Authors: Mary Street Alinder
Emboldened by the success of the Wildflower Festival, in June 1935 Ansel presented the Yosemite Conservation Forum. A panoply of leaders agreed to cosponsor the event, from the director of the Park Service to the presidents of Stanford University and the University of California. In keeping with his inclusionary concept, such groups as the Garden Club of America and the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts were also represented. Ansel constructed a program encompassing legislation, education, landscape, and highways, with a mini-conference to talk about building a Pacific Crest Trail that would run from Alaska to Mexico.
20
Sadly, the final outcome of the Conservation Forum was the precise opposite of what Ansel had intended: it merely led to greater division among the participants. Don Tresidder, president of YP&CC and Ansel’s good friend and sometime employer, argued that national parks should be made accessible for the maximum enjoyment of millions. He reminded the audience that roads were good and that building more lodges meant that more people could enjoy the great outdoors in comfort.
The superintendent of Yosemite reacted by walking out. So dismayed was he by Tresidder’s use of the Conservation Forum to promote business interests that he withdrew his support, and that was the end of it.
21
The Conservation Forum was not Ansel’s last freelance effort on behalf of the cause, but after its conclusion he channeled most of his energies directly into Sierra Club projects.
Ansel’s affections embraced the entire Sierra, stretching far beyond Yosemite’s boundaries to include the Kings River Canyon. Yosemite Valley is only one of a great system of deeply carved river valleys that spread across California’s Sierra Nevada. To Yosemite’s north is San Francisco’s water supply, the dammed and damned Hetch Hetchy, an exquisite valley drowned to quench the city’s thirst in 1913 despite John Muir’s valiant efforts to prevent this.
22
To Yosemite’s south, the three-pronged Kings River flows west from the Sierra’s heights and west through sculptured canyons and flat meadows stretching over five hundred square miles. Considered plain by those who measure everything against Half Dome, Kings Canyon is more subtly adorned by nature and had been a favorite destination for the early leaders of the club; Muir led the second Outing there in 1902, and subsequent Outings followed during the summers of 1906, 1910, 1913, 1920, 1922, 1925, 1932, and 1935.
When Ansel hiked and photographed extensively in the Kings, in 1925 and 1926, he wrote to Virginia from Marion Lake, waxing upon its indescribable beauty and calling this the peak experience of the entire trip. He added that he hoped his photographs would come close to doing it justice.
23
Much of the 1926
Sierra Club Bulletin
was devoted to the Kings River Canyon and reports of the past year’s Outing. Editor Francis Farquhar chose six of Ansel’s photographs to illustrate the articles.
Establishing Kings Canyon as a national park had been a top priority for the Sierra Club for many years. The routing of the 1935 Outing there was of genuine significance; as the group camped in the magnificent canyon, leaders from the Park Service spoke passionately about the proposed park, urging the Outing members to join their campaign.
As was happening all too often, a power struggle between the Park Service (overseen by the Department of the Interior) and the Forest Service (controlled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture) had blocked the preservation of Kings Canyon. The Forest Service controlled the Kings Canyon lands and protested that it was a better steward than the Park Service, which would take over if the canyon achieved national-park status. Returning from the 1935 Outing, Sierra Club members pledged to join with the Park Service. Now all that was left was to get the legislation passed.
24
In January 1936, Congress held hearings on the establishment of Kings Canyon National Park. The Sierra Club sent Ansel to act as its lobbyist;
25
he proved to be the perfect selection and a prime center of attention. Dressed in black jeans and black shirt, wearing a big Stetson (not the usual Washington garb) and armed with an array of photographic landscapes of the Kings River Canyon, he dazzled the assembled senators and representatives.
Not wanting to rely solely on his photographs, Ansel had carefully studied the issues and presented both the history and current facts of the Kings Canyon situation, but it was his visual message that was most persuasive. Previously, in Washington, Kings had been dismissed as “just another canyon”; politicians from Los Angeles had fought hard to establish dominion over it, intending to make of it another Hetch Hetchy, in which to store the water pumped from the Owens Valley until it was needed in the city. Through Ansel’s photographs, members of Congress now saw that there was more to Kings Canyon than an empty hole to fill. It held a rich array of wilderness. Its mountain lakes, waterfalls, granite cliffs and high peaks, remnants of glaciers, clear skies—pure, clean, and American—were all given long-distance life in Ansel’s crisp prints. But even this was not yet enough.
During his days in Washington, Ansel made contacts that would turn out to be important to him personally. In 1936, the Interior Department published a photographically illustrated booklet on Yosemite containing not a single Adams photograph;
26
until his January testimony, he had been an unknown in Washington. That now changed.
In 1938, Ansel published his third book and first book of landscapes,
Sierra Nevada, the John Muir Trail.
27
A large proportion of the images in the exquisitely produced volume had been made in Kings River Canyon. With pride, Ansel sent a copy to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who presented it to President Roosevelt. In these two, the campaign for the Kings Canyon National Park found the champions who would make the difference: with the leadership of both Roosevelt and Ickes, the battle was won in 1940, and the treasure of Kings Canyon was added to the real national wealth, our national parks.
28
While Ansel would have been quick to protest that he was only one of many advocates on Kings Canyon’s behalf, it would not likely have become a national park when it did were it not for his visual testament and his tenacity.
In December 1932, during the de Young’s Group
f.
64 exhibition, Virginia discovered that she was pregnant with her and Ansel’s first child. Her father gave the young couple a gift of a thousand dollars to enable them to travel to the East Coast before the baby’s arrival. Ansel hoped that in the hub of the art world, New York City, he could make his fortune.
1
Armed with potent letters of introduction from Albert Bender and the estimable Mrs. Sigmund Stern, a prominent San Francisco supporter of the arts and wife of the president of Levi-Strauss. On Monday, March 6, 1933, Ansel and Virginia embarked on a train trip across Depression-stricken America.
