<Archive Obituaries> Ansel Adams (April 22nd 1984)
Bill Schenley
Photos:
http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/adams/Ansel.jpg
http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/branches/ccp/education/guides/aaguide/anselpic.jpg
FROM: The New York Times (April 24th 1984) ~
By John Russell
Ansel Adams, whose majestic black- and-white landscapes of
the American West and whose devotion to clarity and
precision made him probably the best- known photographer in
the United States, died of heart disease Sunday night at
Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, near his home
in Carmel, Calif. He was 82 years old.
In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Mr. Adams
combined a passion for natural landscape, meticulous
craftsmanship as a printmaker and a missionary's zeal for
his medium to become the most widely exhibited and
recognized photographer of his generation.
His photographs have been published in more than 35 books
and portfolios, and they have been seen in hundreds of
exhibitions, including a one-man show, ''Ansel Adams and the
West,'' at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1979.
That same year he was the subject of a cover story in Time
magazine, and in 1980 he received the Medal of Freedom, the
nation's highest civilian honor.
In addition to being acclaimed for his dramatic landscapes
of the American West, he was held in esteem for his
contributions to photographic technology and to the
recognition of photography as an art form.
Trained as a Pianist
Though trained as a concert pianist, Mr. Adams decided in
1930 that his true vocation was photography. Two years
later, he was accomplished enough to be given a one-man show
at the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco, and the same
year he joined Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham in
forming the short-lived ''Group f/64.''
In the words of Mr. Adams's friend Wallace Stegner, the
founding of this group was a benchmark in the establishment
of photography as a distinct and legitimate art form that
would be ''not a substitute brush, but a way of seeing.''
From that point onward, Mr. Adams rapidly became famous not
only as a photographer but also as critic, teacher,
publisher of portfolios, co-founder of the department of
photography at the Museum of Modern Art, longtime consultant
to the Polaroid Corporation and spokesman for a heroic and
yet plainspoken approach to photography.
Book Consecrated Reputation
The publication by the New York Graphic Society in the
1970's of his book ''Ansel Adams: Images 1923-1974''
consecrated his reputation as a photographer whose work
appealed to the widest possible public for its evocation of
an American scene that was still without blemish.
Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco on Feb. 20, 1902, of
New England descent. The next year, his parents moved to a
house overlooking the Golden Gate, where he formed his
lifelong taste for a spectacular natural scene.
In 1916, while on a visit to the Yosemite Valley, he made
his first photographs with a box Brownie. Yosemite had so
fired his imagination that for four summers running he took
a job as caretaker for a lodge owned by the Sierra Club, of
which he was later to be a director for 37 years.
Acquired a Patron
In 1927, while earning his living as a professional
musician, Mr. Adams acquired a patron in San Francisco by
the name of Albert Bender. Mr. Bender took him to Taos,
N.M., where, during visits over the next few years, he made
friends with Robinson Jeffers, John Marin and Georgia
O'Keeffe. As his biographer, Nancy Newhall, said later,
''Taos was his Paris and his Rome.'' His first book, ''Taos
Pueblo,'' with a text by Mary Austin, came out in 1930.
Precision and sharp focus were fundamental to good
photography, as Mr. Adams saw it, and as a born teacher he
neglected no opportunity to make his views felt. He wrote
for the Sierra Club Bulletin, he published a series of books
on the basics of photography, he ran workshops and seminars
in the Yosemite Valley, he taught and lectured at the Museum
of Modern Art and colleges all along the Pacific Coast, and
he published his work in portfolio form.
As his reputation grew, he was encouraged to travel
throughout the United States in order to bring his
characteristic clarity and his sense of unforced grandeur to
studies of national parks and remote places of every kind.
In the 1930's he made extended trips with his fellow
photographer Mr. Weston to the High Sierra, and with
O'Keeffe and David McAlpin to the Southwest. In 1933, he met
Alfred Stieglitz, and in 1936 Stieglitz gave Mr. Adams a
one-man show at his New York City gallery, ''An American
Place.'' This was the first one-man show of photography that
Stieglitz had put on since Paul Strand was similarly honored
two decades earlier.
