Authors: Mary Street Alinder
Ansel planned their course, and after a few grueling days of ever upward trails, the Outing party found itself in the lunar landscape of the High Sierra, above tree line with little vegetation to soften the earth’s skeleton for a man or woman in a sleeping bag. It was the duty of each Outing’s freshman members to build and maintain the nightly bonfire, and this year’s bunch, with naive zeal, produced a barely controlled inferno for their first effort. The recorder of the trip recalled that “everyone was toasted into a pleasant stupor, while Ansel, trapped between the ring of Sierrans and the fiery furnace, had to issue his trail directions on the trot . . . with his jeans threatening to go up in smoke at any moment.”
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Even though the trip was cursed with a bounty of rain, Ansel made six negatives that he would include in the American Place show. Four, in deference to the soft, cloud-filtered light, were studies of weathered wood, two of old ghost-town buildings, and two tree details.
Virginia loved the Outings almost as much as Ansel did; at thirty-four, she remained an intrepid climber, on this trip achieving the summit of Mount Whitney for the second time, along with 162 others. She had been one of the first women to ascend its eastern slope.
Ansel was never one for “racking up” mountains, as he put it. Preferring vantage points conducive to a heavy camera and tripod, he made a gentle, glowing photograph,
West Slope of Mount Whitney, Sierra Nevada
, bathed in the warm rays of the late-afternoon sun.
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This and an image of an explosive cumulus cloud dominating the Kern Plateau, entitled
Clouds, Sierra Nevada, California,
were two of only four landscapes exhibited at his Stieglitz show.
47
Soon after his return from the Sierra, Ansel entered his darkroom in the basement of his parents’ San Francisco house and rarely left until the work for both the Stieglitz and the Kuh shows was completed. More than any other photographic artist of his time, Ansel championed the importance of print quality, and he was determined to make the most beautiful prints of his life for Stieglitz.
To that end, he painstakingly assembled the perfect ingredients, changing the printing paper he had used since 1931, Novobrome, to Agfa Brovira Glossy Double Weight. The new paper possessed more silver and thus offered a greater quality of light, producing bright, sparkling whites and more intense cool blacks.
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Variations of images were propped up, examined, and compared.
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Only the best survived.
Ansel trimmed every print with precision, then dry-mounted each onto very white, shiny Bristol Board. Attending to every detail, he had new labels commissioned in a plainly elegant design, proclaiming “A Photograph by Ansel Adams.” One was glued to the back of each print. He needed forty-five prints for Stieglitz and thirty-four for Kuh. Ansel had once bragged that if pushed, he could make three hundred prints in one day when working on a commercial project; it was a measure of his dedication to achieving the very best for these shows that it took him seven weeks to complete the requisite seventy-nine prints.
When Ansel shipped the American Place show off to Stieglitz on October 11, he was fully content. He wrote Stieglitz that with the making of each print he had summoned up the essential emotions he had experienced when he made the negative: method acting applied to photography. He believed these photographs to be more alive than any he had previously made.
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Every negative used for the American Place exhibition had been taken during the previous five years. Four had been in the Group
f
.64 show, and most were in the Group
f
.64 style: close-ups of battered wood, cemetery stones, and rusted anchors. Stieglitz liked imagery that reflected his own concerns and provided a sense of mood and place. For him the natural world was relevant only in how it related to man; he scorned the West and its scale-breaking grandeur. Mindful of this, Ansel selected only pictures that Stieglitz had expressed a liking for, or ones in a similar style. He was discovering that recognition by Stieglitz could be as confining as it had originally seemed liberating. The inventory of prints that Ansel shipped to Chicago was nearly identical to the one sent to New York, though for Katharine Kuh, he included three prints that did not go to Stieglitz,
Monolith, Rose and Driftwood
,
Still Life
, plus a three-panel, photographic screen of
Leaves, Mills College
, each panel measuring an impressive six feet two inches high and two-and-a-half feet wide.
From October 27 to November 25, 1936, Ansel’s photographs hung at An American Place, in the first exhibition by a photographer other than Stieglitz himself since Paul and his wife Rebecca Strand’s two-person 1932 show.
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Ansel was now a leading artist in the United States, and he took his new position seriously. His statement for the show explained that these images had been created from the meeting of the world’s outer reality with the unique personal reality of the artist. Ansel termed the result to be photographs that achieved a “super-reality.”
52
His exhibition earned a substantial notice in the
New York Times
, in which the reviewer remarked that “a skier spotted with snow, a rocky butte against a cloudy sky with great clarity of foreground foliage, the pattern of a pine cone or bark on a tree, a leathery face: these and kindred subjects reveal his personal use of the camera and clarifying ability. Some unusually interesting work.”
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Financially, too, the show was a big success, with at least nine prints sold.
54
Stieglitz disliked even giving the appearance of being a salesman, preferring to “place” prints with duly appreciative buyers. Customers first had to prove to him that they were worthy; they then had to pay whatever price he demanded (which depended on who was buying; Stieglitz believed that the rich should pay a premium). He usually insisted on a thousand dollars each for his own photographs or Paul Strand’s, an outrageous price during the 1930s and 1940s. But whereas Stieglitz and Strand often made only one print from a negative, Ansel held to no such rule, assuming the contrarian position that one of photography’s greatest strengths was reproducibility, the ability to make many prints from one negative. Stieglitz priced most of Ansel’s photographs at thirty dollars, although he sold
The White Tombstone
to the wealthy David McAlpin for a hundred dollars, Ansel’s highest selling price for a single print for many years to come. The same photograph carried a price tag of twenty-five dollars at the Kuh Gallery.
