Authors: Mary Street Alinder
Anathema to Stieglitz’s belief that art was for the appreciative and intelligent few, Ansel was a popularizer who made his photographs and his teachings available, in numbers and price, to all who were interested.
Making a Photograph
explained the basic craft of photography to anyone who cared to read it, and its author’s articles in
Camera Craft
magazine found an audience of thousands.
In the late 1920s, Ansel’s vision had been molded by the Sierra; in the early 1930s, he had become the quintessential
f.
64 photographer, his photographs clearly reflecting the group’s parameters, just as the images in the Stieglitz exhibition had mirrored Stieglitz’s aesthetic as much as Ansel’s own.
Ansel came to understand that he could no longer satisfy Stieglitz. For the first time he found himself in uncharted waters, on his own, no longer bound by the photographic requirements of others. He realized he must make photography that was uniquely his and his alone. It scared the hell out of him.
Just in time, good news arrived by mail. Soon after New Year’s 1937, the Museum of Modern Art asked Ansel to provide six photographs for its first major photographic exhibition. The letter from the exhibition’s young curator, Beaumont Newhall, proved to be life changing for both men.
1
Initially hired as the museum’s librarian by MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., in November 1935, Beaumont had soon come to be regarded as the resident photography expert. As a brilliant young academician at Harvard, he had failed his doctoral orals, perhaps because his interests ranged far beyond the limited, static boundaries that that institution defined as valid art-historical concerns. Beaumont was absorbed in serious study of the art and history of photography, a medium not then accepted within those ivy-clad walls.
2
In May 1936, Barr announced to Beaumont that five thousand dollars had been earmarked for a photography exhibition, one that was to fill all four floors of the museum—what the director called a Big Top show. (Beaumont would not know until 1977 that the money had been given by David McAlpin.) It would be accorded the same respect as the Van Gogh, Cubism, and abstract art exhibitions of the past year. Barr offered him the position of exhibition curator, and without missing a beat, Beaumont proposed mounting a retrospective view of the history of photography under the title
Photography 1839–1937.
3
Barr agreed, and Beaumont, not quite twenty-eight years old, was thrust into the center of creative photography.
Eighteen thirty-nine is a better date than most to mark the beginning of photography. In 1725, a German chemist named Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that silver nitrate, when exposed to light, turns black. Photography is based on that principle: a photograph is made of shades of blackened (oxidized) silver set against white printing paper. But it would take over a century more for the medium’s invention.
The idea of photography was explored without success for decades. Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous English potter, had made photographs by 1802, although a major problem stumped him: the image could be viewed for only a few minutes under candlelight before it faded away. It was impermanent, unfixed.
On January 7, 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s process for making permanent, unique images on silver-coated copper plates, known as the daguerreotype, was given freely to the world by the French government. With Daguerre’s formula, anyone could become a photographer, although making a daguerreotype was far from easy or safe. Daguerreotypes must be developed over the lethal fumes of mercury—thus eliminating, by their early death, a number of its practitioners. Daguerre had partnered with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, whose 1826 image of the view from his studio’s second-floor window, the oldest existing photograph, can be seen at the Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
4
Niépce died in 1833, and it was left to Daguerre to bring the daguerreotype to a practical reality.
At the same time, a gentleman scientist in England, William Henry Fox Talbot, was inventing a photographic process based on a paper negative, which would become known as the calotype. His breakthrough came thanks to Sir John Herschel’s advice that he try sodium thiosulfate to fix the image. Although the calotype was not as clear or as sharp as the daguerreotype, multiple prints could be made from its paper negative. After two decades of supremacy, the daguerreotype bowed to its less difficult and less hazardous British cousin, for which a method had been devised to make the silver emulsion stick to glass to create a transparent negative base.
5
Beaumont Newhall knew that photography’s roots were in Europe and that a trip there would be essential for the preparation of the planned MoMA exhibition. Elated, he informed his fiancée, Nancy Wynne Parker, that since he now had a stable job, they could be married and their honeymoon underwritten. A graduate of Smith College who was just as passionate about art as Beaumont, Nancy served as art editor of the periodical
The New Frontier
, worked as a painter and sculptor, and attended classes at New York’s Art Students League.
6
Barr and Newhall agreed that an impressive oversight committee should be assembled to assure the photographic community that
Photography 1839–1937
would be a serious undertaking. Beaumont first approached Stieglitz, who said no to everything: no, he would not serve on the committee; no, neither the exhibition nor its catalog could be dedicated to him; and no, he would not lend any of his photographs.
7
Stieglitz’s initial anger at MoMA had not cooled. And here came another of the museum’s immature young staff, educated in traditional art history, with no real knowledge of photography, arrogantly chosen to describe the medium’s first ninety-eight years. In addition, Stieglitz had predicted MoMA’s usual European bias, and Beaumont’s first priority was, indeed, a trip to the Continent. Not until after Thanksgiving, seven months into the project, did Beaumont turn his focus to American photographers. In the end, seventy-seven photographers were included in the show’s contemporary photography portion; only twenty-seven were from the United States.
8
Beaumont attributed a great deal of his enthusiasm about photography to Ansel’s 1935 book
Making a Photograph
.
9
In his 1993 autobiography, Newhall called it a “staggering” book and said that after reading it, he had become an adherent of straight photography.
10
Ansel replied quickly and affirmatively to Beaumont’s invitation to participate in the show, contributing not only his own work but an album of albumen prints by the great nineteenth-century photographer Timothy O’Sullivan that he had been recently given by Francis Farquhar.
