Authors: Mary Street Alinder
In 1954, nine years after her last major job, she asked Ansel to join her in photographing three Mormon towns in Utah. He realized how important this story was to her, and sensed that she did not feel strong enough to complete it herself.
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Together they would describe the hard life of the people who lived in this desolate though magnificent landscape, a land more conducive to contemplation than farming and ranching.
At first Dorothea and Ansel thought of an exhibition, but financial realities forced them to secure financial backing by selling the story to
Life. Life
’s editors were not particularly excited about doing a photographic essay on Mormon towns in Utah, but they were intrigued by the unlikely team of Lange and Adams, both world famous but for opposite achievements: the document versus the landscape.
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Ansel welcomed the rare opportunity to show his work in
Life
’s exalted pages, and as for Dorothea, what better venue for her comeback effort?
Ansel and Dorothea, accompanied by her husband, Paul Taylor, and son, Dan Dixon, who would write the text, arrived in southern Utah on August 24, 1953, to find their subjects uncooperative and suspicious. Lange and Taylor reassured them—and Ansel as well—that all permissions had been granted by the church fathers in Salt Lake City. Tensions dissolved, and the team went to work.
There was never any doubt in Dorothea’s working relationships with others that she was in charge. She gave the orders, and when Ansel balked, she threatened to quit. In the truest spirit of friendship, Ansel acceded to her throughout the three weeks of shooting—not his usual modus operandi.
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Ansel and Dorothea completed an extensive document of the towns of Toquerville, St. George, and Gunlock. After they returned home, Ansel suggested that Nancy be brought in to assemble the images and text. Dorothea bristled, as usual demanding full control. Ansel demurred to her, afraid to tax her small energies in any way.
Dorothea flew to New York and handed in to
Life
’s editors the story of the three towns in 135 photographs.
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Unfortunately, much of the space reserved for “Three Mormon Towns” was preempted at the last minute by fast-breaking stories, resulting in the publication of a severely truncated version on September 6, 1954, reduced to thirty-four images
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Letters of outrage poured into
Life
’s New York offices from Utah. It turned out that Lange and Taylor had not mentioned the
Life
article to the church elders but had obtained permission only for the exhibition.
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Dorothea had also neglected to obtain any model releases, believing that the practice undermined the relationship of trust that must be built with each subject.
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One woman demanded a thousand dollars as recompense for the use of her photograph without her consent.
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In addition, many residents of Toquerville, described as living in a dead-end town, were deeply angered by what they felt was a misleading depiction of their home sweet home.
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Ansel was stung by the criticism. A central element in his self-identity was the conviction that his life must be lived ethically. He had cooperated with Dorothea at every turn, yet she had lied to him, as well as to the Mormons.
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He rarely courted conflict and believed that Dorothea and Paul had placed him squarely in a mess of their making. In an unusual move for him, Ansel wrote to tell Dorothea directly how personally angry and disappointed he was with her.
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It may have added to Ansel’s feelings of betrayal that only a quarter of the photographs in the article were his, and three-quarters Dorothea’s. Since she had met with the editors in New York on the layout, Ansel may have thought she pushed her images over his own. Years later, the
Life
editor in charge of “Three Mormon Towns” recalled that fewer of Ansel’s pictures had been used because it was felt that the magazine’s poor reproduction quality would not serve them well, whereas Dorothea’s photographs were already grainy and would not be hurt.
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Dorothea dismissed the problems with the permissions and releases as simply coming with the territory of journalistic photography, and certainly the editors at
Life
did not seem to hold it against her. Almost immediately, she left for Ireland on another assignment. The resulting story, “Irish Country People,” was also published in
Life
, but only after the editors had ironed out yet another enormous hassle: Dorothea returned with lots of fine pictures, but with no names of people nor any permissions. Two researchers flew to Ireland and attempted to match photographs with faces, eventually obtaining enough information to allow the article to run.
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When Dorothea asked Ansel to work with her on a story about the Berryessa Valley, whose homes and farms were about to be flooded for a new dam, he gracefully declined, recommending the photographer Pirkle Jones in his stead.
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“Three Mormon Towns” was their last project together.
Dorothea never really regained her health, but instead gradually worsened. Her scarred esophagus grew so constricted from the surgeries and radiation that eating became a trial for her. Pain was her constant companion. During these years, her friendship with Ansel, which had cooled after their
Life
assignment, began to revive. In 1962, when he was hospitalized for removal of an enlarged prostate, she cabled,
It is my turn to tell you that I wish for you the very best under all circumstances and also that I have loved you right or wrong. Dorothea.
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A large solo retrospective of her photographs was planned to open at MoMA in November 1965. It would be the most important of her life. Although exhausting. Tragically, after years of suffering, Dorothea was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the esophagus in the summer of 1964.
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Ansel remembered,
About two or three weeks before she died I went over to see her. I took a camera. She didn’t look well, but she was still marvelous and sparkling and talking. Her gestures were incredible and I’ve got five or six series. I don’t think they’re great shakes as photographs, but they have something of her spirit. Not perfectly sharp, but . . . the older she got the more beautiful she got. Absolute sexless beauty. Rather frightening sometimes. I mean, she became sort of chiseled, sort of a . . . tragic quality, stronger and more luminous.
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Dorothea died before sunrise on October 11, 1966. Her show opened three weeks later.
