Authors: Mary Street Alinder
To critical acclaim, in 1910 Stieglitz curated the monumental six-hundred-print retrospective
International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography
for the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, New York. At the conclusion of this show, he completely renounced Pictorialism and abandoned the Photo-Secession, charging that it had not progressed far enough.
The real problem was that photography had been so accustomed to emulating Impressionist painting that when painting took off in the direction of abstraction, most photographers were left behind, still immersed in their pictorial haze. Searching for photographers whom he believed photographed with a unique and personal vision, and were committed to expressing photography as an art, Stieglitz found only himself. Until 1916, his New York gallery continued to display paintings, sculptures, and prints by others, but the only photographs shown were by Stieglitz.
With his exhibition of Paul Strand’s photographs in the spring of 1916, Stieglitz signaled hope for the future of the medium, in the form of a new photography influenced by the new painting.
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Viewing the work of Picasso and Braque at “291” as well as at the Armory Show had radicalized Strand’s vision. Through the eye of a Cubist, he photographed the streets of New York, taking on the same subject as Stieglitz but obtaining very different results. By breaking up the picture into flat planes, he pioneered a new visual approach.
Strand explored New York City’s alleys and other aspects that had been seen as unworthy of the camera. Strand had been taught photography by the great documentarian Lewis Hine, whose poignant images of children working in mills and factories had helped establish American child labor laws.
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Strand’s New York, unlike Stieglitz’s, was often unattractive, but it found strong subjects in the faces of interesting characters: working folk and the unemployed, or a blind beggar caught unaware with one open eye. In a foreshadowing of Strand’s later commitment to communism, most of the image area of
Wall Street
,
1915
is dominated by the grand and massive facade of the Morgan Bank, impassive to the column of anonymous New Yorkers moving ephemerally across its base.
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Strand described his version of Stieglitz’s philosophy in “Photography,” an article published in 1917 in the magazine
Seven Arts.
The full potential power of every medium is dependent upon the purity of its use, and all attempts at mixture end in such dead things as the color-etching, the photographic painting and, in photography, the gum-print, oil-print, etc., in which the introduction of handwork and manipulation is merely the expression of an impotent desire to paint.
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There is no direct evidence that fifteen-year-old Ansel Adams saw Strand’s article, but the boy’s ardent reading of the current photographic literature makes it a possibility. He certainly had read it by 1933, when he owned a copy of the issue of
Camera Work
where it had been reprinted.
Ansel slowly moved from Pictorialism’s artifice to the straight-photography camp. By 1925, having decided that the Pictorialist approach was not appropriate for the clean, hard Sierra granite he had chosen as his subject, he had forsaken the soft-focus lens and the bromoil print. He was at least aware of Stieglitz by this time; for Christmas 1925, a family friend gave him a copy of the book
Musical Chronicle (1917–1923)
, whose dedication page read, “To Alfred Stieglitz.”
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But Stieglitz did not directly affect the direction of Ansel’s creative development until their first meeting, in 1933.
Leaving behind familiar Pictorialist territory, Ansel took inspiration from the writings of English poet and philosopher Edward Carpenter, who reaffirmed his earlier affinity for Emerson and Ingersoll. Ansel was introduced to the writings of Carpenter by his best friend, Cedric Wright. Their intense comradeship began in 1923, when Ansel joined the Sierra Club’s summer Outing party for a few days at Tuolumne Meadows, above Yosemite Valley’s north rim. There he encountered Cedric, a serious musician dedicated to the study of the violin. Ansel was thirteen years younger than Cedric. They had been lightly aware of each other: Cedric’s father, George, was Charlie’s attorney, and Ansel had attended Cedric’s eccentric debut violin performance in about 1914. Cedric repeated the first section three times because he had forgotten the ending. He finally quit and cheerily announced to his audience, “Well, I bet you’ve heard enough of that.”
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After getting the basics out of the way (they agreed that Bach and Beethoven were the greatest composers) and finding that they shared an abiding love for the Sierra, they discovered the remarkable coincidence that they both considered photography their hobby. Ansel sat with the audience of Sierra Clubbers about the evening campfire as Cedric stood, violin under his chin, and serenaded the evening. Like Ansel, Cedric had a reputation as a pundit. After devising the first portable latrines for the Sierra Club, Cedric dubbed them Straddlevariouses.
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The two men found each other completely simpatico.
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(Ansel had not yet found out that Cedric’s father with his Uncle Ansel had been responsible for Charlie’s financial ruination.)
Even loftier-minded than Ansel, Cedric set new standards for his young friend, quoting Walt Whitman, Elbert Hubbard, and Carpenter. Cedric was blessed with an assured family income. He bought an old barn in Berkeley and hired famed architect Bernard Maybeck to design its brown-shingled Craftsman-style remodel. From the rafters that towered above its huge main room hung a swing (and mind you, this was forty years before the sixties). Built-in couches upholstered with loose pillows lined its walls. Cedric’s home became “party central” for Sierra Clubbers and musicians. Immensely impressed by the highly personal space Maybeck had created for Cedric, Ansel resolved that someday he would have Maybeck design a home for him as well. (Maybeck was a professor of architecture at University of California, Berkeley, and designed the ornate Palace of Fine Arts for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition). In the interim, Ansel could often be found at Cedric’s. In this era, before bridges connected San Francisco with either Marin County to the north or the East Bay (Berkeley and Oakland), it took him two hours to get to Berkeley and another two hours to get back, combining streetcar, train, and ferryboat.
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Cedric entertained with ease, serving his guests—the sophisticated as well as the unsophisticated—what he believed to be the best chow in the world: the usual Sierra Club camp dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, French bread, tossed salad, and cookies supplemented with the very unwilderness treat of Jell-O for dessert. The coffee was boiled, thick and rich. The only thing missing was the mountains.