From its opening on Saint Patrick’s Day 1937,
Photography 1839–1937
was huge both in size (841 pieces) and in success. Entry was gained through a camera obscura, a darkened room fitted with a lens that projected the scene outside on one wall (in this case, the receptionist at the museum’s information desk). The reviewer for the
New York Times
advised, “After that you emerged . . . prepared for whatever the exhibition might unfold.”
11
While most praised the show, the
New York Sun
’s critic mourned, “They say that if you are lost at sea, you should swim with the tide. I suppose I shall have to swim with the modern museum and give up paintings—at least temporarily—until this second edition of the dark ages has passed and we shall have been blessed with another Renaissance.”
12
Photography 1839–1937
served notice that photography had arrived as a field of serious endeavor for both artist and historian. Beaumont’s catalog for the exhibit, published in an edition of three thousand copies, soon sold out. Such an all-inclusive history was clearly needed, and he set to work on a better book.
Just as
Making a Photograph
had spurred on Beaumont, Ansel himself, after viewing the traveling version of
Photography 1839–1937
in San Francisco, was inspired to write “The Expanding Photographic Universe: A New Conception of Photography as a Form of Expression,” his chapter in the book
Miniature Camera Work.
13
Stieglitz congratulated him on this essay; it is not surprising that he liked it, since in it Ansel drew a comparison between Stieglitz’s photographs and the frescoes of Michelangelo.
More glad tidings came Ansel’s way. He was offered total sponsorship of a book of his Sierra landscapes by Walter Starr, a longtime leader of the Sierra Club. The book was to be a memorial to Starr’s son, Walter, Jr., nicknamed Pete, who had loved the Sierra more than anything and had fallen to his death while solo climbing in the Minarets.
14
At the time of his death, Pete had nearly finished his definitive
Starr’s Guide to the John Muir Trail and the High Sierra Region
, which his father completed and had published.
15
Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail
finally gave Ansel the chance to demonstrate in book form what he could do in photography. The subject matter was all his, and Starr was committed to the best production quality money could buy. Although it was the winter of 1937 and he was still struggling with the demons of depression, Ansel impatiently waited for the winter snows to lift so that the Sierra could become accessible to his lens. In early July, he took off for Tuolumne Meadows and then into the Minarets. He returned home with 350 large-format exposures.
16
Word came that Edward Weston had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first for a photographer. Supported by its two-thousand-dollar stipend, Edward, accompanied by his companion Charis Wilson (they would marry two years later), would have the opportunity to photograph the American West from April 1, 1937, until April 1, 1938.
17
Completely proud and happy for his colleague, Ansel offered assistance of all kinds and begged the couple to come to Yosemite so he could take them off to the High Sierra, where Edward had never been.
Edward and Charis’s first concern was how to ration their funds so that they could live for one whole year. Knowing they would have to camp, Ansel advised them on the absolute essentials: a two-man tent, sleeping bags, a tarp, and a simple set of pans and dishes. When they inquired as to where they could obtain dehydrated vegetables, Ansel scoffed, dismissing those as inedible. After years of personal experience, he had determined that the staples of a camping pantry were salt, sugar, bacon, flour, jelly beans, and whiskey.
18
That May, Ansel and Virginia busily made ready Best’s Studio for the first summer season under their management, following Harry Cassie Best’s death the previous October.
19
The permit to operate the concession had expired with Best, but the Park Service granted Ansel and Virginia a one-year extension on a closely supervised trial basis.
Ansel vowed that the gallery would serve as a showpiece of what a responsible concession should be in a national park. First they rid the studio of all cheap gewgaws, a sizable portion of Harry’s inventory. Then they divided the studio into two rooms, the first selling books, cameras, film, and postcards and providing a photo-finishing service, and the second designated an art gallery. Ansel encouraged painters and photographers to interpret Yosemite so that Best’s Studio could then exhibit their work.
But what almost immediately brought in nearly ten thousand dollars a year was the sale of about a hundred different Yosemite images of Ansel’s, printed by an assistant in massive numbers.
20
Prices depended on size and ranged from $1 (or three for $2.50), to $1.50 (three for $4), to a high of $4 apiece. These “special-edition prints” were anathema to the sales practices of Stieglitz. What Ansel termed his “exhibit prints,” made and signed by him and suitable for museum exhibition, were priced from $10 to $25.
21
Committed to achieving the highest quality possible in all aspects of the business, Ansel secured the Meriden Gravure Company of Connecticut to print the black-and-white postcards that sold for three for ten cents. He meanwhile discontinued the lucrative practice of photographing people at Mirror Lake, believing that it distracted from the quality of the experience for those visiting that lovely spot.
Arriving in Yosemite on July 20 for their promised High Sierra sojourn, Edward and Charis found Ansel’s new, automated darkroom boasting printers and dryers as well as a full-time photographic assistant, Imogen Cunningham’s son Rondal (Ron) Partridge, who bragged about the equipment, “You just sit down and watch [it] work.”
22
Ansel’s setup stood in sharp contrast to Edward’s own photographic simplicity: Weston did not even possess an enlarger, but used just a bare lightbulb to expose the negative in its printing frame.
Despite their planned early departure the next morning, they were a party-hearty crew of six, with the inclusion of Ron and two young mountain climbers named David Brower and Morgan Harris. Virginia, as usual, stayed at home to look after the studio and the children. Everyone fell into bed after midnight and was out the door before six in order to make the one-way-at-a-time control of traffic over the Tioga Pass to Mono Basin.