Authors: Mary Street Alinder
His first column centered on an exhibition of photographs by the Frenchman Eugène Atget, who had died only four years before. Ansel was impressed by his portraits of his Parisian environment, of the streets, buildings, and gardens of the fabled city. Working just after dawn, Atget had captured a world that was hauntingly unpeopled, with very public spaces transformed into private ones. Ansel’s glaring lack of knowledge of the history of photography was all too evident in his suggestion that Atget’s photographs might be the first example of photography as an art form; apparently he was not yet aware of the contributions made by such artists as Emerson, Timothy O’Sullivan, Gustav Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Watkins, among many others.
12
In Ansel’s defense, in 1931 few people in the entire world knew much of anything about the history of the medium.
A month later, highly recommending the Edward Weston exhibition, Ansel counseled that viewers should bring to it a fresh outlook, one unadulterated by preconceptions formed through the experience of other arts. He lavished praise on Weston’s photographs, with one equivocation: he loved the images of rocks but not those of vegetables. A particularly curvaceous green pepper, a fully splayed cabbage leaf, the innards of a halved artichoke: each was made precious by Weston’s closely placed, incisively sharp lens. The rocks asserted themselves, immutable, but the vegetables had been arranged and sometimes shaped by the photographer. Ansel found them contrived.
13
In his struggle to establish his own vision in the context of straight photography, Ansel committed his own share of contrivances in the work he produced at this time. To make
Scissors and Thread
, for example, he dropped the thread time and again over the scissors until their pattern pleased him,
14
while for another studio photograph, called
Still Life
, he placed a hard-boiled egg in an egg slicer and pressed its wires into the white just to the point of penetration.
15
Ansel eventually did find his own way in the still life genre: two years after his Weston review, he made
Rose and Driftwood
, one of his most divinely beautiful images.
16
Ollie had brought him a spectacular white rose from her garden; in his studio, Ansel gently laid it upon a piece of driftwood and took its picture, using the available light from a nearby window to capture each finely veined petal contrasted against the striated grain of the darker wood. For all that Ansel had railed against Weston’s vegetables, he soon had a change of heart.
In such photographs as
Rose and Driftwood
and
Still Life
, Ansel applied conventional techniques commonly used in still life painting, carefully juxtaposing various objects for the best effects of composition, texture, and form. Weston, in contrast, in posing a single object—one pepper or one shell—against his usual blank, black background, broke from tradition.
17
After Ansel’s
Fortnightly
review appeared, Weston wrote him a brilliant, carefully considered response. Instead of antagonizing his critic, he persuasively defended his still lifes, culminating with the assertion, “Photography as a creative expression . . . must be ‘seeing’ plus.”
18
Although Weston claimed to be photographing only the thing itself, strenuously denying other associations, many felt that his photographs were evocative of something beyond the actual subject matter, so that shells became phalluses and peppers the nude female form. O’Keeffe endured the same criticism for her paintings of flower details, with their sexy stamens and pistils.
Ansel’s last published review for the
Fortnightly
was of Imogen Cunningham’s exhibition. He wrote glowingly of her sense of visualization but had the temerity to criticize her use of light and, with the zeal of the newly converted, chastise her for her choice of matte-finished paper.
19
To Imogen, Ansel, sixteen years her junior, was definitely the young upstart. She had been selected by Weston to exhibit at the very important 1929
Film und Foto
exhibit in Stuttgart, Germany. The show was based on the idea that pictures made by a camera could “be one of the most effective weapons against . . . the mechanization of spirit,” a worry that haunted the world during the early years of automation.
20
Imogen possessed a sharp and ready tongue and took a backseat to no man; her reaction to Ansel’s suggestions for improvement can only be imagined.
Following the birth of her three sons (one in 1915 and a set of twins in 1917), Cunningham found herself tied to hearth and home, with “one hand in the dish pan, the other in the darkroom,” as she recalled.
21
Her camera’s subjects had to come from her backyard; they included plant forms and flowers, as well as her rambunctious boys. She built her repertoire on such ordinary material.
In 1920 and 1921, Cunningham photographed the neighboring Mills College amphitheater, producing a strong and very straight composition of curving lines and shadows, an amazingly modern image. Using sharp focus, she framed the striped flank of a zebra, a cypress snag at Point Lobos, and a single morning glory, all before Weston renounced Pictorialism. Although it is Edward Weston who is usually credited with the first major accomplishments in modern straight photography, his earliest Point Lobos cypress negative was not made until 1929.
Cunningham made her famous image
Two Callas
and the extreme close-up
Magnolia Blossom
in 1925, a couple of years before Weston zeroed in on his first shell (1927) or vegetables. Georgia O’Keeffe had begun her famous series of flowers in 1919, but Cunningham stated that she did not see these until much later, when she was in New York in 1934.
22
Instead, she may have been influenced by two photographic close-ups of flowers reproduced in the pages of
Vanity Fair
in 1923, one by Charles Sheeler, the other by Edward Steichen.
23
If Ansel and Imogen’s friendship would always be somewhat prickly, Ansel and Edward discovered they were worthy comrades and began using each other, through letters and visits, as a sounding board to fine-tune their definitions of photography. They agreed on most photographic matters and began a close friendship that lasted until Edward’s death, in 1958.
Their major, ongoing argument centered on the relationship of the artist to society. Edward felt that he must keep his distance and live a sheltered life, focusing all his energies on his art. Ansel was forever up to his neck in the business of life, scrambling to make time to concentrate on his own photography. Neither man ever convinced the other of his position.