Directed a Pageant
In 1940, Mr. Adams directed ''A Pageant of Photography'' as
part of the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco, and
took part with Mr. Weston and Dorothea Lange in a
photographic forum organized by U. S. Camera in the Yosemite
Valley. Also in 1940, he helped Beaumont Newhall and Mr.
McAlpin to found the department of photography at the Museum
of Modern Art.
At the outbreak of World War II, he became a consultant to
the Armed Services. But, ever-sensitive to the plight of
minority groups, he published in 1944 ''Born Free and
Equal,'' a photographic survey of a California camp in which
Japanese-Americans were interned at the outbreak of war with
Japan.
After the war, Mr. Adams three times received Guggenheim
Fellowships, which enabled him to record national parks and
monuments in Alaska, Hawaii and elsewhere. In many writings
in the postwar period, he stressed the importance of vision,
as distinct from gadgetry. ''A picture,'' he liked to say,
''is only a collection of brightnesses,'' and, he would add,
''There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy
concept.''
Fellow of American Academy
Films about Mr. Adams and his work were directed by David
Myers in 1957 and by Robert Katz in 1959. In 1963, Mrs.
Newhall published a study of him called ''The Eloquent
Light,'' after the show of that name that Mr. Adams had just
had at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. In 1967 he and
Mrs. Newhall published a book called ''Fiat Lux,'' to mark
the centenary of the University of California, and in 1974
he was honored by a retrospective exhibition at the
Metropolitan Museum in New York.
In 1966, Mr. Adams was made a Fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and in 1970 he was made a Chubb Fellow
at Yale University. He received honorary doctorates from
Occidental College, the University of Massachusetts and Yale
University.
In 1928, Mr. Adams married Virginia Best. After many years
in Yosemite, the Adamses moved in 1962 to Carmel.
He is survived by his wife; two children, Dr. Michael Adams
of Fresno, Calif., and Anne Adams Helms of Redwood City,
Calif., and five grandchildren. Funeral services will be
private.
---
Photos:
http://waddle.uoregon.edu/albums/NewsImages/Ansel_Adams.jpg
http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/cafe/images/scrnshot/ansel3.jpg
http://magicravenphotography.com/My%20Ansel%20Adams%20pic%20w%20drop%20shadow.jpg
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Ansel Adams 1902-1984;
Master of the Camera, Poet of the Landscape, Protector of the Wild
FROM: The Washington Post (April 24th 1984) ~
By Paul Richard
At photography--and politics--Ansel Adams was a master.
When he came to Washington, as he often did, Adams would
dress up like the Old Man of the Mountains. He'd wear a
string tie and a Stetson. He'd scratch his grizzled beard,
grin his impish grin, snap his red suspenders--and go about
his business with implacable intensity. Adams had two
missions here. One was selling photographs. The other was
pressuring politicians into helping him preserve the wild
landscapes that he loved.
At both of his two missions, Adams, 82--whose heart gave out
on Sunday night--was enormously successful. He was the grand
old man of the environmental movement. His photographs
appear in nearly a million books. He had countless
exhibitions and honors. He was the best loved and best known
of American photographers.
Adams was in some ways a 19th-century artist who flourished
in the 20th. The technically impeccable, usually unpeopled,
photographs that brought him fame blend two differing
traditions of American landscape art, one factual, one
fanciful.
Adams was not the first good artist to go into the
mountains. The western landscapes he portrayed had been
portrayed in the previous century by photographers and
painters. The painters leaned toward poetry, the
photographers toward prose. They taught him different
things.
"Not everybody trusts paintings," said Adams, "but people
believe photographs."
His photographs are believable in part because their details
seem absolutely right. When he shows a still-young aspen
tree growing in New Mexico, one can take a magnifying glass
and study every leaf. When he shows a field of stones, one
can see the texture of every rounded rock.
