Newhall told Father Celestine that: “Without your approval and the consent and cooperation of the Papagos, we would not dream of undertaking even so simple an interpretation as we envisage.” Promising a “sympathetic and beautiful” rendition of the subject, she suggested that perhaps a day or two might do, instead of a week. “Of course, you cannot help but assume that we are the usual hit-and-run nuisances until we prove otherwise!” she wrote.

The actual visit must have mollified the cleric, for in July, 1953, he wrote Adams that the friars were looking forward to his next visit, “which should inject a piquant dash of variation to the monotony that invariably develops about midsummer.”

Adams, the irrepressible versifier, announced his coming with these lines:

TO GOOD FRIENDS AT THE BABBLING BAC

Cometh me, anticipating heat. Prepare thyself - the beard approaches - Ektar-eyed, expecting stern reproaches. For who is man to dare to image men? Troubled is he with an emotional wen. The summer blast, the frail wisp of the breeze Excites my vision and desiccates my cheese. And when I come to see thee, watch my gaitFor I am one who always hates to wait While Fahrenheit without excites the erg within I carry on with minimum of sin. I shall arrive and greet thee with great glee - Parboiled and fried - I still shall look like me!

The portfolio itself, which Carlson said was probably the longest feature published in Arizona Highways up to that time, was a smash hit in the magazine, in the book that followed, and certainly in the expectant eyes of those at the mission. Playing off the musical metaphors that Adams himself often used, Father Celestine wrote to Adams and Newhall: "Hearty congratulations for your symphonic opus on Bac! What sheer delight for the eye, what melody for the ear now soft and sweet with romance, now mighty and resounding with epic grandeur! I confess dire poverty of speech to convey my sentiments. Were I someone else, I might feel the need of a Hollywood director's dictionary of superlatives. I will simply say I was deeply moved and thoroughly delighted."

As for Adams and Newhall personally: "I jot down in my little golden book this evaluation: the most Franciscan people I have met outside the Order. Let that burst a stay or rumple a girdle; don't let it provoke indigestion."

In the San Xavier book, Adams included a full page of suggestions to photographers, cautioning that: "Photographing San Xavier del Bac can start as a half-hour making snapshots and end as a lifetime pursuit; photographers are warned!" San Xavier, he wrote, "is a challenge to the skill and imagination of any photographer. It is a place of people, and yet people are not essential in the images; it is a place of sun, yet sunlight is not its only light. The mission blazes at clear noon, is opalescent at dusk, and pearl-gray in the thunderstorms. Its poignant simplicity the ornate interior notwithstanding implies a humble directness of concept and vision."

The Adams-Newhall collaboration covered seven books and the first volume of a projected biographical series, cut short in 1974 when Nancy Newhall, rafting with her husband on the Snake River in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, was fatally injured by a falling tree. Along with his youthful reaction to the Grand Canyon, and his love for Canyon de Chelly, Adams expressed himself on certain other Arizona photographic locations. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, he wrote to a friend in 1947, was "considerably overrated to my mind," and talk of making it a national park was "ridiculous." Nevertheless, he photographed there often and rated it higher than Saguaro National Monument, which he declared "should be given back to the Indians."

Time, critical acclaim, and public enthusiasm for Adams' work obviate any need for appraisal at this point.

"The approach is, I am sure, understood," he wrote to Carlson when planning the Arizona Highways portfolios. "I am not 'covering' subjects in a literal sense; rather I am making personal interpretations in terms of expressive photography." Nobody ever did it better.

This collection of copyrighted Ansel Adams photography has been made available by the Trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

Prescott-based author Robert C. Dyer became interested in the Ansel Adams-Arizona Highways relationship while writing the text for Timeless Images, a book published by Arizona Highways in September, 1990.