Authors: Mary Street Alinder
Pictorialism had no truck with reality but instead muted the truth of hard lines with soft focus, diffused light, and textured papers. Some Pictorialists even applied brushstrokes or an etching stylus to wet emulsion, so that the effects created by the photographer’s hand sometimes overshadowed those achieved by the lens.
In an attempt to make photographs of “serious” subjects, photographers composed images based on grand themes. These prints often bore titles such as
Motherhood
, or reenacted historic or mythic moments such as the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, as in Imogen Cunningham’s
Eve Repentant
, of 1910.
30
Ansel’s energies had been focused on the technical mastery of photography, but as he achieved that, he began thinking about the medium’s expressive potential from the Pictorialist point of view. In 1920, he wrote to his father from Yosemite to tell of his plan to photograph the Diamond Cascade. Using classical art-composition lingo, he described his intentions in terms of “line,” “tone,” “form,” and “texture,” his superficial understanding picked up in his readings of the Pictorialist-oriented press.
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Remaining completely within the Pictorialist tradition, Ansel chose a soft-focus lens to achieve his desired image of the rushing Merced River corseted by narrow, rocky borders.
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The finished photograph depicts a bright arrow of water penetrating the surrounding dark banks; the soft focus renders the subject so abstract that it cannot be identified without a caption.
Diamond Cascade
is the extreme example of Ansel’s short period of experimentation with photographic impressionism.
33
Over the next four years, Ansel would make use of such other Pictorialist conventions as the bromoil process, in which an oily ink is applied to the paper by roller or brush to produce prints with marked painterly, as well as charcoal, qualities.
34
Ansel experimented with many aspects of photography, including making photographs through microscopes and telescopes. He tried out a variety of printing stock, from parchmentlike sheets to matte-surfaced, golden-toned papers, and attached his photographs to textured, colored mounts ranging in hue from buff to deep chocolate. He began signing his prints, at first just “Adams,” but soon “Ansel Easton Adams” or “Ansel E. Adams,” with a curlicue-ending flourish.
Visually, the great majority of these images were unremarkable and lacked a consistent style. In 1922, two of his photographs were reproduced in the
Sierra Club Bulletin
, one a completely lackluster picture of two deer with the photographer’s empty sleeping bag in the foreground, and the other a traditional landscape,
View from Lyell Meadows
,
Lyell Fork of the Merced River
, with the requisite foreground (river), middle ground (forest and mountains), and background (sky) divided into neat thirds.
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This was the second time Ansel’s work was published.
36
The first publication of one of his images occurred in 1921, when his straightforward architectural record,
LeConte Memorial Lodge—Yosemite Valley
, appeared in the San Francisco magazine
Overland Monthly
in unharmonious partnership with an overwrought poem by one R. R. Greenwood (“His were the bird notes of the crystal morn, / The Son of winds that frolic on the height / Was blended with the forest’s call forlorn”).
37
Also in 1922, Best’s Studio in Yosemite began selling Ansel’s landscapes, and in so doing became the first public space in which his photographs were exhibited. Most of the images were quiet studies that gave little indication of the drama Ansel would soon coax from the same scenery. Taken with a Zeiss Miroflex camera, these photographs were contact prints measuring approximately three and a quarter by four and a quarter inches, made on Kodak Parchmyn paper that produced dull prints of limited tonal range.
Ansel’s first known venture into the commercial photographic world had taken place in 1920. The family’s next-door neighbor, Miss Lavolier, taught kindergarten at the Baptist Chinese Grammar School (children of Asian ancestry were then still segregated in separate schools), and she asked if Ansel would take the class picture in her classroom. Unfazed by his own lack of experience with artificial-light photography, he agreed.
The appointed hour arrived, and with it Ansel, three view cameras, a tripod, and flash equipment. This was before the invention of flashbulbs, and long before high-speed film or electronic flash. Adequate light for an indoor exposure had to be achieved through a controlled explosion of magnesium, known as flash powder. The lively six-year-olds were corralled, placed in some kind of order, and bade to smile at the birdie, in this case Ansel, doing his best imitation of a mockingbird. Ansel ignited the magnesium, and, as he later put it, “The light was truly apocalyptic!”
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Smoke billowed, children screamed and vanished under their desks, and the fire department was summoned. Ansel had overestimated the amount of magnesium needed by sixteen times too much! It was a wonder that he lived. When calm had been restored, Miss Lavolier ushered her students outside, and Ansel finally took some successful pictures without benefit of flash.
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It is doubtless that with this event Ansel’s dedication to natural-light photography was cemented.
Hoping to come out of the whole episode with a profit, Ansel offered prints of the children in three sizes: six-and-a-half-by-eight-and-a-half, five-by-seven, and four-by-five.
40
A dozen copies of the largest size, for example, cost five dollars mounted or four dollars unmounted, with hand-coloring a bit extra (courtesy of his china-painting mother).
A glimmer of Ansel’s mature vision can be seen in
Banner Peak and Thousand Island Lake
, of 1923.
41
With a thunderstorm imminent, roiling clouds fill the sky above sculpted Banner Peak, its contours still described by sunlight. Thousand Island Lake lies quietly at the mountain’s base, rimmed by a foreground of brush and boulders. Each element joins together to form the stronger whole of a dramatic picture. Although Ansel believed his soul was at one with the Sierra, he could not yet reliably produce what he saw before him in a finished print. He chalked up this, the first of his dramatic landscapes, to luck.