Adams as a lobbyist was comparably effective. His pictures
of California's Kings Canyon, hand-carried to Washington in
the 1930s, helped lead to the creation of the 455,000-acre
Kings Canyon National Park. Adams, a Sierra Club director
from 1936 to 1970, worked over every president from Franklin
Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. He made phone calls, he wrote
letters. When Interior Secretary James Watt was in office,
Adams would dash off a letter of complaint--to newspapers
and congressmen--almost every day.
"You should see him lobby," said his friend Bill Turnage in
1979. After seven years as Adams' business manager, Turnage
had become the head of the Wilderness Society. When Adams
came to Washington, they would work the Hill together.
"We run this Abbott and Costello act," said Turnage. "I let
Ansel start. He speaks about the spirit, then I hit them
with the details."
Adams the photographer took a similar approach. The majesty
of landscape, and its minutiae, too--the spirit and the
details--dance together beautifully in his finest works of
art.
He was a masterful technician. He invented the "zone system"
of exposure, he taught 5,000 students, and his printing sets
a standard that has rarely been surpassed. When, in 1932,
Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Willard Van Dyke
began to work together, they called themselves "Group f64,"
in honor of the smallest lens opening then available. They
liked f64 because it offered the greatest depth of field and
the sharpest possible focus. "A lot of younger American
photographers," observes John Szarkowski of the Museum of
Modern Art, "have no clue about how much they've been
influenced by Ansel's rigorous sense of obligation to using
the machine well."
The scientist in Adams insisted on the precise replication
of the smallest detail. But he was a poet, too.
"Ansel Adams was complaining about the clouds when I first
met him," wrote David Brower, then director of the Sierra
Club. "They weren't yet what they ought to be, but he
thought they would get better."
The early western photographers took nature as they found
it. C.L. Weed, C.E. Watkins, E.J. Muybridge and their
colleagues were rock-hard men who left us rock-hard
pictures. They cared little for the arty. They were
scientists, explorers. They rode mules to Yosemite. Their
cameras were cumbersome, their lenses were hand-ground. They
hauled carboys of acid and fragile glass plates up the rocky
slopes. They did not sleep in lodges, but outside, on the
ground. Their pictures call to mind the pictures the first
astronauts took from outer space. They brought back to the
cities accurate, convincing images of marvels rarely
glimpsed before.
Bierstadt and Moran and other 19th-century painters of the
mountains cared less for reportage than they did for drama.
Their pictures feel like operas. In the wilds they made
sketches that were relatively straightforward. But when they
returned to New York, to their studios, they pulled out all
the stops. Their lakes are just a bit too clear, their peaks
a bit too high. They liked to dress their mountains with
waterfalls and rainbows, sunsets, stormy clouds, little
bears and deer. Their pictures aren't believable. They are
too gaudy, too romantic.
Like Bierstadt, like Moran, Adams often stretched the truth
a bit. He wasn't always a "straight" photographer. He once
admitted that he dodged the crosses in the foreground of his
"Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," his most famous image, to
make them just a bit lighter and more ghostly.
As a young man in California, Adams studied to be a pianist.
The day he died, his family and friends gathered in his
Carmel, Calif., home to hear a recital by his favorite
pianist, Vladimir Ashkenazy. When he talked about the aims
that guided him in art, Adams often spoke of seeking
"spiritual resonance, as moving and profound as great
music." When one looks at Adams' photographs, one can almost
feel him there behind the camera, a maestro in control,
conducting all those boiling clouds and those shafts of
sunlight that seem to shoot, on cue, through the stormy
clouds.
"Purism, in the sense of rigid abstention from any control,
is ridiculous," he wrote. "A great photograph is a full
expression of what one feels about what is being
photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true
expression of what one feels about life in its entirety."
Washington's Harry Lunn, the dealer who helped make Adams
rich, used to say, "there are two markets for
photography--there is one for Ansel Adams, and one for
everybody else."
