Authors: Mary Street Alinder
Ansel was not content simply to demonstrate Polaroid products; he insisted on being involved in their development as well. The first Polaroid prints were brown and white, not black and white. Ansel objected to the color, believing that professional photographers would not take Polaroid seriously until it produced a true black-and-white photograph.
18
A new Polaroid film (Type 41) that produced black-and-white prints was introduced in late 1950. Disconcertingly, six months later a wail of complaints arose: prints were already fading and were easily scratched. Land concentrated on the two problems and in less than a month, with camera returns piling up and the company’s survival at stake, came up with a solution.
The first Polaroid photographs were completed in the camera, in what advertisements proclaimed as a one-step process. After a prescribed time, the sepia-toned photograph was peeled away from its negative in the camera, already developed, fixed, and resistant to scratching. When removed from the camera, the new black-and-white prints carried with them a thicker layer of light-sensitive emulsion, which proved delicate as well as incompletely fixed. Land devised a coating stick that the camera operator wiped across the picture surface to achieve permanence along with a protective plastic coating.
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It was messy and smelly and required a second step, but it worked, and that was the way Polaroid prints were made for many years.
Ansel’s next push was for the creation of a professional line of products, especially a Polaroid film pack that could be used in any standard four-by-five-inch view camera. By 1956, Ansel was testing such a product, which was released for sale in 1958. By 1970, the four-by-five-inch Polaroid film pack was generating sixteen million dollars annually in sales, a small but nonetheless significant amount for what had by now become a major corporation.
20
When Ansel wondered why a negative could not be obtained from the process, as well as a print, the result was the introduction of Type 55 P/N (positive/negative) film in 1961. There was a definite problem, though: if correct exposure was given for the negative, the print would be too light, and if the print looked good, the negative would be too thin, or underexposed. Always honest, Ansel counseled in
Polaroid Land Photography
that the photographer must make two exposures, one for the negative and one for the print.
21
Another of Ansel’s responsibilities was to induce other respected photographers to work with Polaroid materials. He sent out free cameras and film to the chosen, including Charles Sheeler, Dorothea, and Imogen, who, after a suitable period, sent him back a Polaroid self-portrait of herself apparently passed out on her bed, surrounded by piles of flack for the process, including Ansel’s own
Polaroid Manual.
Her accompanying note warned, “Herewith I am giving you notice that I am practically dropping dead from overexposure to POLAROID.”
22
Ansel made thousands of Polaroid photographs, most of them close-up studies suited to a small four-by-five-inch print: spruce needles against rough bark, a lichen-encrusted branch curling across pine boughs, wild grasses set amid ruffled leaves. He used the four-by-five Type 55 P/N film differently, however. Since he could obtain an excellent negative for enlargement, he did not hesitate to make images of a wide variety of subjects, just as he would with any four-by-five film. One of his major projects in 1961 had him making murals from his Polaroid negatives to prove their fine-grain quality.
23
Ansel’s last great photograph,
El Capitan, Winter Sunrise
, was made in 1968 with Type 55 P/N film. This particular day dawned on a frosty Yosemite, dappled with snow as the sun played tag with fast-moving clouds. The dramatic weather roused Ansel, and before the snow could melt, he was out driving around the valley looking for pictures. He stopped and parked when he came to the El Capitan pullout, which provided what he felt was the best view of that natural monument. Ansel had made many exposures from this spot, although the growth of trees over the years had encroached upon a formerly expansive view. Before him loomed El Cap, its great granite face glazed with ice and wreathed in shifting bands of fog.
He chose his favorite lens at the time, a Schneider 121mm Super Angulon, which would give him greater covering power for this broad scene while maintaining a normal perspective.
24
Again, by setting up the camera on top of his car, Ansel was able to frame the image with minimal foreground, entirely removing the Merced River below. It was so cold that the film would not develop, and so Ansel ended up back in his Yosemite darkroom to process the negatives.
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What makes
El Capitan, Winter Sunrise
so wonderful is Ansel’s courageous choice of tonalities. A full half of the image is taken up with the somber near-monotone of the dark-gray trees that frame two sides. Snow gently traces each branch, exquisitely detailed in a tone of slightly lighter gray, kept from its natural whiteness by full shadow. In the soft light of sunrise, the prime subject—gigantic El Capitan—its waist gracefully obscured by a diaphanous, low-hanging cloud, somehow transcends its granite self. It is no longer of this world but from some better reality.
The occasion of Ansel’s 1974 retrospective exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, his first solo museum exhibition in that city since 1936, demanded an accompanying catalog. Unfortunately, Ansel was about to publish his first very-large-format book,
Images: 1923–1974
, which was much too expensive to serve as the catalog. The exhibition’s sponsor, Ansel’s old friend David McAlpin, found his personal collection of four-by-five-inch unique Polaroid contact prints enchanting. An entire section of the Metropolitan show was to be devoted to them, so why not a catalog based on these little-known images? This idea took hold, and the slim and inexpensive softcover catalog,
Singular Images
, containing fifty-three of Ansel’s Polaroids made between 1954 and 1973, was published.
26
In a short, rather convoluted essay for the book, Land concluded that it was an act of the greatest bravery as well as of wisdom for Ansel to photograph the landscape, a subject dismissed by many as just a lot of rocks, trees, or twigs. Ansel achieved greatness by beginning with the ordinary and creating something new and extraordinary.
27
The easy camaraderie between Land and Ansel eventually grew distant. At one time the Lands proposed building a small museum outside Boston devoted to Ansel’s photographs, and Ted Spencer was engaged to draw up plans. He designed a remarkable building constructed in the shape of a nautilus shell: on entering, the visitor would be drawn in through the inward-spiraling corridor to the center of the building, as well as deeper into Ansel’s photography. When all seemed ready to proceed, the Lands abruptly withdrew their support, to Ansel’s depressed consternation. He never figured out what had happened to cause such a swift change.