Ansel idolized Cedric, whom he saw as intelligent, accomplished, and worldly. Cedric became his guide to the tantalizing world of wine, women, and song, and to the young artistic achievers living in Berkeley. Although Cedric was wed, first to Mildred and then to Rhea, and although he had three children, he seems not to have let his marriages get in the way of his quest for the ideal woman. For Ansel, Cedric proved to be a potent influence in matters of the heart as well as philosophy.
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Together, the two friends reflected on line after line of Carpenter, who instructed, “Never again will Art attain to its largest and best expressions, till daily life itself once more is penetrated with beauty.”
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An unwritten pact was made between them: they would devote their lives to the creation of beauty.
During the next years, as he hiked and photographed the Sierra, Ansel was never without his pocket edition of Carpenter’s book
Towards Democracy
. His letters during this period were peppered with quotes:
In the first soft winds of spring, while snow yet lay on
the ground—
Forth from the city into the great woods wandering,
Into the great silent white woods where they waited in their beauty and majesty
For man their companion to come:
There, in vision, out of the wreck of cities and civilizations, . . .
I saw a new life, a new society, arise.
Man I saw arising once more to dwell with Nature.
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Carpenter’s beliefs reaffirmed Ansel’s own feeling that nature was the source of all goodness and man’s best friend, nourishing life by providing beauty. An ordered nature conformed to an organic logic and pattern, but these largely eluded man’s comprehension. Nature was meaningful in a way that few could perceive, for one can seldom glimpse more than a small portion of the universal mysteries. Ansel’s goal, whether on the piano or through the camera, was to express something of what nature revealed to him.
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First with Charlie and Aunt Mary’s help, then with Cedric’s, Ansel worked out his philosophy before he established its full expression through his art.
Ansel returned to San Francisco in the fall of 1925 and, affecting Carpenter’s style of capitalizing words of central importance, wrote that he was pledging his life to “Art.”
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The end results of his summer in the Kings River Canyon were a consistent group of directly seen, sharply focused, and cleanly composed images. His ground glass narrowed and isolated the scene before him in such a way that the natural world appeared uncomplicated and understandable. Many of the best images were portraits of individual mountains, standing tall and apart from their surroundings, with characteristics so unique that one could never be mistaken for another. This represented a strong first step toward a personal vision.
Ansel’s musical studies had been getting short shrift. It was difficult for him to keep up the charade of making music his life’s work when it meant spending long hours shackled to a piano in San Francisco. Just as his mind had been drawn to the blue skies, clouds, and fog flowing past the windows when he was in school, so did it wander to the mountains as he sat at the piano, his fingers on the keys. Ansel’s siren and muse were Yosemite and the Sierra, not Bach and Beethoven.
After days away from the piano, he would experience physical pain each time he returned for three to four hours of practice. He finally concluded that his hands were all wrong: too small to span many keys and, with his thinly padded fingertips,
more
suited to the violin than the piano.
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Glumly, he commiserated with Cedric, who had a pianist’s large hands, not a violinist’s.
As the decade of the twenties progressed, Ansel’s future was further shaped by his urge to establish his own home and studio modeled upon Carpenter’s ideals, just as had Cedric, although he lacked his friend’s income. Ansel continued to live with his parents, earning only small sums from the piano teaching that he had begun in 1923, as well as occasional photographic jobs.
During the late spring of 1926, at a party at his house in Berkeley, Cedric introduced Ansel to Albert Bender, who owned a small insurance agency and devoted his considerable energies to the support of artists and fine books.
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Albert Bender was to change the course of Ansel’s life.
Born in Dublin in 1866, Albert had arrived penniless in America in 1883 and had gone on to build one of the most respected San Francisco insurance practices of his day. An exemplar of hybrid vigor—his father was a rabbi, his mother Catholic—Albert was a small man of regal bearing, with an aquiline nose and hooded eyes, his suit never complete without a flower in the jacket’s lapel.
When Ansel met him, Albert was a lonely man, still grieving over the death, three years earlier, of his true love and first cousin, the painter Anne Bremer. Bremer had studied in Paris for more than ten years and returned to the United States committed to the new modern art, which she is credited with having introduced to San Francisco. She became president of the Sketch Club, founded for and by women artists in 1887 and dedicated to providing members with studio space and semiannual exhibitions.
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Bremer brought her cousin Albert into the center of San Francisco’s art scene.
Scandalously, Bremer and Bender maintained adjoining apartments. After she died, he changed nothing, keeping her rooms as a memorial except during his thrice-yearly blowouts to celebrate his particular trinity of holidays: Yom Kippur, the Chinese New Year, and Saint Patrick’s Day, which he insisted was his birthday and on which he would bestow blessings upon all while dressed as a cardinal, complete with red cap.
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Albert’s generosity was the stuff of legends. His pockets bulged with an endless supply of trinkets—rings, necklaces, brooches, and small carved figures—that he dispensed to those he met throughout the course of his day, be they building janitors or esteemed authors.
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He kept artists from starving and poets from dying of John Barleycorn thirst. Before meeting Ansel, Albert provided financial support to poets Robinson Jeffers and Ina Coolbrith and photographer Edward Weston, among many others.
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Cedric had already built up each man to the other before his pivotal introduction. That night, Ansel showed Albert photographs from his high-country trips of the past summers to the Kings River—images of Roaring River Falls, Paradise Valley, and Marion Lake. A confirmed city boy, with all that implies, Albert had no interest in these as illustrations of places, but admired them as art, plain and simple.