Authors: Mary Street Alinder
Ansel began making a general exposure of the entire image, but because he wanted to limit the exposure to the lower foreground, he began to dodge (that is, cover) that section after a few seconds. He used a small handmade dodging tool (a section of coat-hanger wire with a circle of cardboard the size of a fifty-cent piece taped to one end) to block the part of the image that he had attempted to intensify thirty-two years earlier. Holding the tool only inches from the paper, Ansel kept in constant motion: stopping the movement even for a second could result in an area of uneven tone.
Ansel quickly picked up a large piece of cardboard—the side of an ordinary corrugated box—in which he had cut a three-inch slit. For the rest of the exposure, he shielded the printing paper with the cardboard, selectively burning (or giving more exposure to) specific areas of the image. Ansel counted to ten under his breath, his lips moving, counted to twelve, then five, then seventeen. His hands flew about the picture, stopping to burn for precise second counts while varying the cardboard’s distance from one to three feet from the paper. There was nothing static about the making of a
Moonrise
; the total printing time for each print was about two minutes.
He exposed six prints before placing them in the developer. It took twelve and a half minutes to print this batch and then another twelve and a half to develop, stop, and fix them, then gently slide them into a holding tray of plain water. His concentration was focused totally on each print as he carefully inspected it, destroying any that revealed a less-than-perfect dodge or burn exposure or any other flaw.
These last prints of
Moonrise
were being made for his Museum Set project. The decision to include the image in every such set meant that during 1979 and 1980, Ansel was required to make more than one hundred perfect prints, a daunting number at his age.
I badgered Ansel to make a straight print from the
Moonrise
negative—to print the negative without any darkroom manipulation. It took a while to convince him that this would be a great teaching tool to demonstrate how far he transformed the negative to achieve his final expressive equivalent. He finally obliged, and I immediately put the resulting print on Ansel’s workroom wall side by side with a fine print. The comparison clearly showed that the circumstances in Hernandez had been in the daylight, but he emphatically chose nighttime to complete his visualization.
27
(See plate 3, second photograph insert.)
In all, Ansel produced approximately one thousand original prints from this negative during his lifetime, more than from any of his others. The reason was simple: he printed on demand, and he received more orders for
Moonrise
than for any other image. Most of these prints were about sixteen by twenty inches, with a few larger, including some murals, and a few smaller. The great majority were made after 1970.
But more than either its historical or its technical details, the most discussed aspect of
Moonrise
is its price. At one time, former Boston photography dealer Carl Siembab quipped, “Ansel’s pictures are a new form of currency; instead of dealing in gold, we deal in
Moonrise
s.”
28
More dollars, pounds, marks, and yen have been spent on
Moonrise
than on any other image in the history of photography. A rough estimate puts Ansel’s receipts in the neighborhood of four hundred thousand dollars for the sale of fine prints of
Moonrise
alone, most of that amount from 1975 onward.
29
This is but a fraction of the profit realized by collectors and dealers in the later resale market. Once a photographer sells a fine print, he or she never sees another penny from its further sales, even if the original price is fifty dollars and ten years later it is sold for fifty thousand.
In fact, in 1948, fifty dollars was Ansel’s normal price for a sixteen-by-twenty-inch
Moonrise
, including shipping. This was double the price of his other prints of similar size. Ansel’s fee for a
Moonrise
was raised only slowly, to sixty dollars in 1962, seventy-five dollars in 1967, and then $150 in 1970.
30
As the decade of the seventies unfolded and photography grew more and more popular as a “collectible,” Ansel was swamped by requests for
Moonrise.
He stopped taking all print orders as of December 31, 1975, his decision having been spurred by the increased demand. The negative had never become any easier to print, and it took him three years to fill the orders in hand. At this time, the late 1970s and early 1980s, significant numbers of investors began entering the photography market for the first time. Business magazines took notice. One article reported that in December 1979, the sale of a
Moonrise
for twenty-two thousand dollars at the Sotheby Parke Bernet auction house had set three sales records: it was the most ever paid for a photograph by a living photographer; the most for a twentieth-century print; and the most for a photographic work on paper. Up to that time, only a daguerreotype self-portrait by nineteenth-century photographer Albert Sands Southworth, on a silver-plated copper sheet, had brought more, selling for thirty-six thousand dollars.
31
The
Wall Street Journal
even published a bar chart that allowed its investment-minded audience to compare the selling prices of
Moonrise
for the years 1977 through 1981.
32
Ansel’s last selling price for
Moonrise
had been twelve hundred dollars; after the supply was curtailed at its source, the price of a sixteen-by-twenty-inch print has continued to escalate in the secondary market of auctions and galleries to twenty thousand dollars in 1996 and forty-five thousand in 2014. The most paid for a sixteen-by-twenty-inch
Moonrise
was $609,600 at an auction at Sotheby’s in 2006, and it was for one of those rare early prints Ansel made in 1948. In 2014, the current total value of all the
Moonrise
prints that Ansel made is in excess of fifty million dollars.
As is the case for so many of Ansel’s images, the precise dating of
Moonrise
has been problematic. When collectors and historians demanded to know when he had made the negative, Ansel assigned it dates ranging from 1940 to 1944, with 1944 most often favored. Leading the chorus of plaintiffs was Beaumont Newhall, who was driven crazy by his friend’s inexactitude. To settle the matter, Beaumont contacted David Elmore, a young astronomer, who accepted the challenge, drove to New Mexico, and, using evidence provided by the picture itself (from which he extrapolated the moon’s altitude and azimuth) coupled with data acquired in Hernandez (e.g., the position of Ansel’s camera tripod), returned to his computer and devised a program that eventually determined that
Moonrise
had been made on October 31, 1941, at 4:03
p.m.
