Authors: Mary Street Alinder
When the sun’s first rays fell on the highest peaks before them, including Mount Whitney and the Whitney Pinnacles (which would form the background of the picture), Ansel ventured once more into the freezing cold to frame his image. Covered in snow, the jagged silhouette of the Sierra was revealed slowly, inch by inch, as the sun rose. In the middle ground, the curving form of the Alabama Hills lay at the Sierra’s feet, still slumbering in shadow. Just then, a shaft of light illuminated the foreground meadow. But as it did so, it also shone brightly on one of several grazing horses, whose backside was turned defiantly toward Ansel’s camera. As has already been mentioned, Ansel was not given to prayer, but he later admitted that at this moment, he placed his hands together and cast his gaze heavenward to entreat God to move that horse. As if by divine intervention, the light became perfect, the horse turned in profile, and Ansel made his exposure.
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(See plate 4, second photograph insert.)
Winter Sunrise
appeared as the final landscape in
Born Free and Equal.
It sings of Ansel’s mature signature artistic devices, especially the effect of a long-focus lens used from a great distance, not to zero in on one subject but to compress the spaces between the various elements, emphasizing two, not three dimensions, as he had done with
Frozen Lake and Cliffs
and
Surf Sequence.
As in many of his greatest photographs, nearly solid bands of tone travel across the image surface in horizontal stripes: at the bottom, a narrow, dark foreground punctuated by an equally narrow band of sunlight; above that, the deep color of the Alabama Hills; then the bright whiteness of the Sierra; and finally the middle tone of the warming sky.
Ansel never intentionally included a human or an animal in his creative landscapes. For him, nature was Teflon-coated; man did not stick. Given his choice, he would not have had horses in
Winter Sunrise
, but they were there, and he made the most of them; they added an earthly touch to the unearthly beauty of the scene. Control, as absolute as possible, was at the heart of Ansel’s photography. Mountains stayed put, but people and animals were wild cards, potentially unmanageable moving variables in Ansel’s highly structured approach to his art.
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For Ansel, the critical variable was light.
There are many stories about
Winter Sunrise.
A favorite one can be verified only with an original print by Ansel, and not a book or poster reproduction. The high school students in Lone Pine traditionally placed whitewashed rocks forming the letters
L
and
P
on the side of the Alabama Hills, which just happen to be included in the left-hand side of
Winter Sunrise.
Ansel judged those rocks a blight on one of the greatest and otherwise most pristine landscapes in America, and in all of his prints of
Winter Sunrise
, he had his print finisher spot out the “LP” with ink so that it would become invisible (unless you know it’s there).
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In the spring of 1943, Ansel had his first camera platform constructed for his car, a Pontiac station wagon—what the Beach Boys came to call a “woody.” From that time on, many of his best-known images would be made from this perch, which eliminated the clutter of an immediate foreground and enabled his camera to see a greater distance, making possible the expansive vistas for which he became famous. The camera platform ensured that Ansel would always have a raised, special view; with the construction of this important tool, he rarely again gained entrance to the natural world on foot.
Between Manzanar and the Sierra lies an amazing field of boulders, rising above which is 14,376-foot-high Mount Williamson, so gigantic that at sunset it casts a shadow seven miles long, fully engulfing the site of the internment camp. In the last days of Manzanar, during August 1945, Ansel drove his Pontiac along the dirt tracks that crisscross the boulder field, climbing toward Mount Williamson. He found his spot, climbed up on the platform, and positioned the eight-by-ten with the twenty-three-inch long-focus element of his Cooke XV triple convertible lens, adding a Wratten G. deep yellow filter. The bird’s-eye viewpoint allowed him to tilt the camera down slightly to include the huge rocks that stretched from the car to the mountain, its summit now cloaked with clouds pierced by rays of light from the unseen sun, outside the picture area.
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The sense of scale in the final image is surreal, with the telephoto effect of the long-focus lens making foreground rocks appear as large as the truly gigantic mountain behind them.
Mount Williamson from Manzanar
is ripe with the mystical and holy presence that Ansel believed permeated the area surrounding the camp. When Nancy Newhall first saw a print, she titled it
The Apocalypse
. (See plate 6, second photograph insert.)
In 1944, the editors of
Fortune
hired some of the best California photographers, including Edward, Ansel, and Dorothea, to illustrate a single theme issue to be called “The Pacific Coast.” Ansel and Dorothea decided to pool their energies, with the implicit understanding that he would do the big scenes and she the people. They produced five articles together, comprising a total of twenty-four photographs, and Ansel did one story completely on his own.
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Because they shared credit for the five done jointly, there is now no way to determine who made which image. The article that Ansel photographed solo was “The El Solyo Deal,” about a huge, 4,400-acre corporate ranch. Dorothea refused to photograph agribusiness; she had spent the last ten years documenting the plight of family farms, which were disappearing at a fearsome rate as they were absorbed by corporations. Ansel, for his part, had no moral problems with the assignment.
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Dorothea and Ansel’s goal in “Richmond Took a Beating” was to demonstrate the effects of wartime industry on an East Bay town. Before the war, Richmond had been a rather sleepy place of twenty-four thousand people, but its shipyard had grown to become the largest in the country employing one hundred thousand workers, and nearly that many new residents, a number beyond the operational mechanisms of an old small-town bureaucracy.
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The idea of the
Fortune
editors was to shoot the story over one twenty-four-hour period (a predecessor of the contemporary “Day in the Life” concept).
Working together on this story proved a severe test of Ansel and Dorothea’s relationship. An observer at the time commented, “What an impossible team! They were so unlike one another.”
