Authors: Mary Street Alinder
In 1971, Beaumont retired as director of George Eastman House, having built it into an institution of international renown with a suitable new name, the International Museum of Photography. He and Nancy moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he joined the highly regarded University of New Mexico Department of Art to teach the history of photography.
The steady friendship between Ansel and Beaumont and Nancy finally faltered. As Ansel aged and became more determined to live as long as he could, he drank less and gave up smoking completely. Beaumont and Nancy, meanwhile, continued to puff up a storm and drink with abandon. No one is more righteous than a reformed whomever: suddenly, cigarette smoke bothered Ansel a great deal. He believed that he had developed an allergy to it and felt it was an extreme hazard to his health.
40
When the Newhalls were houseguests—which was now more infrequent—Ansel would beg them to smoke outside, but after they left, their bedroom always stank of cigarettes. Even after days of airing, Ansel would swear he could smell it still.
Whether due to some genetic flaw, because of the incurable sadness she felt at the death of their baby and their inability to have another, or her years of what she felt was banishment in icy Rochester, Nancy found her greatest comfort in liquor. Her descent into alcoholism was infinitely sad to witness for all who loved her. When she stayed with Ansel and Virginia in 1969 during the completion of the Tetons book, she would climb the stairs each morning at eleven to begin work with a drink already in her hand.
41
She regularly suffered falls, bumps, and sprains. Ansel tried counseling her on many occasions, in person and by letter, but she took no heed.
42
Although they spent less and less time together, in an interview on July 1, 1972, Ansel would still proclaim of the Newhalls, “They’re my closest friends.”
43
To celebrate their thirty-eighth wedding anniversary in 1974, Nancy arranged a vacation in the Tetons. A priority for any trip to that territory is rafting down the Snake River, secure in the hands of veteran guides, in what is normally a gentle experience. On this occasion, however, heavy rains had fallen, and the river was swollen so high that it eroded the roots of a huge spruce tree that smashed down on the Newhalls’ raft.
44
All the passengers were thrown into the river without benefit of life jackets, but Nancy was the only one hit. Her ankle nearly severed, she suffered heavy blood loss. The raft had no two-way radio and scant emergency supplies, but help finally arrived and Nancy was transported to the hospital in Jackson Hole, where she stabilized and began the process of recovery. On July 1, Beaumont brought champagne to her bedside, and they toasted their anniversary. Less than a week later, on July 7, out of the blue, a blood clot tore loose and blocked Nancy’s pulmonary artery, and suddenly she died.
45
Beaumont immediately called Ansel, and they grieved in shock together.
46
Ironically, the place where the tree struck the Newhalls’ raft was quite near the bend of the Snake River featured in Ansel’s famous photograph
The Tetons and the Snake River.
After that, every time he looked at that image, Ansel saw the site of Nancy’s accident. That negative was the very last one he printed before his death, in 1984.
Beaumont brought Nancy’s ashes to Carmel. On August 18, 1974, after a short service at their home, Ansel and Virginia walked down with Beaumont to the beach below and watched as he waded out into the cove and slowly sowed the Pacific with Nancy’s remains.
47
If Ansel had a soul mate, it probably was Nancy. She was everything he ever hoped to find in a woman: brilliant, independent, full of energy and enthusiasm, physically attractive, and devoted to photography. There has been speculation for years about whether she and Ansel were lovers, but neither Virginia nor Beaumont believed that anything physical had happened between them.
48
Nancy adored Beaumont, and he her. Ansel possessed many old-fashioned morals. True, he was not always a faithful husband, but he drew the line at affairs with married women, and especially when the married woman was the wife of his best friend.
Beaumont, as Nancy had long known, was not a man to live alone. Writing to Ansel in 1973, she informed him that if she died before Beaumont, some fine woman would soon be caring for him, and with her complete blessing. On May 22, 1975, he married Christi, who filled his life with “affection and very thoughtful companionship.”
49
Beaumont and Christi built a house in Santa Fe designed around both their work, with one wing for him, another for her, and a central shared living area. Christi planted gorgeous gardens of flowers and vegetables that Beaumont loved to photograph.
While he had earned his reputation as a historian, Beaumont had also been a serious photographer, although he had refused to promote his own images as long as he worked in museums. He now hired as his assistant David Scheinbaum, an able young photographer who not only made prints from his old negatives but assisted him in the making of new ones. Much to Beaumont’s pleasure, galleries began to exhibit and sell his work.
Although they were divorced in 1985, Beaumont and Christi continued to share their house; as his health declined, her supportive presence enabled him to remain at home. He spent his last years writing his autobiography;
Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography
was published posthumously in the autumn of 1993.
In August 1992, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles acquired Beaumont’s and Nancy’s archives. That same month, Christi adopted a baby, whom she named Theo.
50
Beaumont was proud to claim him as his son, and Theo made a delightful addition to his last months. Beaumont died on February 26, 1993, after suffering a stroke.
51
With him, those generations so crucial to the advancement of photography as a fine art in the twentieth century, led by Stieglitz, Strand, Weston, Cunningham, Lange, Steichen, White, and Nancy and Ansel, came to an end. The string had run out, but the battle had been won.
A glance over a list of Ansel’s greatest photographs reveals that after 1949, he made few images of consequence, nothing like the abundance of masterpieces he produced before that time. Simply put, Ansel was burned out: the muse of inspiration had vanished. And he knew it, confessing to Beaumont and Nancy in 1952 that making photographs had become a bore.
1
He had come to believe that all artists moved through these stages—rise, plateau, and descent—and he saw himself as being in the final phase. He thought that perhaps he had accomplished all he could and it was now time, at the age of fifty, to follow another path, as had been the case twenty-five years earlier with his musical career.
