Ansel Adams: An Autobiography
Adams, Ansel & Alinder, Mary Street
ANSEL ADAMS: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Ansel Adams, with Mary Street Alinder/Little, Brown/$50.00 Vernon Young We have become so accustomed to the character of a man's art being contradicted by his...
...Brett Weston, son of Edward and himself a productive photographer, lived in an intuitive world, distrusting technique and preaching "the triumph of instinct...
...Adams was always wary, in his several statements of credo, about committing himself either to the force of inspiration or to the exclusive demands of method...
...he pursued that livelihood with other-worldly dedication and increasing recognition and reward...
...What is perhaps most impressive about them, within the cohesive subject of wilderness, is their variety, their seemingly infinite balancing of the lyric and the majestic, the analytical and the visionary...
...I never know in advance precisely what I will photograph...
...I am a primitive," he declared...
...He fell in love with the right girl at the right time, remained happily married for over fifty years, and until the end of his span enjoyed in the main good health...
...His understanding of photography must have already been considerably crystallized in 1926 when his pictures attracted the special attention of Albert Bender...
...Ansel Adams, master photographer and conservationist, as revealed in the autobiography he completed a year before his death in 1984, is a source of such amazement...
...Yes, well—we've been there before, haven't we...
...By 1982 this collection had sold, in hard and soft-cover combined, 200,000 copies...
...the following year Carter presented him with the country's highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom...
...The miracle of the image" in his photographs, combined with his championing of projects on behalf of endangered areas (such as Big Sur), has increasingly secured his dual prestige as an artist and as an activist...
...he was given showings at Arles in 1974 and in 1976, and in London the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted (1976) what he has described as "one of the best installations of my work I have seen...
...seldom is an augenmensch also a horenmensch...
...People are surprised when I say that I never intentionally made a creative photograph related directly to an environmental issue...
...When no such contradiction is forthcoming, we are amazed...
...Adams discovered "the impact of the Natural Scene" in early trips to the Yosemite and was thenceforth committed to the Western American setting as the great good place and as the principal subject of the magnificent photographic record he would eventually compile...
...It is masterly stuff...
...The style of any single picture has been determined by the view he had chosen...
...Yet he has kept the pictures separate from the function they have helped to activate...
...Adams's photography, wrote Devrees, "strikingly captures a world of poetic form...
...However, they depart from reality in direct relation to the placement of the camera before the subject, the lens chosen, the film and filters, the exposure indicated, the associated development and printing...
...shells embedded in sandstone...
...To which Adams protested that he used techniques in order to free his vision: "The physics of the situation are fearfully complex but the miracle of the image is a triumph of the imagination...
...From the seventies on, the attention paid him, the exhibits provided and the awards bestowed, mushroomed at what was no doubt a gratifying pace...
...I am addicted to the found object...
...In a textbook he once wrote he came closest to explaining the delicate balance...
...There is not an overall mannerism that makes any two photo-graphs resemble one another—except, naturally, as one mountain will resemble another...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 47...
...He lived a success story from his youth on-ward...
...Reagan's "curt reply was that there is considerable disagreement about the causes of acid rain...
...His private life was without tragedy, frustration, or bitterness...
...The book is unfittable to any shelf and it weighs a ton...
...Howard Devrees, of the Times, expressed in a short favorable paragraph the appeal of Adams's art, soon to be shared bythousands...
...ANSEL ADAMS: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Ansel Adams, with Mary Street Alinder/Little, Brown/$50.00 Vernon Young We have become so accustomed to the character of a man's art being contradicted by his personal character, or at least existing in an oblique relation-ship to it, that we tend to read biographical literature in order to con-firm our ready inferences...
...He has high praise for Lyndon Johnson, for Gerald Ford, and of course for Carter, none for Nixon, and none for the present incumbent...
...great trees and cumulus clouds...
...When Adams met Strand in 1930, as he says, he had surely by then fully prepared his Taos Pueblo volume...
...My sole adverse criticism of this volume: the many stunning photo-graphs (largely chosen by Mary Street Alinder) created for the publishers a problem of format they ill resolved...
...A traveling exhibit was initiated by MOMA (1979) which coincided with the publication of his book, Yosemite and the Range of Light...
...Adams had his first one-man show in New York City in 1933, when photography, either as a fine art or as current history in the work of photo-journalists, was just coming into its own...
...After an initial procrastination in his choice of livelihood (oddly enough the choice was between music and photography...
...He tried to re-mind Mr...
...the remarkable interplay of textures in the "Oyster Fence" photo of 1953, or the brooding epic vistas of "Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake" (1947...
...Reagan that the burning of fossil fuels pollutes water and air, reducing the ozone layer of the atmosphere and bringing acid rain...
...Inevitably, it seems now, Adams's preoccupation with nature in the wild led to his active cooperation with conservationists who, despite the establishment long ago of National Parks, have had to fight tooth-and-nail against encroachments on virgin land by corporate investors...
...Europe was discovering him...
...The present volume is abundantly illustrated with pictures taken as early as 1930 and as late as 1983...
...Adams's encounters with Presidents predates (and postdates) the meeting with Carter and he gives his frank opinions of these men, insofar as they were concerned with the issue of conservation...
...Influential, wealthy, eccentric, and immensely generous, Bender be-came one of the most fateful patrons in Adams's career...
...Photographic images cannot avoid being accurate optically, as lenses are used...
...and in 1981 he was awarded the Hasselblad Gold Medal...
...He introduced the photographer not only to Carmel and Robinson Jeffers but also to Mabel Dodge Lujan and Taos...
...To the chagrin of professional portrait photographers, we sup-pose, Adams was chosen in 1979 to take the official portraits of President Carter and Vice President Mondale (wildlife on the Potomac...
...Invited to the White House, presumably to ex-change ideas on the state of public lands, he was "negatively impressed" by the President's failure to discuss or challenge his opinions...
...For such explanations, other photographers frequently thought of him as primarily a technician...
...I can-not summon the creative impulse on demand...
...Ansel is a scientist...
...I go out into the world and hope I will come across something that imperatively interests me...
...His lens has caught snow-laden branches in their delicate tracery...
...Shown these pictures without identification of their authors, you might find it difficult to believe that the sculptured lucidity of "Moon and Half Dome" (1960) was photo-graphed by the same eye that perceived Vernon Young is a writer living in Philadelphia...
...Adams may be exaggerating a little when he claims to have decided on a career in photography rather than music as late as 1930, when he first saw the "glorious negatives" of the photographer Paul Strand in New Mexico...
Vol. 19 • July 1986 • No. 7