Their first stop was Santa Fe, where they found themselves grounded. Two days after inspiring the country with his inauguration speech, with its famous line “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt closed all the nation’s banks for a full week.
2
Ansel and Virginia were traveling with bank checks, and it took them almost two weeks to secure their funds. They bunked with friends and hopped from party to party as their many Santa Fe and Taos buddies happily entertained them.
Back on track, and after stops in Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester, they arrived in a rainy New York City on the morning of Tuesday, March 28.
3
The weather was bleak and the streets stank, piled high with garbage thanks to a strike. They found and rented an inexpensive studio at the Pickwick Arms Club Residence at 230 East Fifty-first Street, at a rate of sixteen dollars a week, service included.
4
After settling in, the pregnant Virginia retired for a nap. Ansel took a brisk walk, then picked her up for lunch and a visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Julien Levy Gallery. That first night they met Don Tresidder for drinks and dinner at the 21 Club, the most famous speakeasy in Prohibition-era New York, followed by a Broadway show.
5
The next morning, leaving Virginia at the Pickwick Arms to unpack, Ansel charged off, intent on showing his photographs to Alfred Stieglitz at his gallery, An American Place.
6
Strand, Marin, and O’Keeffe had impressed Ansel to his importance, while Albert Bender had characterized Stieglitz as an “intellectual talking machine, but nevertheless . . . the chief man in America to have raised photography to a high plane.”
7
Composed of three galleries, a small office, and a storage room/darkroom on the seventeenth floor of an office building, Stieglitz had founded An American Place in 1929, the same year that MoMA, funded by Rockefeller money, opened its doors. (The collapse of the stock market came in late October 1929, MoMA premiered in early November, and An American Place presented its first exhibition on December 29 of that same year.) It was no coincidence: Stieglitz believed it was important to offer a strong alternative to what the bright young men (most under thirty years old) at MoMA planned to present. He was certain their prejudice would run against American artists and toward the Europeans.
8
Stieglitz feared that the artists he had been promoting, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Arthur Dove, and John Marin, would be ignored by the museum. Strand and O’Keeffe encouraged him to open a space where their work would be assured of a New York audience.
9
An American Place attained an almost immediate status as an influential gallery that was sympathetic to artists—provided, of course, that the artist was deemed worthy by Stieglitz.
Stieglitz had married Georgia O’Keeffe in 1924, after a passionate six-year courtship.
10
He adored her and created the most magnificent collective portrait ever made of one woman through his intense and personal photographs, lingering on the curve of her shoulders, the stretch of her neck, the grace of her hands, the fullness of her breasts, and the directness of her gaze. Twenty-three years older than O’Keeffe, Stieglitz suffered a heart attack in 1928; the following year, he came to the depressing realization that she was physically distancing herself from him, more content in New Mexico than in New York.
11
Stieglitz had a well-earned reputation as a curmudgeon who would not suffer fools. Rationing his words to describe himself, he proclaimed, “I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.”
12
Ansel entered An American Place in 1933 clutching his letter of introduction from Mrs. Stern, a portfolio of prints (High Sierra landscapes and Group
f
.64 subjects), and a copy of
Taos Pueblo
.
13
Stieglitz greeted him with a scowl, and then things got worse. Glancing at the letter from Mrs. Stern, Stieglitz sniffed, “All she’s got is money.”
14
With a warning that he was too busy to be bothered, he allowed that if Ansel came back in a few hours, he might look at his work. Hopes dashed and offense taken on Mrs. Stern’s behalf, Ansel huffed back to their room and advised Virginia that they were leaving the city. He had no idea of the current difficulties faced by Stieglitz, whose black mood was even blacker than usual.
The previous November, unable to carry out a commission to paint a mural across the walls and ceiling of the second-floor women’s room at Radio City Music Hall, O’Keeffe had suffered a nervous breakdown. Stieglitz had become irate after she independently signed the contract for this huge job that he felt was beneath her talents and for which she was to be paid a paltry fee of fifteen hundred dollars. (He had recently sold two of her paintings to the Whitney Museum of American Art for a total of nearly six thousand.)
15
On February 1, 1933, Stieglitz agreed to have O’Keeffe admitted to a private New York mental hospital, where she was diagnosed as suffering from a rather unspecific condition termed psychoneurosis. In fact, she was acutely depressed. Just a couple of days before Ansel’s arrival, O’Keeffe had been discharged and immediately boarded a southbound ship to recover in the warmth of Bermuda for two months. These events had emotionally depleted Stieglitz, who had been allowed to visit her for only ten minutes each week while she was hospitalized. He blamed his wife’s problems on menopause.
16
Feeling abandoned, he had had little interest that morning in viewing the portfolio of an unknown photographer from California.
Sensibly, Virginia insisted that Ansel give Stieglitz one more chance. His return visit to An American Place later that afternoon went even better than he could have dreamed. Bidding him to sit down, Stieglitz took Ansel’s portfolio, untied the three black ribbons that held it shut, and slowly examined each print. There was only one chair in the gallery, and Stieglitz was sitting on it. Finding no other option, Ansel lowered himself onto the radiator, trying to ignore the hot water coursing through its pipes. Whenever he tried to comment on one of the images, Stieglitz would glare him back into silence. Finally, Stieglitz tied the portfolio shut, paused, and then, with great thoughtfulness, untied it and began studying each print again. He gave the same careful attention to
Taos Pueblo
and expressed great appreciation for the elegant simplicity of both the design and the images.
17
By now, Ansel’s bottom, still perched on the radiator, had been baked into corrugation. His discomfort was quickly forgotten, however, when Stieglitz, with a direct look, pronounced the work among the finest he had seen.
18