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  Copyright

  In 1976, Ansel Adams selected Little, Brown and Company as the sole authorized publisher of his books, calendars, and posters. At the same time, he established The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust in order to ensure the continuity and quality of his legacy—both artistic and environmental.

  As Ansel Adams himself wrote, “Perhaps the most important characteristic of my work is what may be called print quality. It is very important that the reproductions be as good as you can possibly get them.” The authorized books, calendars, and posters published by Little, Brown have been rigorously supervised by the Trust to make certain that Adams’ exacting standards of quality are maintained.

  Only such works published by Little, Brown and Company can be considered authentic representations of the genius of Ansel Adams.

  Copyright © 1985, 1996 by The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First ebook edition: February 2017

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  This new edition reproduces the entire text of the original book, as well as a small selection of the photographs.

  Acknowledgments of permission to quote from copyrighted material appear at the back of the book.

  ISBN 978-0-316-43701-1

  E3-20161220-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Editor’s Note

  1. BEGINNINGS

  2. CHILDHOOD

  3. MUSIC

  4. FAMILY

  5. YOSEMITE

  6. MONOLITH

  7. ALBERT BENDER

  8. VIRGINIA

  9. STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

  10. STIEGLITZ & O’KEEFFE

  11. THE SIERRA

  12. COMMERICAL PHOTOGRAPHY

  13. YPCCO

  14. THE NEWHALLS

  15. DAVID MC ALPIN

  16. EDWARD WESTON

  17. DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY

  18. NATIONAL PARKS

  19. EDWIN LAND

  20. TEACHING

  21. CARMEL

  22. PRESIDENTS & POLITICS

  23. RESOLUTIONS

  24. HARMONY

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Also Available from Ansel Adams

  Newsletters

  Preface

  If one feels inclined to embark on a journey into memory, after eighty-two years the experience promises to be kaleidoscopic and, perhaps, willfully colored. I have attempted to remove the filter from my memory lens, allowing more than my dreams to reach the page. Many things are clarified only by the passage of time. I distrust any lifelong memory of facts, but not the lifelong glow of experience that depends upon another form of reality. Possibly it would be too shattering to recall everything exactly, not because it was necessarily bad, but because it could reveal opportunities missed and errors made. Such might be best unremembered.

  I think I have something to give my readers of the flavor of a good part of the twentieth century as seen through a life of creative experience. The worlds of nature and of people have been closely involved; a fact not too clear in the general opinion as I have chosen to stress the natural scene above other directions in my photography.

  I am not going to retrace my life from past to present on a one-lane highway. I intend to recall varieties of experience, stretching tentacles of memory to the earliest sources in such sequences as seem logical, but without restrictions of time or place.

  It is sometimes a desolate moment when one sees old photographs and realizes that all the humanity represented is dead and forgotten. Painting or sculpture of deceased persons, famous or not, does not evoke the same response in me as do photographs; there is a reality in the camera remembrances that compels respectful consideration. Likewise, literary discussion of the departed holds a certain poignancy and euphoric assurance of their continuing presence among us. As I write I find that while I use words denoting past situations and long-dead persons, I continue to acknowledge their living reality and their relationship to my life and work. It is my responsibility to recall them as essential spokes in the great wheel of life and to relate them to the conclusions I have drawn about my life and work.

  Some of my friends were of tremendous importance in their time, yet what they accomplished was not the stuff of history books. Nevertheless, they continue in the lives of those influenced by their generosity and spirit. I have also known characters, both historical and famous, who were personally and immensely inspiring: Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Charles Sheeler, Dorothea Lange, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Edwin H. Land, David Hunter McAlpin, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin. Then the roster broadens; literally thousands of wonderful friends have accompanied me in life and many now await me in the secret eternity to come. I have enjoyed the long voyage and I thank all for their companionship and their affection.

  I wish to express my deep appreciation:

  To Mary Alinder, my dear friend and editor, whose devotion and love gave me the daily inspiration to continue writing this book, and whose editorial genius assembled it into a meaningful whole. She truly knows me better than I know myself—

  To cherished Virginia, my wife of more than half a century, who gave excellent commentary on the text from the vantage point of remembering better than anyone both the joys and sorrows of my life in the world and in my art—

  To James Alinder, who kindly read this tome as an historian, editor, photographer, and friend; his insights have served to clarify my chaos—

  To Chris Rainier, Phyllis Donohue, and Rod Dresser for their continued and valued assistance—

  And to my colleagues at Little, Brown: Janet Swan Bush, George Hall, John Maclaurin, Ray Roberts, and Arthur Thornhill, Jr., whom I have come to know over the past decade to represent the finest in publishing.