Following the debacle surrounding “Three Mormon Towns,” Ansel for all intents and purposes gave up his ten-year personal crusade to develop a documentary side to his vision. He had tried mightily to skip out of his established “Nature Boy” groove, and many would say he partially succeeded. Perhaps the creation of such images as
Winter Sunrise
and
Mount Williamson
, two of the greatest landscapes of all time, allowed him to realize that in his groove he was the best at what he did. In the world of photojournalism, there were better.
By early 1950, Ollie, now eighty-seven years old and bedridden, was failing fast. In January, Ansel hired a night nurse for his mother so that his father, her very conscientious caregiver, could get some sleep. Suffering from pneumonia, Ollie sank into a coma, her eyes opening only at the time of her death, as if to see into the beyond. Her body shook in a death rattle as she released her last breath in her own bed on the evening of March 22, son and husband by her side.
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Later, the two men sat together by the fire, drinking hot toddies. Ansel knew his grieving father would not understand the relief he felt at his mother’s death.
2
Charlie never recovered from the loss of his wife, sliding quickly toward his own death less than a year and a half later, on August 9, 1951. Ansel held his hand during the final hours as the family’s longtime cook and gardener, Harry Oye, dressed in his ceremonial robes as a Buddhist priest, lighted candles and silently prayed. Charlie’s passing was peaceful and warmed by the love he left on earth.
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The bodies of both Charles and Olive Adams were cremated, their ashes mixed together and buried unmarked under the thick green grass at the base of a woody thicket in the family plot at Cypress Hill Cemetery, in Colma, California. Charlie’s brother-in-law Ansel Easton, who had been instrumental in his financial ruination, is also buried there with his family, although an impressive carved granite obelisk towers over their remains.
Throughout the stressful months of his parents’ last days, Ansel poured out his heart in a torrent of letters to Nancy and Beaumont, confessing that he cried for the first time in his life when his father died.
4
With great empathy, Beaumont wrote to Ansel about the death of his own father,
I could only wish for your father and for you so peaceful an ending . . . I wanted to tell you about my father because I do not know how else to tell how much I owe to him. If it had not been for [his] deep understanding, his confidence, his belief in what lay unknown and unexpressed within me, I would not have been able to develop the way I have.
So I think I know, Ansel, how you feel about your father. To look back over the years, to measure that love, is almost too much.
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Ansel’s letters to Beaumont and Nancy were usually covered with doodles and accented with a red typewriter ribbon. To one such letter, he attached a full-page drawing that summed up the Newhalls’ central importance to him: in a sketch of a heart, the right atrium held the initials BN, the left atrium was marked AA, and across both ventricles was inscribed NN.
Nancy was the one person with whom Ansel could be most himself. Her friendship grew rather than faded as she learned of the qualities he kept hidden from almost everyone else, such as his confirmed mysticism. Although he did not practice any formal religion, Ansel believed that there was another reality beyond the one we usually experience that could be glimpsed only on the rarest of occasions. He most often encountered it while lying in his sleeping bag and gazing at the night sky from the top of some Sierra peak. He was convinced that each of us is born with a program of possibilities encoded in our brain and that few are able to express the incredible potential of that gift. He had known from childhood that he was special, but he thought that everyone else was, too, if only they would recognize it.
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One mystery that he could never unravel was what he called spirit writing. At times Ansel felt literally forced to sit down and write a poem; in a trance, he would set down the words without thought, as they flowed through him but not from him, emerging whole and complete. He was confused by this, and a bit chagrined, unable even to discern whether the results were good or bad.
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For a man who held dear what he called the objective approach, these events were unsettling. At first with embarrassment, he talked to Nancy about this phenomenon; later, secure in her acceptance, he would refer casually to spirit writing in his letters.
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At the end of his life, Ansel remembered a number of telepathic experiences: a voice in his ear commanding him to stop just before a huge piece of concrete fell from above, crashing directly in front of him; sudden impulses, although his car evidenced no problems, to pull into garages, only to find that the steering was about to fail, or that the tires had developed explosive bulges. Once, driving with Beaumont and Nancy, Ansel swerved the car into a ditch without warning and waited; moments later, two trucks came careening around the bend, racing down the two-lane road side by side.
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Ansel and the Newhalls seemed to be involved in everything of value, photographically speaking. Their intertwined lives can be easily traced because of their voluminous correspondence. They wrote not only about events but about their reactions to the work of other photographers, their ideas about the future of photography, and their philosophies of art.
They dreamed of the projects they might work on together. When
Arizona Highways
, an advertisement-free magazine published by the Arizona Highway Commission to promote travel to that fair state, contracted with Ansel for a series of articles on Southwestern parks, he recommended Nancy to write the text. This first publishing collaboration between them became ongoing, with six major stories published in the magazine between 1952 and 1954: “Canyon de Chelly,” “Sunset Crater,” “Tumacacori,” “Death Valley,” “Organ Pipe,” and “Mission San Xavier del Bac.”
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The editor, Raymond Carlson, always provided generous space for every article, enabling the pair to convey the particular atmosphere of each special place. In addition to writing the text, Nancy acted as the stories’ editor and designer, selecting the images as well as creating the layout in a drama-building sequence for which she became recognized.
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Two of the stories, “Death Valley” and “Mission San Xavier del Bac,” grew into complete books published in 1954 by 5 Associates.
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The coauthors traveled together to each of the locations save one; in that instance, Nancy amazed Ansel by producing an effective text about Canyon de Chelly without actually ever having been there.
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