But Stieglitz was not yet finished with the prospective buyer. After a check for the full amount was made out directly to the artist, Stieglitz required that a second check be contributed to the “Rent Fund” of An American Place, which in the case of McAlpin and
The White Tombstone
meant an additional forty-nine dollars.
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The White Tombstone
is a haunting image of a carved and Tudor-arched headstone bearing a profiled figure of a young woman, her head bent in sorrow. Sculpted as a grieving memorial to Lucy Ellen Darcy, who died in 1860 at the age of twenty-six, the stone had subsequently been etched by age and nature.
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The camera’s tilted viewpoint in Ansel’s photograph seems to suggest that the world has been permanently pushed askew by the tragedy of Lucy’s death.
With confirmed paying jobs awaiting him in Chicago courtesy of Katharine Kuh, Ansel boarded the train from San Francisco on Saturday, November 7. He spent nearly a week in the city, basking in the accolades of the critics and making some money as well. Kuh arranged seven sittings for portraits and a couple of days’ work photographing corsets and brassieres for Paris Garters. Ansel happily tackled this bizarre range of assignments, grateful for the income.
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On Saturday, November 14, he lectured to the Chicago Camera Club. A newspaper notice of the event described him as the “noted California photographer,” and an accompanying photograph depicted the thirty-four-year-old Ansel, now balding, with broad brow, hooded eyes, prominent nose underlined by a dark mustache, and a tiny apostrophe of a beard beneath his lower lip, looking a bit like a soul patch. Staring off into space, he confidently posed with his new 35mm Zeiss Contax camera held in his smooth, handsome hands.
The proudly displayed Contax was his latest toy. Ansel was amazed by the ease and portability of the little camera, such a change from his cumbersome eight-by-ten. Shortly after receiving it, he took the Contax into the High Sierra for a month and managed to shoot two dozen rolls of film, about 864 exposures, a revolution for a photographer used to the time-consuming project of making a negative with a view camera. In an article for
Camera Craft
, Ansel touted the Contax as the single piece of equipment most responsive to the hurly-burly of real life.
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Ansel arrived in New York too late in the evening to visit An American Place, but the next day he crossed the gallery’s threshold and became transfixed by Stieglitz’s presentation, from the soft gray walls (a color selected by O’Keeffe) to the thoughtful sequencing of image next to image. Most were hung in a line, but a few were grouped in twos or threes, and a few were double-hung, one above another.
Proper lighting is imperative for photographs if the subtle nuances of tone and detail are to be revealed. The six-foot-tall windows at The Place were sheathed in white shades made softly luminous by the sunshine that moved through the surrounding skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. The shades unrolled from the bottom up to allow regulation of the natural light, which was supplemented by rows of floodlights, their intensity controlled by reflectors; the effect produced recalled the “quality of light of a cathedral.”
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Anointed by Stieglitz, whose praise provided the deepest affirmation and whose intellectual reinforcement had been critical for him, Ansel had achieved the pinnacle of success in the established art world.
After just four days in New York, Ansel had to return to Chicago for a few days for another round of portrait making and a commercial assignment for a paper factory, and then it was on to Carlsbad, New Mexico. This promised to be another lucrative stop for Ansel, with paying jobs for the Southern Pacific Railroad and the possibility that if he made good photographs in Carlsbad Caverns, the U.S. Department of the Interior would buy them.
Ansel spent the better part of a week entombed in the caverns, and emerging each evening only made him feel more like a bat. Photographing there proved a frustrating experience: he was repelled by the Park Service’s theatrical lighting, which laid bare what should not have been seen and kept in shadow aspects that deserved revelation. Ansel also found offensive the repetitive boom of the ranger’s voice as he momentously expressed important thoughts about the meaning of life for each new band of tourists. Doubtful that he could capture the quintessence of the natural splendor of the caverns, Ansel wrote to beseech Stieglitz to pray for him.
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He also sent his deepest thanks for the exhibition that had reinvigorated him and trumpeted that he was heading in an exciting and new direction; he chose the word
joy
to describe his state of mind (despite the cavern experience).
Finished with Carlsbad, Ansel finally traveled home, arriving in San Francisco on Thursday, December 10, 1936, to a mountain of personal troubles.
Ansel’s future seemed golden, but what looked like the best of times was actually the worst, and it was all because of love. In early 1936, now an established commercial photographer, he had been hired by the Southern Pacific Railroad to shoot promotional pictures of their posh new passenger cars. Extras were needed, and on a whim, Patsy English, a friend of someone at the modeling agency, joined in the crowd.
Patsy stood out, at least to Ansel, who asked her to work as a model for him on an advertising campaign for his major client: Yosemite Park and Curry Company (YP&CC) was clamoring for new pictures depicting pretty tourists making the most of their Yosemite experience. Although she had no professional training, Patsy agreed, and she proved so adept that Ansel asked her back for a number of shooting sessions. She bunked at the Best home in the valley along with Ansel and Virginia. Ansel was thirty-four, Virginia thirty-two, and Patsy twenty-two years old.
Swamped with orders for stock prints from YP&CC, Ansel decided it was time to hire a darkroom assistant: Patsy. Patsy was inexperienced in photography, but she possessed a full measure of energy and was ready and willing to learn. She later remembered that Ansel “needed to make two dozen of this and two dozen of that. He taught me to do the fixing and washing while he printed. This is when I learned about quality. I watched while he exposed and printed and I came to understand. I was very receptive and had the same kind of taste as he did.”
1
Patsy stayed on as Ansel’s assistant as he made the prints for the An American Place and Katharine Kuh Gallery shows. She was struck by the severity of his self-criticism, as he often reacted to a freshly made print by saying, “I can do better than that,” whereupon he would return to the darkroom to try it again.