Driven by the events of the past year, Ansel now made a large number of new images. His own solo exhibition at the de Young, during February 1932, featured three galleries displaying eighty photographs, on a much greater diversity of subjects than his Smithsonian show of just one year earlier, which had been little more than an extended portrait of the Sierra.
24
In a statement written for the de Young show, Ansel declared that he had two rules: one, the completed image must directly reflect how the subject appeared in the camera; and two, he had to see the finished photograph in his mind before the shutter was released (his concept of visualization).
25
This was straight, or pure, photography for Ansel in 1932.
But this philosophy did not take into account his nagging belief that ultimately an artist must go beyond the obvious reality to communicate the full emotional power of a scene. Just as earlier he had to master photographic technique before he could produce consistently strong images, so now he had to understand the rules of straight photography completely before he could apply them to the making of his own vision.
Considering the de Young exhibit, a San Francisco reviewer, apparently well versed in the tenets of straight photography (perhaps through Ansel’s own
Fortnightly
articles), held Ansel to his own gospel and found some of the images to be less than catholic. He accused the photographer of “making studiously arranged compositions of inanimate objects which seem to us to lack a relationship with everyday life that one looks for in photography.”
26
Four months later, in June 1932, the Courvoisier Galleries in San Francisco presented another solo exhibition of Ansel’s photographs. The reviewer for the
San Francisco Examiner
queried,
Is photography an art? It certainly is not, if the photographer is not an artist. More than that, it is only art of a lowly genre, if the photographer insists on reading his own moods into Nature.
Ansell [
sic
] Adams does not do that. But when the frost etches lovely conceits in the graining of an old tree stump or cleaves the granite into cubistic monoliths, then he is interested and his camera registers his interest in studies which lovers of beauty will prize . . . Adams lets Nature do her own work, and her work and his are both good.
27
Here was evidence that although museums were still dragging their heels about recognizing photography, art critics in most major cities were ready to take it seriously.
Lloyd Rollins continued his support of photography at the de Young with two subject-oriented competitions,
A Showing of Hands
and
California Trees.
Ansel commandeered the hands of friends and family as subjects and photographed his wife’s threading a needle and peeling potatoes.
28
This
Hands
exhibition accounts for the amazing preponderance, in the archives of northern California photographers, of images of hands made in 1932, most of them object lessons in the futility of assigning a creative artist a specific subject.
The intent of the second exhibition was “to stimulate interest in trees as features of our landscape, to encourage their preservation, and to suggest, via photographic art, their beauty and spiritual appeal.”
29
Of the eight hundred photographs submitted, 160 were hung in the de Young from September 21 to October 21, 1932. Edward Weston claimed the hundred-dollar first prize for an image of a Joshua tree, and second prize went to Oakland photographer Alma Lavenson for her
Snow Blossoms.
Ansel was awarded twenty-five dollars and fourth prize for his
Sugar Pine
, while seventh (and last) place went to Willard Van Dyke, enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and also a student of Edward’s, for his
Detail of Madrone.
Also exhibiting were Henry Swift and John Paul Edwards, both soon to become associated with the others.
30
It is probable that these two competitive shows sorely tried the patience of such photographers as Van Dyke, Weston, and Ansel. His sponsorship of “theme” exhibitions was a strong indication that Rollins did not fully understand their very serious intent.
With his girlfriend, Mary Jeannette Edwards, another young photography zealot and daughter of John Paul, Willard Van Dyke established a studio in an old converted barn at 683 Brockhurst in Oakland. It quickly became the congregating place for Bay Area photographers. On Saturday, October 15, 1932, Willard and Mary Jeannette invited Ansel, Imogen, Edward, Sonya Noskowiak (Edward’s lover and photographic assistant), John Paul, and Willard’s best friend, Preston Holder, to a party.
31
It may have been that night that Willard photographed a pensive Ansel sitting slumped on a sofa, a coffee cup in one hand and his chin in the other, as he attempted to sober up before his long trip home to San Francisco. With Prohibition still the law of the land, Willard and Mary Jeannette served a lethal drink they called the Five-Star Final, made from the pure grain alcohol they used to dry negatives mixed with the juice from five lemons, water, and a dose of glycerin.
32
It was known to pack a wallop.
Although Edward was acknowledged as the senior member of this bunch, it was Ansel and Willard who insisted that they must take a united stand in favor of straight photography. Willard later remembered that Weston did not want to be listed as a member of the group because he was not a joiner; he consented to stay only after Willard argued that his leaving would be a “slap in your friends’ faces.”
33
The strongest statement, they agreed, would be made by their exhibiting together. They talked of renting a space in San Francisco but abandoned the idea after realizing that such a separate venue might undermine Lloyd Rollins.
34
Rollins responded by offering the group a show.
Preston Holder, Willard’s roommate at Berkeley, recalled that the group met only three or four times, on occasions that were probably more social than official. Holder reminisced that at a party at Ansel’s in San Francisco, they determined they must devise a suitable name for the group,
Willard and I got good and drunk . . . and on the way back to Oakland, I thought of that design, you know the “
f
” that looks like that Bauhaus stuff and makes very nice graphics. And I said, “Will, that’s what that group should be,
f.
64, because that’s what you want to stop down to anyway and that’s a good rationale for it, a catchy name and a good symbol.” Willard agreed.
35