A single print of "Moonrise" sold recently for $71,500. It
wasn't a unique object; its edition had been "limited" to
942. Suppose each "Moonrise" print is worth that much. That
means that the artist, with one click of his shutter in
1941, had made a golden goose whose golden eggs today have a
combined market value of more than $67 million.
The most popular American artists--Norman Rockwell, Andrew
Wyeth, and Adams, too--tend to lend their art a quality of
almost shameless emotional exaggeration. Most of Wyeth's
pictures are a bit too morbid, most of Rockwell's too
goody-goody. Szarkowski writes that "the natural world," as
seen by Adams, "is infinitely varied in aspect . . . : its
grand vistas and its microcosms are never twice the same . .
. ; the landscape is not only a place, but an event."
Still, something in his pictures suggests a benign
propaganda. No tin cans mar his landscapes. His elegant,
authoritative, perfectly made prints show us what we wish
the world outside to be. He was a true believer. His mission
was to awe.
One great photographer, Paul Strand, helped show Ansel Adams
the path that led to art. Another, Alfred Stieglitz, gave
Adams his first one-man show 46 years ago.
"It is all very beautiful and magical here," Adams wrote
Stieglitz from New Mexico many years ago. What he said of
that landscape could describe the viewer's experience of
Ansel Adam's art:
"The skies and land are so enormous and the detail so
precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated
in a glowing world between the macro and the micro--where
everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the
clocks stopped long ago."
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Photos:
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/adams/W26.jpg
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~tim/images/ansel%20adams%20tree.jpg
http://www.robertkleingallery.com/gallery/albums/adams/aac.jpg
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A Vision as Majestic as Yosemite
FROM: Newsweek (May 7th 1984) ~
By Douglas Davis
In one classic photo after another, Ansel Adams captured the
glories of America.
What is perhaps the most famous of modern photographic
images fell on its creator out of the blue. The photographer
was driving along a road near Santa Fe in 1941, tired and
grumpy after a day of failed shooting. Suddenly he saw a
perfect picture above him -- the moon riding high and white
in the east while the sinking sun in the west illumined a
church and a cemetery with a row of battered white crosses.
He yelled to his companions and slammed on the brakes. He
scrambled for his camera, his film and his tripod, guessed
at the exposure time -- one second -- and pressed the
button. Hands trembling, he pushed a second negative into
his big, bulky camera to try again -- but not in time! The
sun sank in the hills behind, destroying the complex image.
It was days before he could make up a print from his
precious negative, years before he learned, by "burning" and
darkening the sky around the glistening moon, how to perfect
the result to get what he wanted. What the world now
knows -- and loves -- as "Moonrise" was ready, at last, to
be seen.
Last week, Ansel Adams, the creator of"Moonrise" and many
other classic images drawn from the raw American landscape,
died of heart disease in San Francisco; he was 82. His myth
has long since overtaken him. Toward the end of his long
life Adams became the John Wayne of photography. For
millions of ecstatic fans and a few dissenting critics, he
seemed "the perfect eye," no more, no less. He was a man for
whom nature stood still, a man who mastered the "straight"
skills of photographic realism and faithfully documented the
real world, while his contemporaries chased offin search of
fancy technical tricks and sordid, sensational subjects.
Adams himself often denied this postcard view of his work.
"I don't think my pictures tell you about the landscape," he
said. "They aren't realistic." He stressed the importance of
his portraits and still lifes. He argued that his printing
always altered reality. "The negative is like a score in
music," he often said. "The print is the performance."
All in vain.
No matter what he said, the world regarded his
pictures as perfect "windows." Legions of collectors gobbled
up every original print made. And he made vast numbers.
Adams churned out an estimated 13,000 prints in his
lifetime, each one a painstaking performance, often varying
in tone or scale from its predecessors. A particularly large
and luminous "Moonrise" fetched $71,500 at a Los Angeles
gallery in 1981. It set a sales record for a living
photographer and prompted Adams to remark, in his acerbic
manner, "Don't they know I'm not dead yet?"