2
As the 1950s progressed into the 1960s, Ansel turned his still-considerable energies to writing, making portfolios, consulting, and teaching.
Commercial assignments did not require the inner spark so crucial to his creative work, and they continued to supply his basic income.
3
From 1949 until the end of his life, working as a consultant for the Polaroid Corporation kept him busy and gainfully, if but part-time, employed.
4
Ansel and Polaroid’s founder, Edwin Land, developed a mutual admiration society. Both were brilliant men who had never graduated from college but had nonetheless achieved huge success by marching to their own drummers. Known as Din to his close friends and Dr. Land to everyone else, Land was a real maverick, just like Ansel. He was addressed as “Dr.” Land because of the great respect accorded him as well as the honorary degrees that had been bestowed on him. Just as Georgia O’Keeffe was always spoken of as Miss O’Keeffe, so Edwin Land, a formal, reserved man, was Dr. Land.
Although Ansel’s walls, too, would be hung with prestigious honorary doctorates, no one who knew him, and most especially Ansel himself, would have considered for a minute calling him Dr. Adams. From the moment of meeting, he was “Ansel” to everyone, regardless of age or achievements in life.
Land knew at age seventeen that he would be a scientist and began a search to find a field in which he could make a contribution of consequence. He decided on optics, and specifically the invention of man-made polarizing lenses to eliminate the natural scatter of light and its glare by allowing only parallel rays to pass through. The best his predecessors in science had been able to come up with was a mixture of dog urine, iodine, and quinine; the resultant tiny crystals did polarize light, but it was a fragile and less than aesthetic solution.
5
Following his freshman year at Harvard, Land dropped out, to the great disappointment of his parents, announcing that he would use his school money (tuition was three hundred dollars a year) to fund his independent quest to learn everything about the polarization of light. By 1935, when he was twenty-six years old, Land produced an effective synthetic polarizing filter that was quickly picked up by Kodak for placement in front of the camera lens. Sunglasses were just becoming commonly available, and Land jumped in with polarizing lenses, which proved immediately popular and the prime moneymaker for his fledgling company, incorporated in 1937 as the Polaroid Corporation. Land also introduced 3-D movies, the kind that must be viewed through special glasses.
6
The World War II years were filled with extremely important war-related projects for Polaroid, but still Land’s restless mind never stopped. During a few days over Christmas of 1943, when his wife, Terre, demanded that he stay at home and enjoy the holidays—an enforced break from his obsessive, round-the-clock laboratory life—he brought out a camera and made some family snapshots. Their daughter Jennifer innocently queried, “Why can’t I see the pictures now?” Since Land could not provide an answer, he was driven to find one.
7
On February 21, 1947, at a conference of the Optical Society of America in New York City, Land demonstrated his new instant photography, producing a self-portrait in just fifty seconds, much to the astonishment of the audience and the delight of the press. The achievement made the front page of the next day’s
New York Times.
8
Forever and always a techie, Ansel wanted a Polaroid camera from the first word he heard of it in 1947, but he could not justify spending $89.75 for a snapshot camera.
9
In February 1948, while in New York, he took the train up to Boston and went straight to Polaroid’s research laboratory, where Land made a picture of him with the new camera. Ansel and Din began to talk and could not stop, finding a coincidence of parallel intellect. To continue their discussion, Land brought Ansel home to dinner. By the end of the evening, Ansel was hooked on Polaroid.
10
Returning to New York, he wrote Land a letter just busting with questions about the new process. After first assuring him that he saw great aesthetic potential, Ansel ripped into what he saw as some of the possible problems. How permanent would the prints be? Could they be dry-mounted? What would be the effect of filters? He suggested that these were all questions he could answer through testing. Land did not respond to that letter or to the others that Ansel continued to send. Nor was any camera forthcoming—until Land purchased Ansel’s
Portfolio One
in late 1948 and then followed up with a letter of admiration and the shipment of camera and film as a gift of appreciation.
11
In November 1949, in the East to photograph in Maine with the Newhalls, Ansel spent the sixteenth with the Lands. When Beaumont and Nancy came to pick him up the next day to begin their trip, he announced with delight that Land had hired him as a consultant, complete with a budget and a monthly retainer.
12
Although it was unusual for a corporation to place an artist on its payroll, Ansel earned every penny paid him, and much more. (For most of his tenure at Polaroid, he received a hundred dollars a month plus expenses.)
13
First and foremost, it was understood, if not formalized by contract, that Ansel’s use of Polaroid products would place upon them a seal of approval, similar to
Good Housekeeping
’s. The large audience of
Modern Photography
magazine was soon treated to Ansel’s article “How I Use the Polaroid Camera.”
14
From Cambridge to California came prototype films and cameras. Ansel tested them in the field and wrote back lengthy reports in more than three thousand memos.
As a teacher, Ansel found the instant feedback provided by the Polaroid camera extremely valuable. He could individualize his students’ learning experience: on the spot, each student could see, using the print he or she had just made, what could be improved, and then another exposure could be made, the entire process serving to refine the student’s visualization.
15
The full weight of Ansel’s influence on photographers around the world via his technical books would eventually come into play on behalf of Polaroid. In his 1948 technical book,
Camera and Lens
, Ansel referred to Polaroid in but a few sentences, only briefly describing the effects of polarizing filters.
16
By the publication of the fourth book in the series,
Natural-Light Photography
, in 1952, he gave four pages to the same subject.
17
His audience building, in 1963 Ansel produced a substantial manual devoted to Polaroid products, entitled
Polaroid Land Photography
, which was substantially revised and released again in 1978.