Authors: Mary Street Alinder
Ansel could not make
Moonrise
again today. The view of the village from U.S. Highway 84 is quite different than it was in 1941. The original church, embellished in the early 1950s with a bell tower and a peaked tin roof, has been largely abandoned on behalf of a new one built in 1972 of steel and concrete; the old church appears uncared-for, forlornly abutting the Rio Arriba County road-equipment storage yard, complete with its metal shed, bulldozers, and road graders. Hernandez, never rich, is now economically depressed. Few bother growing crops that can be easily purchased at markets in nearby Española. The new Highway 84 is heavy with the traffic of bedroom commuters traveling to work in booming Santa Fe. Earthen adobe homes have been replaced by immobile double-wides. On his last visit to Hernandez, in 1980, Ansel remarked, “I would never stop and photograph that mess today. There’s nothing there that I could visualize.”
42
Moonrise
is a sublime memory of what once was, a reminder that some progress is dubious.
But on the positive side, Ansel discovered that his photograph was a source of pride to the small village; many people had hung reproductions of it on their walls. Ansel sent an original print to the Hernandez Elementary School inscribed, “For the people of Hernandez.”
43
Just five weeks after Ansel made
Moonrise
, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States was finally at war. Ansel reacted with intense patriotism, writing again to Park Service Director Newton Drury to suggest that he himself could best serve by making photographs to motivate Americans, images that would communicate the great and pure beauty of their land, whose freedom was now in serious jeopardy.
44
This concept was beyond the consideration of a government more intent, at the moment, on the survival of the country.
Ansel’s intimate and quiet vision of the 1930s gave way to a more expansive one in the 1940s with
Moonrise
and the Mural Project. Image after dramatic image expressed the grandeur, strength, and purity of the motherland. Mountains tower and extend from horizon to horizon; boulders are monumental. Enriched with a catalog of clouds, the sky is full of promise, the air crisp and clear, the sunlight revelatory.
Moonrise, Winter Sunrise, The Tetons and the Snake River, Old Faithful
, and
Mount Williamson from Manzanar
—with these photographs, Ansel bore witness to the country behind the flag. To the question, What are we fighting for? These images were Ansel’s fervent response.
Under contract to write a series of books on photographic technique, Ansel began work on them when Lee Benedict arrived as scheduled in Yosemite in late May 1945.
1
Nancy had well prepared the young woman for her Girl Friday position. Attractive and vivacious, Lee dressed in the Yosemite-appropriate blue jeans and bright shirts and immediately took to Ansel’s rock-climbing lessons. If he hiked up to Vernal Fall, Lee came along and took dictation while he photographed. If he took a trip, she went with him, sitting in the front passenger seat, her stenographer machine on her lap as Ansel spoke the books.
2
This rather strange technique worked. The first two slim volumes,
Camera and Lens
and
The Negative
, were published in 1948, followed by
The Print
in 1950.
Six weeks after Lee’s arrival in 1945, Ansel wrote to Nancy that he was in love again: his heart was afire, and the world was fresh and new.
3
When he was in love, his energies were at their peak; he could move mountains, at least mountains of work, and he did. In September, in a letter to Edward, Ansel thanked him for his hospitality during his latest visit, when the two men, Lee, and Charis had all danced long into the evening. In what was perhaps a joking aside, Ansel suggested that he and Edward trade women for a month or two.
4
Ansel’s portrait of Lee catches her staring straight into his lens, dressed in a pleated skirt and jewel-neck sweater, her feet in sandals, arms crossed against her chest, her right leg casually hooked about her left knee. She seems to be waiting for something—probably for Ansel to get back to work on the text.
5
By November, Ansel’s passion had grown, but he quashed it with the sobering reality of his marriage.
6
Lee Benedict, like others before and after her, became history.
Although Ansel had convinced Virginia less than four years earlier, in 1941, to withdraw her divorce petition, he never stopped his flirtatious ways, seeking out one object of desire after another. Women loved Ansel, not because he was a particularly handsome specimen—he was not—but because he was so alive.
7
This quality attracted men as well as women, and in truth, it is difficult to find anyone who knew Ansel who did not like him.
Most of the women who became romantically linked with him worked for him in some capacity or other, as darkroom assistants or secretaries. (After learning this, I understood why many people wrongly assumed I was Ansel’s mistress.) He craved female attention for himself, not to run Best’s Studio, maintain a home, raise his children, or care for his parents; those were Virginia’s realm. His amours provided energy, compassion, and inspiration, qualities he hungered for.
His liaisons typically stopped just short of intercourse, although observers of the time hold this as a question mark. Repartee and shared experiences of climbing, hiking, and photographing, with some necking thrown in for good measure, seemed to have been enough for him, although the rumor mill worked overtime.
8
Times were different then, and although affairs certainly occurred, the 1930s and 1940s were eons distant in terms of social mores from the sexual permissiveness so prevalent later in the century. What seemed adventurous, indeed scandalous, in Ansel’s heyday would probably be considered much less so today.
Ansel’s passions were time and again fired and then damped, whereupon he would return to Virginia’s hearth. In a 1944 letter to Nancy Newhall, who had begun work on his biography, Ansel outlined his life story in a list that included his appreciation of Virginia’s understanding about his other women.
9
One of Ansel’s old flames recalled asking, a few months into their developing relationship, if he intended to marry her. He quickly replied that he would always stay with Virginia, whom he defended as a “fine woman.” Her hopes of marriage to Ansel dashed, the young woman wisely concluded that her future lay elsewhere.
10
A similar progress of events ended more than one such affair.