Prolific:
With his white beard and large Stetson hat, Adams
was a flamboyant presence. He often testified before
Congress in behalf of preserving and protecting the rugged
landscape in the West and pressed his views on a string of
presidents. Though he decried the use of words to explain
his photographs, Adams was a prolific teacher and writer. He
sold more than a million copies of books that he wrote to
define and defend his method of "visualizing" the final
printed image before firing the camera. He had just finished
"Ansel," a long, epic autobiography -- due out next year --
when he died.
The very last book published before his death, "Examples:
The Making of 40 Photographs," may yet prove the most
valuable. Here Adams reveals precisely how he made -- or
rather, invented -- each of his iconic images. The accounts
are filled with vital biographical and technical details,
certain to be relentlessly studied by future students and
historians of the medium. They begin with an earIy visit to
fabled Yosemite Valley in California, his home state. He
describes his early attempts to climb the High Sierra with
Virginia Best, who later became his wife, and his first
successful photographing of the ma-estic, brooding Half Dome
mountain peal after an all-day hike. It was also his first
effort to "visual ize" the end result in his mind's eye by
perfectly juxtaposing the shaded and sunlit halves of the
mountain.
Turning Point:
The book is filled with rebuffs to the Adams
myth. Over and again he stresses the importance of the still
life and the portrait in his work, as though determined to
convince us that he is more than a landscape artist. The
turning point in Adams's career was the founding of the
radical "Group f/64" in 1932, which included Adams, Edward
Weston and Willard Van Dyke. Sickened by the "soft focus"
school of photography that was then fashionable, Adams and
his rebellious friends called for sharp details, focused
through the smallest aperture (f/64) in the lens. From that
period comes an exquisite study of a pale pink rose resting
on a piece of driftwood. There is a charmingly cropped
portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe and a friend giggling against
the Arizona sky. Most telling of all, there is an
unforgettable study of actress Carolyn Anspacher, whose
face, bleached by two foil flash lamps, takes on the
magnificent solidity of pure stone. Though Adams insisted
that he preferred "natural" light, he admitted that the
result, here, impressed him, that it led him to use
artificial light again.
The Anspacher portrait proves Adams to be thoroughly
"modern" in tone and feeling. He is closer to Picasso and
Braque -- his contemporaries -- than to the great landscape
photographers of the last century, with whom he is always
compared. Adams's eye, like that of the cubists or of any
truly modern painter, was always on the final image, raised
to flattened visual perfection. And like them he was
obsessed with his medium, with the exaltation of its, and
his, singular abilities -- to capture the clouds moving
across the sky at twilight, the exact moment when the surf
rolls back toward the sea, the arc made by a rainbow in
Nevada, slicing through two branches in a lonely tree.
In a way, Adams's lifelong quest to define himself and his
intentions ended in failure. The majesty of his "Moonrise"
overpowers the artistry of the man who sighted it on a road
in New Mexico 43 years ago. Some critics have argued that
Adams similarly defeated himself as a conservationist. His
delectable pictures brought mobs of tourists to his beloved
Yosemite, filling the valleys and streams with Coca-Cola
bottles and ice-cream cups. The last pages of his last book
are filled with nostalgia for the lost paradise of his
youth, for "my mountains and streams." But if Adams failed
to make the world see and act as he wished, he left an
immutable record of it behind. His pictures preserve moments
from a time that would otherwise be lost. It is more than
apt that his ashes will be scattered from a mountain in
Yosemite that may someday bear his name. In the end, Ansel
Adams will be seen not as the folk star of photography but
as its-tragic hero.
---
Photos:
http://www.fotonostra.com/biografias/fotos/anseladmas2.jpg
http://www.coolantarctica.com/Shop/ansel_adams/aa_aspens_lg.jpg
http://www.drowlord.com/art/favoriteArtists/ansel_adams/full_size/12_dogwood.jpg
http://www.ralphmag.org/AC/georgia-okeefe503x370.gif