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When Ansel picked her up, Dorothea had her one camera, a Rolleiflex, strapped around her neck, and was carrying a film bag and a notebook. He, in contrast, had as usual loaded his big station wagon with everything he might need and more, including four cameras. When they arrived in Richmond, Dorothea hopped out of the car and disappeared into the throngs of workers as each shift came and went. While she acted invisible with her quiet little camera, Ansel stood on top of his car with his big black beard and ten-gallon hat, the center of his intended subjects’ attention; in such a situation he found it very difficult to capture meaningful people images. Mountains and trees were not disturbed by his eccentric appearance and ways, but people surely were.
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During this assignment, Dorothea grew angry because Ansel kept shooting people (her world) and did not stick to the distant view (his). Her vision definitely rubbed off on him, at least for a few minutes; it was at Richmond that he made the keenly seen portrait
Trailer Camp Children
, an image more Langelike than Adamsesque.
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Ansel and Dorothea together happened upon the three ragged children in a gritty Richmond trailer camp. The older brother, still a child himself, had been left to care for his two sisters while their father and mother were working at the shipyard. Realizing that his eight-by-ten-inch view camera was hardly the vehicle for an intimate environmental portrait, Ansel borrowed Dorothea’s Rolleiflex and made only one exposure.
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Gently lit by available light, the brother cradles his younger sister in one arm while the baby clings to his knee. The eyes of the three children tell all. The boy looks away from the camera, into space and beyond, to an uncertain but surely desperate future—rather like Dorothea’s
Migrant Mother
, although his face is not yet furrowed by time. His sister is wide-eyed, staring into the horror of her present. The baby, however, looks directly at the camera, without fear and with a remnant of hope in her attitude. Providing visual resolution, at the bottom corner of the image, in dim light, the gently curled fist of the older brother lies next to the hand of the baby.
Trailer Camp Children
was not the image of Richmond that
Fortune
wanted to project. The editors chose pictures that showed the robustness of this wartime city, not its consequences. The strongest image from the entire shoot,
Trailer Camp Children
was not selected for the article.
At this time, any photographer who claimed a social conscience joined New York’s Photo League. Founded in 1936, the Photo League was something well beyond the usual camera club, its roots firmly planted in the leftist movements of Depression-era America.
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Members of the Photo League commonly shared the philosophy that photography’s best use was as a tool for social change. Although they were primarily documentary photographers, as the years progressed, their discussions broadened to include those with other viewpoints, such as Ansel, Beaumont, and Nancy, who found the Photo League’s newsletter,
photo notes
, a worthy vehicle for occasional articles.
No stranger to the Photo League, Ansel most likely joined when, trying to drum up support for MoMA’s new photography department, he gave a lecture to the group in November 1940. He returned to lecture again at eight-thirty in the evening on November 28, 1947, on the topic “The Interpretation of the Natural Scene.” He proposed classifying photography into four categories: 1) Record, as the name implies, simple records such as passport photos; 2) Reportage, that is, journalistic assignments from without; 3) Illustration, including advertising and portraits; and 4) Expressive, or creative photography. An audience member described the proceedings: “Ansel Adams leads with his chin. One member after another takes a swing. He’s up. He’s down. The crowd roars. Mr. Adams is a brave man. He asks for argument.”
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A noisy chorus begged to differ with Ansel, asserting that his definitions denigrated their work: it was entirely possible to have expressive reportage, and they were the living proof.
Ansel relished the give-and-take of this debate, which continued in letter form. Famed
Life
photographer Philippe Halsman berated him for taking such a narrow view of photography, insisting that he acted as if everything of consequence must fit within his confining parameters.
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Ansel’s reply was two single-spaced pages full of friendly steam, denying any such parochialism.
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The Photo League was nothing if not lively.
But the postwar years were also the dangerous era of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, with its slogan “Better dead than Red.” (Ansel and the Newhalls called it the House Un-American Committee.) Just one week after Ansel’s lecture, the Photo League was blacklisted by the United States attorney general, joining a catalog of groups that were judged to be subversive, beginning with the Communist Party.
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At first members rallied, and letters of support poured in from Edward, Dorothea, Eliot Elisofon, Ben Shahn, Paul Strand, and Ansel, each confirming his or her allegiance to country as well as to Photo League. Ansel’s letter proclaiming that he would stand by the organization—“I am a member of the PHOTO LEAGUE and proud of it”—also took pains to assert that he was certainly no Commie!
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He challenged the other members to “dust off your lenses and get going! . . . The constant, dynamic affirmation of the camera must be devoted to the support of the democratic potential. Do not feed the wrath of the stupid; bring shame to them through images of the truth.”
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As the months rolled by and belonging to a blacklisted group became dicier, Ansel, among others, asked the board to announce officially that it had no ties to the Communist Party. Photographer Barbara Morgan telephoned him to warn that Communists had taken over the board of directors; she advised him to join her in resigning.
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In testimony before HUAC, it was revealed that one of the leaders of the Photo League was indeed a Communist.
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Ansel believed that the contemporary practice of Communism in Stalinist Russia was in the same league of repression and persecution as fascism.
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When the board refused to issue any statement, and did not even respond to his query, he quit, writing a formal letter of resignation and sending a copy to the FBI.
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The League, virtually memberless, finally folded in 1951.
Soon after the completion of Ansel and Dorothea’s
Fortune
assignment on Richmond, she became very ill with a duodenal ulcer. Over the next few years, it laid waste to her. Surgery followed surgery, and then she underwent extended radiation treatments. Always a small woman, Dorothea became emaciated, too weak to photograph. It took her a long time to regain enough strength to begin working again.
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