Ansel’s amorous pursuits, insofar as they were directed at his employees, were clearly sexual harassment, even though potential conquests’ refusals were accepted and did not negatively affect their working relationship with him. Interviews with many of his assistants, both female and male, confirmed that he was not sexually active during his last twenty years. The Ansel I knew was warm and generous—you knew he cared for you—but made no advances whatsoever. Whether this change in behavior was based on emotional growth or impotence following his 1962 prostate surgery is unanswerable.
Ansel eventually wrote two more books to complete the Basic Photo Series,
Natural-Light Photography
in 1952 and
Artificial-Light Photography
in 1956. Through these difficult-to-digest tomes, he became known to a large audience of photographers as THE expert. He realized little in royalties, even though the books sold well. Chronically strapped for cash, the publisher, Morgan & Lester, secured an agreement with each of its authors to delay payment of royalties; eager to have his books published, Ansel agreed to these terms and never did get paid.
11
Ansel taught photography not only through books but in person as well. In San Francisco, the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) had assembled an incredible painting faculty that included Elmer Bischoff, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. Richard Diebenkorn was only one among an esteemed group of students. An air of excitement permeated the school, and Ansel decided that it would be just the place to establish an equally distinguished department of photography. In a departure from pedagogic methods practiced at other photographic institutions, which were in essence no more than trade schools, Ansel conceived of teaching students how to express themselves individually through photography by giving them all the technical tools paired with an aesthetic approach.
12
With his friend Ted Spencer pulling strings from his power position as president of the San Francisco Art Association, in January 1946 Ansel taught a one-month course to prove to the school’s trustees that serious study of photography was both needed and wanted. They agreed to set up a department of photography on the condition that Ansel raise ten thousand dollars to cover start-up expenses. The Columbia Foundation came through with the funds, and full-time classes were slated to begin that fall.
13
Up to his ears in carpenters, Ansel supervised the building of the darkroom he had designed. He immediately began lobbying to expand the department to include the instruction of photographic history, hoping to create a position for the out-of-work Beaumont. But Beaumont and Nancy had other plans, and anyway, they could not conceive of being so far from New York, the center of their universe. Nancy was hard at work on a book with Strand, and Beaumont was churning out articles as a freelance writer and teaching photography workshops for Chicago’s Institute of Design (at Moholy’s behest) and Black Mountain College.
14
His students at CSFA (now called the San Francisco Art Institute) found Ansel a tremendous teacher, full of inspiring energy even as he piled on a heavy load of technique.
15
Most students dove right in, although Ansel’s presentation could be daunting: he often started his instruction with the conclusion of a subject and slowly meandered back to its beginning.
16
His critiques crackled with incisive advice, although since his workshop in Detroit in 1941, he had learned to place more emphasis on what was right about a print, and less on what was wrong.
His students were an unusually dedicated group. The war had forced most of them to put their personal dreams on hold; now they were highly motivated, ready to get on with their lives. A close camaraderie developed between pupils and teacher, cemented by their common commitment to photography. Well aware that theory went only so far, Ansel contracted actual assignments for his classes, which sent them into the field on a commission for Pacific Gas & Electric for an interpretive study of the Feather River power plants.
17
But even before the first class matriculated, Ansel realized that his active involvement in the school could not last for long. In early April 1946, he had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship of three thousand dollars to prepare a book of photographs and text on the national parks and monuments of the United States,
18
and he was ready, determined that nothing would stand in the way of his carrying out the project. Since Edward’s 1937–1938 grant, only four other photographers had received the prestigious Guggenheim: Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Eliot Porter, and Wright Morris.
Ansel had applied before. In 1933, he proposed not one but two projects: “A Photographic Record of the ‘Pioneer’ Architecture of the Pacific Coast” and “Research in Contemporary Photography” (an open-ended subject if ever there was one).
19
The experienced word on getting a Guggenheim was (and still is) that a photographer must expect to get turned down at least the first time, and possibly many more times; it was (is) all just part of the process.
20
With the temptations of the Guggenheim-funded open road before him, Ansel had to find and train his CSFA replacement over the summer, in time to teach the first full class in September. Beaumont and Nancy thought they knew just the right person: Minor White, the same man whose photographs and name had captured their attentions during the
Image of Freedom
competition. After Minor left the service at the end of the war, he traveled to New York and interned with Beaumont and Nancy at MoMA. They became very fond of him and were impressed with both his intellectual and his photographic skills. When Beaumont resigned, Steichen asked Minor to assume his former position as curator, but to his everlasting credit, Minor refused, choosing instead to stick by his mentors. The Newhalls now shipped off their protégé to teach with Ansel during CSFA’s summer session.
21
Somehow, although they were very different men, Ansel and Minor developed a strong friendship based on mutual respect. As much as he could, Ansel conducted his life, and especially his photographic life, on the basis of scientific fact and objectivity. He believed that a student should learn the craft of photography to the point of fluency, but he also felt that the essence of seeing was beyond words. He had little tolerance for those who analyzed photographs, imposing psychoanalytical meaning on every mountain and tree.
Minor’s mind traveled in a completely opposite direction, though he, too, imparted excellent technique to his students. While enrolled at Columbia University in 1945, he had attended two seminars taught by the great art historian Meyer Schapiro, who taught him to use Freudian analysis to decipher art and the artist’s intent.
22
Minor insisted on verbally investigating the meaning of every aspect of an image, and he did not stop with Freud. He would place a print before the class and ask each student to stand behind another and draw the feelings elicited by the photograph on the back of the person in front of them. A few years later, prospective students would be required to submit their birth time and place along with their application so that Minor could have their horoscopes read.