33
Ansel was totally delighted with these findings and just wished there were more moons in his other pictures so he could know when they, too, had been made.
The saga continued, however, when another astronomer, Dennis di Cicco of
Sky & Telescope
magazine, became obsessed with
Moonrise.
34
He had recently written a computer program based on celestial coordinates that calculated azimuth and altitude for any time or place in the world. His attempts at dating
Moonrise
did not confirm October 31, 1941, 4:03
p.m.
Could the tripod position have been incorrectly determined, he wondered? Di Cicco traveled to Hernandez and noticed an old road behind and above the current modern highway. Elmore’s calculations had been made with the camera placed in the middle of the new highway, which di Cicco guessed had not yet been built in 1941. His hunch was right: when we visited Hernandez together in June 1980, Ansel told me that he had made
Moonrise
from the old road.
Even after all of this, the correct time was not easy to come by. Di Cicco eventually isolated two dates, one in 1939 and one in 1941, but he was bothered by the fact that the moon in
Moonrise
appears slightly less full than it should have been on either of those occasions. When he read a description of how Ansel printed
Moonrise
, however, the lightbulb went on: he realized that when Ansel burned in the sky with such intensity, the margins of the moon must inevitably have been singed, making it appear to be in an earlier phase. Close examination of the negative of
Moonrise
confirms that the moon was indeed almost full, certainly fuller than it seems to be in the exhibition-quality prints. After another trip to Hernandez and ten years of sleuthing, di Cicco published his conclusion:
Moonrise
was made on November 1, 1941, at 4:49:20
p.m.
Mountain Standard Time. The full moon occurred on November 3.
Dating has not been the only controversy about
Moonrise.
The question has been posed, if it was made with Mural Project funding, does
Moonrise
rightfully belong to the American people?
35
Letters from the time between Ansel and the Department of the Interior clearly state that Ansel acknowledged the government’s ownership of the negatives.
36
Furthermore, in a letter dated August 18, 1942, Ansel indicated that the negatives would remain in his custody for as long as he could personally print them and that he would store them in a government vault. Following his death, the negatives were to be sent to the secretary of the interior.
37
The government agreed, reiterating that the negatives “are the property of the United States Government.”
38
Due to World War II, the Mural Project was canceled as of June 30, 1942. Ansel delivered 225 small work prints to the Department of the Interior in November of that year, representing the output of his two extended trips; he kept the negatives so that he could make the murals when the project was, he hoped, reactivated following the war. The work prints presented a full array of subjects for the potential murals. In truth, a number of the images had not been made during the past year; some, notably those from the Sierra, came from negatives dating back to the mid-1920s.
39
In 1946, Harold Ickes, whose personal project the murals had been, left office, and that spelled their demise. Nothing was done with Ansel’s photographs until 1962, when they were transferred to the National Archives, where they still reside and where anyone can order a copy print. These prints are made from a copy negative that was itself made from Ansel’s original print. The quality of such photographs is poor, not coming anywhere close to that of an original print, and yet anyone can publish them in books, posters, or calendars. Unfortunately, all too many undiscerning souls are willing to plunk down their money on such inferior items.
As to the question of whether Ansel kept negatives that rightfully belonged to the Department of the Interior, the answer is complex. Ansel never delivered any negatives at all to the Interior Department. He knew in what disregard negatives and photographs were held at that time by the National Archives, and he did not want to allow such a fate to befall his treasures. Throughout his lifetime, he stonewalled any inquiry on this matter, providing various excuses as to their whereabouts or suggesting they had been destroyed in his darkroom fire in Yosemite—an impossibility, given that the fire was in 1937 and the negatives in question were made in 1941 and 1942.
40
At the beginning of the Mural Project, Ansel labeled all of the Interior Department negatives “NPS,” for National Park Service; the fact that for many years he continued to use that same label on negatives made of the national parks and monuments only serves to confuse the issue. However,
Moonrise
was never given an NPS classification. The negative number is 1-SW-30, describing an eight-by-ten-inch negative, Southwest subject matter, negative number 30.
It was Ansel’s custom to reserve days for his own personal work in the midst of a commercial assignment. He was scrupulous about accounting for his time. The bill he submitted to the Department of the Interior for the autumn 1941 trip totaled $232.97; he traveled for forty-seven days, yet charged the government for only eight and a half days of work and per diem, and for only forty miles of travel.
41
Ansel charged nothing for November 1, the day on which we now know
Moonrise
was made.
Moonrise
belonged to Ansel.
That is not the case, however, for a number of other famous negatives by him. In April 1983, Ansel and I went through all of his NPS negatives and concluded that 229 of them were from the Mural Project. Such well-known images as
The Tetons and the Snake River, Leaves, Mt. Rainier, White House Ruin, The Grand Canyon
, and his great series of Old Faithful are all rightfully the property of the U.S. government. Ansel was uneasy about the subterfuge he had to engage in to hide the negatives, though he believed it was justified. He intended to petition the government to allow them, following his death, to be kept with the rest of his negatives, in his archive at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, where they would be properly cared for and accessible—within severe limits—to the public. Meanwhile, he would be happy to provide the government with prints at its request. But time, and his life, ran out before he found a sympathetic ear in Washington.