Ansel Adams Read online

  One day Mr. Born drove me into town and back in his two-cylinder Reo automobile. Proceeding home out Lake Street at eighteen mph with hands white-knuckled, grasping the jiggling steering wheel, and the engine coughing and clattering under the seat, he yelled, “If a front wheel should come off, we would be crushed to jelly!”

  Most of his houses were completed at close to the same time and they were quickly sold and inhabited. We became an instant neighborhood, a part of San Francisco, no longer loners on the sandy outskirts. Most thought it progress; I wistfully remembered the sand, sea grass, and lupines.

  My parents enrolled me in a succession of schools. From that early period when I was battling institutional education, I too well remember the Rochambeau School. The architect of the school must have been a dull and primitive cubist. It was a dismal three-story building, dark brown on the outside, dark brown and tan on the inside; everything, including its atmosphere, grimly brown. The students acquired this pervading mood of depression from the teachers, and the teachers must have caught it from the building: big square rooms, wide noisy staircases, grimy windows, ink-stained desks, smudged blackboards, and crummy toilets. The janitor dour, the principal grim, and the playground dirty! Dogs would do and dump on the cement yard; evidences of trysts were occasionally found behind ashcans; the older boys-about-town would grin and wink knowingly.

  The school bully, Beasley by name, picked on all the younger and more timid children. He always triumphed without doing too much physical damage. One day he encountered me in an isolated area of the schoolyard. He deftly punched me in the stomach, hard enough to make me gasp. I recall being completely furious. I knew nothing about boxing, but in my blind wrath I swung my fist like a pendulum and swatted him as hard as I could on the chin. To my amazement he toppled over and passed out cold. This was the first time I was personally taken home by the principal.

  “Fighting is absolutely not permitted in my school!” the principal exclaimed to my mother.

  “Beasley hit me first!” was my excuse.

  The principal must have known about Beasley, but she kept silent, glared at me and left.

  My mother asked, “Did he hurt you?”

  “A little, I guess.”

  “Did you hurt him?”

  “A little, I guess.”

  Case closed.

  By the time I was twelve I had developed a behavior pattern that if I became bored with anything I would drop it; hence my life was cluttered with incomplete expressions. One of my Rochambeau teachers was a Miss Oliver. She was a buxom Minerva with a steady, penetrating stare. Her voice oozed with unctuous certainty as she tried to bring order out of my chaos. Several times she asked me to come to her house for generalized lectures on behavior and responsibility. I did not comprehend most of what she was saying. We would sit in a stuffy little room in which a number of tired plants and an exhausted cat held forth. I remember that I could hear the ocean and yearned to escape the concerned stare and the flow of Truth that cascaded from her pursed lips. I am now sure that she was weaned on misunderstood Emerson.

  Each day was a severe test for me, sitting in a dreadful classroom while the sun and fog played outside. Most of the information received meant absolutely nothing to me. For example, I was chastised for not being able to remember what states border Nebraska and what are the states of the Gulf Coast. It was simply a matter of memorizing the names, nothing about the process of memorizing or any reason to memorize. Education without either meaning or excitement is impossible. I longed for the outdoors, leaving only a small part of my conscious self to pay attention to schoolwork.

  One day as I sat fidgeting in class the whole situation suddenly appeared very ridiculous to me. I burst into raucous peals of uncontrolled laughter; I could not stop. The class was first amused, then scared. I stood up, pointed at the teacher, and shrieked my scorn, hardly taking breath in between my howling paroxysms. To the dismay of my mother I was escorted home and remained under house arrest for a week until my patient father concluded that my entry into yet another school would be useless. Instead, I was to study at home under his guidance.

  My father was quite good at French and also tutored me through the complexities of basic algebra. He insisted I read the English classics and provided me lessons in ancient Greek with an elderly minister, a Dr. Herriot, who taught me the complexities of that language and its aural magnificence.