  ANSEL ADAMS

  Carmel, California

  March 1984

  Editor’s Note

  I began working for Ansel Adams as his executive assistant in 1979. While I supervised his staff and his many projects, my prime responsibility was to assist Ansel as he wrote his autobiography. We began by taking long, daily walks—me with tape recorder in hand—asking question upon question, jogging his memory, getting both of us excited about the possibilities that lay ahead with this book. During the five years we worked on this text, even during his increasingly frequent hospitalizations, we always continued in an established routine. We joked that the hospital was the one place I could get him to concentrate fully on the autobiography. Wherever we found ourselves, we worked well together, writing and rewriting the chapters of this book through seven drafts.

  Ansel died peacefully on the evening of Easter Sunday, April 22, 1984. That day a concert by the great pianist Vladim
ir Ashkenazy, a close friend, was given in Ansel and Virginia’s home. Ansel had been hospitalized a couple of days before, but we thought until the last minute that he would be able to attend. Although he was not physically there, everyone in the audience felt that Ansel was listening with us as Ashkenazy performed his inspired interpretation of music by Schubert, Schumann, and Chopin. Following the concert, family and a few close friends came to the hospital’s intensive care unit and were greeted by Ansel’s booming words of welcome, wide grin, and outstretched arms. Just hours later he quietly passed away. He had maintained his brilliance, vigor, humor, and purpose right to the end.

  It was a great honor as well as a formidable task to complete Ansel’s most personal book. I could not have done it without the selfless cooperation of our staff. Ansel had prepared us to continue without him through his patient teaching and then bestowing of responsibility.

  With Ansel’s death I realized the absolute necessity to recheck facts, since he was not here to confirm them. Very helpful comments on the manuscript were given by Jeanne Adams, Michael Adams, Peter C. Bunnell, Anne Adams Helms, Ken Helms, George Kimball, Beaumont Newhall, Otto Meyer, Sue Meyer, Andrea Gray Stillman, McDonna Sitterle Street, David Vena, and most important, by Virginia Best Adams, a woman of great gifts who gave them unselfishly in support of the man she loved.

  Ansel’s death left a void in my life, but surrounding that emptiness is the love provided by my husband, Jim, who had read and commented on many drafts of this manuscript and whose photographic documentation of Ansel’s last years enrich this book; and our three children, who helped magnificently while my life was dominated by this project.

  I would like to add thanks to my colleagues at Little, Brown, particularly Janet Swan Bush, George Hall, Michael Mattil, Nancy Robins, Ray Roberts, John Maclaurin, and the designer Susan Marsh. I am appreciative of Polaroid Corporation for their generous contribution of necessary advice and materials. Special thanks also to Arthur Thornhill, Jr., William Turnage, and David Vena, Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, for their counsel, support, and encouragement.

  MARY STREET ALINDER

  Carmel, California

  September 1984

  1.

  Beginnings

  RECENTLY I MADE SOME NEW PHOTOGRAPHS, THE FIRST in several months. I had been occupied with printing, writing, workshops, and an accumulation of obligations that captured me. It was wonderful to set up the camera among the rocks at nearby Point Lobos and to work in the fresh sea air, experiencing again the empathies with scene and visualization and camera that every serious photographer comes to know. Just as a musician gets out of practice, I was slow with the mechanics involved in managing the equipment and even the exposure calculations. It took a little time to regain the facility I had when I was making new pictures every day. But all smoothed out and the miracle of the image on the ground glass revived me. I returned home to Carmel Highlands and a warming lunch and then spent a few hours working in the darkroom, processing the negatives I had made that morning.

  People are surprised when I say that I never intentionally made a creative photograph that related directly to an environmental issue, though I am greatly pleased when a picture I have made becomes useful to an important cause. I cannot command the creative impulse on demand. I never know in advance precisely what I will photograph. I go out into the world and hope I will come across something that imperatively interests me. I am addicted to the found object. I have no doubt that I will continue to make photographs till my last breath.

  Late that afternoon, as I do nearly every day, I sat by the living room window; the great Pacific Ocean stretched out before me, to the hazy line of the horizon, the borders gently interrupted by the silhouettes of pines, varied foliage, and the myriad colors of Virginia’s flower garden. A small wind stirred. A bee explored the outer surface of the window. From my chair I can see the many miracles of day and night. The external events of majesty and beauty are very clear and direct.

  The ocean and its rich foreground compose a familiar view. Dusk is my favorite time, sometimes sparked by the gentle green flash as the ocean finally receives the sun. The sky darkened, holding no crescent moon or evening star to make the situation impossibly pictorial. An approaching band of fog suggested that the next day might be one of silver and cool gray. Robinson Jeffers wrote of the “vast shield of the ocean.” I do not forget its presence even during those many hours I am in my darkroom or at my desk, both so detached from the direct light of sun or sky. Every so often I emerge, reaffirm the splendor of the world, and then return to the caverns of my particular creativity.