42
The artistic success of
Banner Peak and Thousand Island Lake
depends largely upon its clouds. It is in fact the earliest of Ansel’s photographs to have clouds in the sky; his previous landscapes, like those of nineteenth-century photographers, all had blank skies, owing to the hypersensitivity of photographic emulsion to the color blue, which meant that shade was rendered as white in the finished print. But shortly before Ansel left the valley for the trip to Banner Peak, Yosemite photographer Arthur C. Pillsbury’s studio (where Ansel attended at least one photography class) offered for sale some of the first glass plates to be coated with a panchromatic emulsion, which was equally sensitive to all colors, including the previously unobtainable blue.
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The actual clouds in a scene could now be captured. Although his funds were limited, Ansel bought some panchromatic plates and used one for the Banner Peak exposure.
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Clouds appear only sporadically in his images from this time until 1932, however, as he continued to use mostly the less expensive orthochromatic plates.
Each passing year found Ansel approaching photography with increased seriousness. In a letter written on September 28, 1923, he declared that from that day forward he would seek to achieve the highest standards of art in his work, without compromise and following purely photographic values.
45
What was Ansel’s definition of “purely photographic” in 1923? Primarily he meant no hand-coloring. Hand-colored pictures were popular with the tourists in Yosemite, and his mother had tinted some of his early prints, but Ansel prophetically proclaimed that black and white was photography’s true dominion.
46
“Purely photographic” did not yet refer to the use of only photographic techniques, a restriction that he would come to embrace fully a few years later.
Ansel’s term “purely photographic” did not spring forth from a void. The world of creative photography that he involved himself in had long been engaged in self-examination. Ever since its announced invention, in 1839, photography had been accused of being little more than a mimetic device, though this view met with swift opposition. British historian Lady Elizabeth Eastlake wrote in 1857 that photography did not replicate reality, but rather interpreted it.
47
After Eastlake’s time, the struggle to establish photography as an independent art form moved onto a broader front. British photographer Peter Henry Emerson was an early defender of “pure photography,” admonishing those who could not accept a photograph that looked like a photograph to “leave us alone and not try and foist ‘fakes’ upon us.”
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Emerson was one of photography’s most important spokesmen until the end of the century.
At nearly the same time, Alfred Stieglitz appeared on the scene. Stieglitz was the self-appointed leader of the creative-photography movement in America from the turn of the century until his death, in 1946. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1864 to a wealthy family, assured of an independent income and thus free of the demands of a job, he determined to explore the extent of his own creative abilities through art.
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It was fortunate indeed for photography that it became his chosen medium.
After studying the chemistry and optics of photography in Berlin, Stieglitz returned to New York City in 1890 and joined the moribund Society of Amateur Photographers of New York, whose members were contemplating converting it into a bicycle club. Aghast, Stieglitz plunged in and by 1896 had merged his now-revitalized group with the Camera Club of New York, making it the largest photographic organization in America.
50
In 1902, having decided that he must roust photography from its secondary status in the art world, Stieglitz began a movement that he called the Photo-Secession. Its aim was to define creative photography, both in word and by example. Photography had not yet clearly identified itself as an art form separate from others and was still hiding its innate characteristics behind the Pictorialist sham; Stieglitz’s goal was “to compel [photography’s] recognition, not as the handmaiden of art, but as a distinctive medium of individual expression.”
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Stieglitz’s protégé and fellow Photo-Secession leader was the painter and photographer Edward Steichen. Born in 1879, fifteen years after Stieglitz, Steichen became quite the enfant terrible in American photography, first presenting his work to the older man (who was then but thirty-six) in 1900 while on his way to Europe. When Stieglitz bade him farewell with the words, “Well, I suppose now that you’re going to Paris, you’ll forget about photography and devote yourself to painting,” Steichen emphatically replied, “I will always stick to photography!”
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Employing such techniques as soft-focus, etching, bromoil, and platinum, Steichen’s photographs gathered awards and acclaim in Pictorialist salon after salon, both in Europe and in the United States. Settling into a proper studio in Paris, he soon made friends with Rodin and other important artists and became a member of the art cognoscenti, while still maintaining close ties to Stieglitz.
Stieglitz was a brilliant photographer, and while his colleagues in the Photo-Secession continued in the Pictorialist tradition, he developed a different way of seeing. To prove that his results were not obtained by means of expensive equipment, he worked with a snapshot camera, choosing the streets of New York for his subject matter (a decidedly unPictorialist choice) and photographing daily events, recording the energy and beauty of the great city during winter storms and spring rains.
In 1904, Sadakichi Hartmann, a respected critic of the arts, reviewed a huge, three-hundred-print exhibition of the Photo-Secession, which had been juried by Stieglitz, Steichen, and Joseph T. Keiley. The resulting landmark article, “A Plea for Straight Photography,” defined a straight photograph as one made using little or no manipulation. He advised that this could be achieved if the photographer was patient enough to wait for the ultimate moment of the scene before him, when every aspect was perfect, from light to composition.
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Easier said than done: even when Ansel reached the peak of technical fluency, he never made a perfect negative. Either some edge needed slight cropping or a rock or some other element had to be darkened by burning. There was always something.
From 1903 to 1917, Stieglitz published
Camera Work
, the journal of the Photo-Secession, often described as the most important and beautiful publication in the history of photography. In 1905, he opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which became known as “291,” after its street address on New York’s Fifth Avenue.
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Steichen was Stieglitz’s remarkable “eye” in Europe, sending back entire exhibitions of the new and startling work of the Cubists and Fauvists to his mentor, who introduced, in their premier American shows, Rodin (1908), Matisse (1908), Toulouse-Lautrec (1909), Cézanne (1911), and Brancusi (1914).
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In 1911, he presented the first solo exhibition anywhere by Picasso.
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Stieglitz now commanded the attention of the entire art world.