  Our conversations after the lesson would inevitably lead toward some matter of faith; Dr. Herriot assumed I went to church and he was very curious as to which one. It did no good to explain that I was an agnostic, to him a heathen. My disregard of conventional faith was incomprehensible to him.

  One day Dr. Herriot asked what I was currently reading. I told him I was immersed in Shelley’s Prometheus. He was shocked, and said, “Shelley was a dastardly atheist.” I could not understand Dr. Herriot any more than he could me.

  Another conversation turned to evolution. “There is no such thing as evolution!” exclaimed Dr. Herriot. “There is only devolution from the year of the Creation!”

  I appeared perplexed. He followed with, “We know God created the world in October, four thousand and four years before Christ; we are waiting for the Second Coming which will take place soon! Don’t believe this evolution rubbish!”

  Now I was stunned. I ventured, “Dr. Herriot, how do you explain the fossils in the rocks?”

  The silver-maned Reverend Doctor looked at me with what would pass as theatrical compassion and said, “My dear boy, God put them there to tempt our faith.”

  After that revelation I could not return to him for further instruction. His cold blue eyes in the ruddy, white-whiskered face, his pronouncement of rigid faith, and his implications of what would happen to me on Judgment Day, all were at huge variance with the luminance of music, the revelations of philosophy and poetry, the freedom of the rolling hills and the ocean.

  From my conversations with Dr. Herriot and others came my realization that intolerance, unreason, and exclusionism exist and that all three are blended in many manifestations of our society. This stimulated my intellectual and imaginative faculties, but also drew sharp lines of separation between myself and a good part of the society in which I lived. I believe religion to be deeply personal; I am a loner with my particular amorphous sense of deity.

  Sometime in 1914, my father heard me trying to pick out notes on our old upright piano. He decided that his twelve-year-old son had talent! I soon began piano lessons, which were in addition to my other studies.

  In 1915 my father gave me a year’s pass to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal), which would be my school for that year. He insisted that I continue my piano and study literature and language at home, but I was to spend a good part of each day at the fair.

  The exposition was large, complex, and astounding: a confusion of multitudes of people, more than I had ever encountered, with conversations at excitement levels and innumerable things to see. I visited every exhibit many times during that year.

  In some respects it was a tawdry place, a glorious and obviously temporary stage set, a symbolic fantasy, and a dream world of color and style. The buildings, constructed expressly for the exposition, were huge and flamboyant, with great scale and spaciousness. They were to reflect the spirit of classicism, daringly transcribed by western architects and designers. Included were: the Campaniles, reminding me of Italian postcards, the Court of Ages with its infinity of finials, the rococo Hall of Horticulture, the glorious Palace of Fine Arts, and the improbable Tower of Jewels. There were acres of foreign pavilions as well as many from American states, some pleasing and instructive, some incredibly dull.

  And then there was the Zone, the amusement area. In addition to the usual neck-breaking rides, tumblers, twisters, and tunnels of love, there were the seamy traps of girlie shows, curio shops, and freak displays. If the fronts of these establishments were bad, the backs were worse—plywood, tar p
aper, trash, as well as drunks and assorted strange fragments of humanity.

  On occasion when I was late coming home, I would make for the exits through the backyards of the Zone to the nearest streetcars. On one such evening my path crossed a group of shabby men. One, with a hooked nose and sardonic grin, had rolled up his sleeve and was injecting himself with a huge syringe. I was badly frightened and I rushed through the nearest turnstile and jumped on the first streetcar I saw. It happened to be going in the wrong direction, but no matter; I felt I had escaped some awful, threatening situation. I got home quite late and very distressed. My father asked me what had happened. I blurted out the horror of the experience, but my father simply said, “He must have been a drug addict—you should feel very sorry for him.” This clarifying charity eased my spirits.