28
Still, the basic respect each man held for the other remained. In 1982, when Land could not attend Ansel’s eightieth-birthday celebrations, he sent a witty, heartfelt poem in his stead.
29
And, in 1983, when Ansel was sentenced to a month of bed rest, the longest and most revealing letter he wrote was to Land.
30
In the late 1970s, Polaroid experienced great success with its instant color camera, the SX-70, but this was diluted by Kodak’s entry into the market with a copycat color camera that ate deeply into what should have been Polaroid’s sales. Although Polaroid would eventually win a huge settlement in court, the interim years proved costly. Greatly adding to its financial woes would be another one of Land’s personally backed products, Polavision, instant color movies without benefit of sound. The timing was bad: too little, too late. Videotape recorders and playback units were then also just hitting stores, and we know who won.
31
In August 1982, Land retired without fanfare, quietly announcing that he would devote the rest of his life to pure research at his just-founded Rowland Institute for Science, Inc. He died on March 1, 1991.
32
Although Ansel served Polaroid with devotion, he never took a vow of chastity, and he worked on many projects for rival Eastman Kodak at the same time. Shortly after he became a consultant for Polaroid, Ansel accepted a similar position with the Swedish camera company Hasselblad. After meeting its founder, Dr. Victor Hasselblad, in New York in 1950, Ansel arrived home to find one of their first cameras awaiting him—a far cry from the suspense he experienced expecting a Polaroid.
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All the people at Hasselblad asked was that Ansel let them know how he liked it. He responded eagerly with a deluge of reports detailing both the good and the bad.
34
And he did find problems. Hasselblad had brilliant engineers, but no one there really knew about the requirements of making photographs. With that first camera, Ansel discovered if it was not carried and stored in the upright position, the internal mirror would fall out; the engineers had not understood that cameras may be stuffed into backpacks and cases, ending up in all kinds of positions.
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Hasselblad was grateful for Ansel’s suggestions and criticisms and through the years shipped him each new model camera as it was produced, along with whatever lenses he might be interested in.
With age, arthritis and gout began to afflict Ansel, and his larger view cameras became increasingly cumbersome for him to operate. He found it necessary to have an assistant to carry and set up his equipment; even making the necessary adjustments before an exposure was difficult for him. The Hasselblad proved to be the perfect camera for him at just the right time. He did not need the help of an assistant because it was relatively small and lightweight, and he could position it himself on a tripod. Its negative size was decent—two and a quarter inches square—and the quality of the negatives he obtained was splendid. The Hasselblad became his preferred camera for most of the rest of his life. (The year before his death, Ansel also enjoyed using a Leica, whose ease of use and very small size were hugely attractive to him at eighty-plus years of age.)
The Hasselblad Foundation awarded Ansel its gold medal in 1981.
36
The ceremony was held at MoMA, and the honor presented by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, in the presence of four hundred guests and nearly as many photographers, whose jostling and electronic flashes transformed the festivities into a battlefield. Afterward, Ansel retired happily to a small private reception hosted by Mrs. Hasselblad. It was an ultimate party, featuring unlimited quantities of champagne (Roederer Cristal) and caviar (Beluga Malossol), though Ansel himself preferred the simpler combination of a vodka and a few crackers.
Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park
(1960) remains the most famous photograph that Ansel made with the Hasselblad. Although he continued to live primarily in San Francisco, he always spent the Christmas holidays with his family in Yosemite, seeing to his Bracebridge Dinner responsibilities. One afternoon, on his way to a rehearsal at the Ahwahnee, Ansel spotted the nearly full moon rising over Half Dome. He immediately visualized an image and parked his car. With Hasselblad and tripod across his shoulder, he hiked a couple of hundred yards out into the middle of the meadow east of the hotel.
He knew that the image he was about to make would end up as a vertical, even though the Hasselblad produced a two-and-a-quarter-inch square negative. His eye cropped the image he saw through the viewfinder. He experimented with first a 150mm mildly telephoto lens, then switched to a 250mm Zeiss Sonnar lens that made the moon appear bigger in relation to Half Dome and moved the image toward abstraction by flattening the picture planes, a device he had used successfully for most of his life. He made twelve exposures, an entire roll of Panatomic-X fine-grain film that would allow him to make enlargements even to mural size.
Ansel placed a dark-orange filter (not as strong as a red filter) before the lens to increase the tonal contrasts, heightening the drama of the picture by deepening the dark values while brightening the whites.
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He squeezed the cable release on the last exposure at 4:14
p.m.
on December 28, 1960 (another date and time arrived at thanks to a feat of curiosity, persistence, and computer wizardry by Dr. Donald W. Olson and his students).
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The resulting image is almost a tonal reverse of his 1927
Monolith
, in which the face of Half Dome is dark, boldly thrusting skyward from its setting of brilliant white snow. In
Moon and Half Dome
, the cliff is brightly lit, its every detail described by the full rays of the setting sun; Half Dome’s shape is modulated by the dark presence of Washington Column in the left foreground and by the triangular shadow of the Diving Board anchoring its base. The nearly full moon completes the composition.
Moon and Half Dome
is both visually arresting and popular, if not as soulful as
Monolith
, made thirty-three years earlier.
In 1959, Ansel was awarded his third, and final, Guggenheim: a grant of three thousand dollars a year for two years.
39
His project was to make prints from the thousands of negatives that he had never found time to print. Whereas his first two Guggenheims, in the 1940s, had funded the making of new images, this last grant reflected Ansel’s continuing feeling that the best use of his time now lay in revealing what he had already accomplished, not in the increasingly futile effort to create new photographs.