  The next morning was, as expected, chilly and foggy. Cobwebs on the trees and bushes quietly sparkled with fog drops, minute star clusters that, when the sun broke through, slowly faded from their prismatic glitter. I decided to examine a box of old family photographs, some of which may accompany these recollections. I found one snapshot that is supposed to be me, an infant in an impossibly long white gown. My memory bank trembled a bit and I recalled lying in a perambulator on a warm afternoon looking up past its bonnet to the eaves of the house and beyond to a pastel blue sky with fingers of fog flowing east in silence. Soon the sky was fully gray and my nanny gathered me in her ample arms and put me in a crib indoors.

  This memory faded into another of my mother and father having a party, probably in late 1903 or early 1904. My mother brought me downstairs to display me to an audience of black ties, white shirts, high-collared lace dresses, necklaces, rings, generous smiles, and strange sounds. There was much light—chandeliers, candles, and reflections—and I remember squeezing my eyes closed and gurgling in some form of primal protest. This ability to remember clearly even my earliest days has persisted over the decades.

  Another fragment floated into memory: I was a child of about three. It was a winter morning; I stood at the window in my mother’s room, looking over the dunes to the Marin hills rising in the misty rain over the waters of the Golden Gate. I can still see, these many years later, a fishing boat, with a pale gray, pointed sail, drifting eastward toward the bay, almost hidden in the delicate shrouds of rain. Quiet as the scene was, it was vibrant with light of a cool translucence and a great mystery of presence.

  Memories come to me as if they are scenes revealed by the stately opening of a proscenium curtain. A spring morning in about 1910 came clearly to me. I was up early and out in the sand dunes near our home. A gale blew out of the northwest, difficult to stand against. It was cold and clear, and the grasses and flowers were shivering violently in their shallow little spaces above the ground. The brittle-blue distances, including the horizon of the sea, were of crystal incisiveness. The ocean was flecked with whitecaps that appeared as countless white threads in a blue tapestry. My experience that day was a form of revelation that in some way became part of my creative structure.

  I constantly return to the elements of nature that surrounded me in my childhood, to both the vision and the mood. More than seventy years later I can visualize certain photographs I might make today as equivalents of those early experiences. My childhood was very much the father to the man I became.

  The Adams family was from New England, having originally emigrated from Northern Ireland in the early 1700s. My paternal grandmother spent her last years striving to connect the confused family line to the Adams presidential dynasty. No luck. We could not trace any association. My father’s father, William James Adams, traveled west as a young man in the early 1850s. He established profitable grocery businesses in Sacramento and San Francisco but then lost everything to fires. Returning home to Thomaston, Maine, in 1856, he wed a young widow, Cassandra Hills McIntyre, whom he brought to California in 1857. They settled in San Francisco, where my grandfather built a prosperous lumber business. It was called Adams & Blinn, and later, the Washington Mill Company. They eventually had their own lumber mills in Washington and Mississippi, as well as a large fleet of lumber ships.

  My father, Charles
Hitchcock Adams, was born to Cassandra and William in 1868; he was the youngest of five children. In the same year, my grandfather built the family home in Atherton, south of San Francisco.

  My mother’s family came from Baltimore. My grandfather, Charles E. Bray, married Nan Hiler and they, in the company of thousands of other pioneers, proceeded west by wagon train to make their fortune. My mother, Olive, was born in Iowa in 1862 and her sister Mary came into the world in Sacramento in 1864. The family next moved to Carson City, Nevada, where Charles Bray began a successful freight-hauling business, although I was told that as soon as he got financially ahead he plunged his resources into ill-considered mining or real estate ventures with repeatedly catastrophic results.

  The Bray family home in Carson City was popular as a social and cultural center. My mother was active in china painting, and we still have some of her handiwork. It always appeared to me to be of superior quality, but florid and decorative in the late Victorian manner. My Aunt Mary was a leader of the Browning Society, whose members spent frequent evenings reading the poems of the Brownings as well as less luminous local efforts at verse. These belles of Carson City, bustles and all, would attend glittering gatherings of San Francisco society, properly chaperoned, of course. At one such event Olive Bray met Charles Adams. He pursued his suit, traveling frequently to Nevada, and they were married there in 1896. After my Grandmother Nan Bray died in 1908, both Grandfather Bray and Aunt Mary came to live with us, and the family’s Carson City era came to an end. Grandpa Bray and Aunt Mary had practically no resources and were additional financial burdens for my father until their deaths—Grandfather’s in 1919 and Aunt Mary’s in 1944.

  I emerged into this world at about three in the morning on February 20, 1902, born in my parents’ bed in their ample flat in the Western Addition of San Francisco. I was just a few hours into Pisces out of Aquarius: a fish out of water. So much for astrology. I was named for my uncle, Ansel Easton, a man of independent means who married one of my father’s sisters, Louise.