  I happily returned to my school, the exposition. The Festival Hall, a huge, domed building with excellent acoustics, contained an organ, a gargantuan instrument of some quality that now graces San Francisco’s Civic Center. Daily at noon the exposition organist, Edwin Lamar, gave a concert that he closed with an improvisation on a theme submitted by someone in the audience. I was increasingly involved in my own music study and was impressed by his ability to create a prelude or a fugue on the spot with such inventiveness, musicianship, and authority. I always tried to attend his concerts, then scampered a mile to the YMCA cafeteria for a cheap lunch.

  I made many visits to the painting and sculpture exhibits at the Palace of Fine Arts, where I saw work in the modern vein—Bonnard, Cézanne, Gauguin, Monet, Pissarro, Van Gogh. They had little effect on me at the time, though I remember viewing them repeatedly. I now wonder what subconscious effect they had in the years to follow.

  My father often met me in the early afternoon and we visited exhibits together. He particularly enjoyed the science and machinery exhibits and also liked to sit in the courts and watch the fountains. Occasionally my mother and aunt would join us. We would have something to eat and stay for the fireworks; they were always spectacular. Arriving home late, the next day was usually a bit quiet for the ladies.

  Although everyone at the exposition was kindly to me, I am sure I was a real pest. But patience is the keystone of salesmanship, and the intent of the exposition was to encourage interest in and purchase of the items displayed. It was much more sensible than ordinary advertising; everything was there to see and handle and try out if you wished. Exhibitors seemed interested in inquisitive children and went out of their way to explain things. They were anxious that word be spread at home and parents alerted to such things as new office or home equipment.

  A friend of my father was managing the Dalton Adding Machine Company exhibit and he taught me how to use the machine. I enjoyed demonstrating it to spectators and often did so for an hour or two a day.

  I also frequented the Underwood Typewriter exhibit that presented on a large movable stage dioramas of the history of office writing—from the eighteenth-century bookkeeper laboriously pushing a quill pen to the most modern typewriter of 1915. These scenes appeared in sequence, one dissolving into another with a smoothness that was truly remarkable. Real people were involved; each illusion was a beautifully arranged and illuminated stage set. How it was done baffled everyone.

  I met Mr. Thomas Mooney, the technician of the display, and he revealed the secret, making me promise not to divulge it until the exposition was over. I was proud of this confidential information and carefully guarded the secret. It is hard to describe my astonishment and disbelief a few days after the shocking 1917 Preparedness Day bombing on Market Street to see a photograph of Thomas J. Mooney, charged with major complicity in this terrible crime. I found it difficult to believe he was guilty, but he was so charged and sentenced to many years in prison. In my memory he is a kind and gentle man.

  On the closing day of the exposition, I arrived early and visited my old haunts. Many displays were already packed up, leaving a sad, abandoned look. I had saved up some cash for a few rides on the roller coaster, then had a double-rich dinner at the YMCA cafeteria. Piles of turkey and dressing and ice cream went the way of my innards. I had one last ride on the roller coaster with disastrous gastronomic results and ended my activities at the infirmary.

  I left the infirmary at nine in the evening and wandered off to the east gate. The crowd was huge, filling the large open areas from rim to rim. I was trapped in the center of a vast surge of people who swayed en masse as if under the spell of a choreographer. It was terrifying; several women fainted but were kept upright by the close-pressing bodies. We slowly reached the exit and poured into the street. The streetcars were jammed; there was little use waiting, so I started to walk home through the Presidio. I found that I was quite weak, the combination of illness and the long, frightening experience in that mindless throng had their effect. I needed to rest frequently and simply sat down on the roadside. I straggled home at two A.M. to find my family anxiously awaiting me, fearing the worst.

  After the exposition, my education continued along its individual course. In and out of several schools in search of a legitimizing diploma, I finally ended up at the Wilkins School. Mrs. Kate Wilkins was a stout, motherly character; she read the lessons out loud to me and gave me an A. Graduating from the eighth grade at the Wilkins School signaled the end of my formal academic career.

  I often wonder at the strength and courage my father had in taking me out of the traditional school situation and providing me with these extraordinary learning experiences. I am certain he established the positive direction of my life that otherwise, given my native hyperactivity, could have been confused and catastrophic. I trace who I am and the direction of my development to those years of growing up in our house on the dunes, propelled especially by an internal spark tenderly kept alive and glowing by my father.

  3.

  Music

  MY THIRTEENTH YEAR WAS DOMINATED BY TWO SUBJECTS: the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the beginning of serious study of the piano. The world of music was an immediate contrast to my undisciplined life and unsuccessful performance in school. Within a block from our house lived an extraordinary, elderly maiden lady of very definite Yankee determination. Miss Marie Butler, my first piano teacher, was a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music and had taught piano for many years. Her technical competence was bewildering, her knowledge of music—harmony, theory, and history—tremendous, and her perseverance remarkable.

  My father must have explained my undisciplined character to her. She was very proper with a soft voice and manner, but she showed me no mercy whatsoever. There was no adaptation to my usual scattered approach to life. She insisted on week after week of grueling exercises and repetitious scales that I felt to be purposeless. Then one autumn day I suddenly realized what was happening. The perfection was beginning to mean something to me! Miss Butler seemed to recognize my awareness and said, “It’s time for a little phrasing.” My scatterbrained existence was gradually being tuned to accuracy and musical expression.

  The change from a hyperactive Sloppy Joe was not overnight, but was sufficiently abrupt to make some startled people ask, “What happened?” I still recall that the Bach Inventions taxed my concentration, especially when a sunny breeze carrying the sound of the ocean stole through the open window. I worked for a month getting the Bach Invention No. 1 note-perfect. “Now,” said Miss Butler, “we may begin to play it!” Then began the wondrous putting-together of the simple phrases in all their independence. Her approach to teaching was “if it’s not right in every way, it’s wrong,” and that was that. “Bring it back right next lesson.” She was very patient with problems of interpretation, but to not have the correct notes or rhythms was unforgivable. She never played or demonstrated music that I was working on. I had to express the music myself. Her teaching still remains impressive.

  BUTLER: “Look at this phrase; see the five rising and falling notes?”

  ADAMS: “What do you mean ‘rising and falling’?”

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nbsp; BUTLER: “Isn’t it on the page: a hill to climb and descend? Something to lift and let fall?”

  ADAMS: “Oh! I think I see.”

  BUTLER: “Try it.”

  Shape was born! If the notes were accurate, their volume should be in relation to their “lift.” What had been an uneven plateau of notes took on the aspect of a range of hills.

  BUTLER: “Do you think you got an agreeable ‘bell’ quality with the top note of this phrase?”

  ADAMS: “Show me what you mean.”

  BUTLER: “No, it’s your phrase. You have to sculpt it.”

  ADAMS: “Where is the accent? If I stress the top of the phrase, am I not losing the prime accent?”

  BUTLER: “Not at all. The time accent is the ground plan, the phrase crest is the architecture.”

  Conversations such as these opened new worlds of thought and feeling. Gaining the techniques to produce beautiful and precise sounds, I began to express my emotions through music. I am convinced that explanation of emotion in art is accomplished only in the medium in which it is created. This came to me powerfully years later when I turned to photography.

  From the beginning I was trained to play a simple five-note exercise, note by note, with a metronome set at sixty-nine beats a minute. I do not know why sixty-nine and not seventy-two or sixty-five, but sixty-nine it was.

  Each note struck required the following:

  1. Hand level, fingers lightly resting on the keyboard.

  2. Lift the finger as high as the joints will allow.

  3. Strike with finger impact only.

  4. Relax finger just enough to prevent the damper dropping on strings.

  5. Strike next note, releasing the first note as the next sounds.

  This is a relaxed procedure and the basis of a true legato: each note a pure, balanced entity, most to be connected to other notes with a consistent smoothness and equality of tone. When all notes were even in sound and accurate in strike, the metronome speed would slowly be increased and the hand would remain relaxed. Later on, hand and arm energies would be used. It was a monotonous, but rewarding procedure.