MR. ADAMS AND ME

Jerry Harkins

Let it be acknowledged at the outset that Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was one of the greatest of American photographers. His black and white landscapes are without peer and his portraits and still lifes are invariably revealing. His artistry combined a unique visual imagination with equally unique field and darkroom disciplines. Not everyone likes his images, the most famous of which tend to be too romantic for some. But everyone recognizes his genius, myself included.

There is, however, an artificial quality apparent in many of his landscapes as though he was trying to show the world not as it is but as it should be or might be if he were in charge. It is a quality that often inflates one’s first impression but that turns out to be superficial and, in the end, embarrassing. Take, for example, his signature image, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.

Adams was driving south on what is now U.S. 84 after what he called a “discouraging” day in the Chama Valley. Around 4:00 PM he came upon the scene and instantly visualized it as a photograph. He very quickly set up his 8 X 10 view camera but could not find a light meter. Fortunately, “I suddenly realized I knew the luminance of the moon—250 c/ft2. [1] Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this luminance on Zone VII; 60 c/ft2 therefore fell on Zone V, and the exposure with the filter factor of 3X was about 1 second at f/32 with ASA 64 film.” [2] Even so, the negative proved very difficult to print in a way that would yield something close to his visualization. The concept and the physics were so out of whack that every important factor had to be manipulated in the darkroom. He burned and he dodged. He experimented with various developer-to-water sequences and was still working on it several years later, re-fixing and re-washing the negative and treating the lower section with a dilute solution of Kodak IN-5 intensifier.

He actually knew the luminance of the moon! Are you properly dazzled? Of course you are—at least until you start thinking about it. To begin with, Adams may have imagined the scene as it appears on the print, but the reality was very different. The sky was not black. It was 55 minutes before sunset. The sky was still blue, probably light blue, and the clouds were probably beginning to glow red. He was using a deep yellow filter (Wratten No. 15G) which darkened the sky without affecting the green in the shrubbery. The filter did not, however, render the sky black. We do not need to guess how much grayer it became because, in the end, it was the contrast between the sky and the clouds and the sky and the moon that Adams was interested in. He says the clouds were “two or three times as bright as the moon” which may be true but both were bathed in the light of the sun. And neither was made brighter by the filter which darkened them slightly if anything. The contrast in the print is wrong. The crosses in the cemetery were no brighter than the wall of the structure behind them or the rear wall of the church on the left, and the vegetation in the foreground was not nearly so dark. Overall, the contrast, on which the impact of the image is totally dependent, was nowhere near as high as it is in the prints.

What you have here is a striking photograph that was made almost entirely in the mind of the photographer. The camera, for all the technical talk, was incidental. I suspect a pin camera would have done as well or almost as well. I have no objection to this. Nor do I have a problem with the photographer’s visualization any more than I do with Picasso’s three-headed mistress. I really don’t care about the tensile strength of Picasso’s palate knife or even the dimensions of his brushes even if the artist thinks I need to know it. In the present case, we are dealing with what was in the artist’s head and what the results communicate to the rest of us.

Moonrise is the story of a very particular moment which is not the moment it was taken, but some moment the real moment inspired in the photographer. Whatever else it is, it is a night story, a midnight story: The pitch black sky hovers ominously over everything, occupying more than half of the image area. The laws of nature are suspended. Not even the light of the nearly full moon brightens that imaginary sky (just as the real moon did not an hour before sunset). The clouds and the grave markers are lit. We know intellectually their glow comes from the sun but that knowledge plays no part in the psychological impact of the image. It is a night image. Anything glowing must have its own internal source of light. The feeling is eerie and maybe a little scary. This is surrealism masquerading as realism or, perhaps, romanticism. The important thing, though, is that Adams visualized it all while riding along gazing out a car window—or maybe not. Maybe it was similar to William Wordsworth’s observation that, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” In Adams’ case, the tranquility was in the darkroom which, arguably, is where he “discovered” the photograph.

Monolith, The Face of Half Dome is another image made mainly in the darkroom. Taken in early afternoon on April 17, 1927, it is almost as surrealistic as Moonrise. Once again, the dark sky was created mainly in the lab. (A yellow filter again contributed to this.) The shadow on the right of the monolith is hard to explain. According to Adams, at noon the monolith was in full shadow. Nearly a month after the equinox, that’s hard to believe but, two hours later, the sun was slightly lower in the sky. This calls attention to what seems to be a shadow consisting of two shades of gray while the formation in the lower right hand corner seems to be in full sunlight. Moreover, the shadows of the trees on that formation suggest the sun is at the right rear of the picture. Why then is the right side of the monolith still in deep if not full shadow? The precisely perpendicular border of the shadow divides the image into two parts, light and dark. The same precision also suggests the line was created by a poor job of burning.

This is an early image and, unlike Moonrise, it seems to have no meaning or message beyond being a generic pretty picture. [3] Adams was attached to it, he says, because it was the first time his visualization was realized exactly in the final print. But what visualization? Is he talking about “visualizing” a perfectly straight line dividing the picture in two? I think not. This was a hard picture to take if what caught his eye was the texture of the monolith. My guess is that is precisely what Adams wanted to show and he was elated when he saw he had succeeded. Once again, I suspect his “visualizations” come largely or wholly after the fact, not before it.

Sand Dunes, Sunrise is one of the master’s greatest photographs. It is not at all romantic, although, like Moonrise, it conveys an unsettling mood. It is a hard-edged, almost abstract image taken near Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley in 1948. Unlike Moonrise, this was carefully planned well in advance and, this time, what you see is pretty much the scene as it actually was. The lab work is incidental. Here you see what happens when the process of visualization unfolds pretty much as Adams describes it. He knew in advance that the contrasts on the dunes at sunrise would create a metaphor for the feeling one experiences at moments of high anticipation.

The few minutes just before and just after the sun comes up over the horizon are what Maya Angelou called the “pulse of morning.” [4] During that brief interval, the temperature drops noticeably. In summer, the birds have been singing for about a half hour but now they pause. The wind, if there is any, freshens. If it is calm, a breeze comes up. Experiencing this tiny drama, an observer senses both the possibilities and the uncertainties of a new day. What Adams has done is to re-create these feelings using a straightforward image of a range of shades of gray with just enough context to prod the viewer. You know this is a real landscape, not an abstraction. The photographer took special care to reveal the sand ripples at the bottom of the image in what appears to be an opening in the earth. The ripples are what cues you that the scene is real. Moreover, I believe, they speak to the transience of both the moment and its meaning (although I am not oblivious to the shape of that opening). This is a beautiful image and, if I am right about its meaning, it is also a brilliant one. It is not necessary that Adams’ visualization include my “pulse of morning” analysis, only that his emotional state be consistent with it. The artist feels what the critic then tries to put into words.

Mirror Lake is one of several Adams images of the large lake-like widening in the Merced River about a mile from the trailhead behind the Ahwahnee Hotel. The fullness of the lake tells us this must have been springtime. The brightest light seems to be coming from the upper right. Assuming it is morning, the camera then is looking north. [5] It seems that little or nothing was done to change what the lens saw and it may be that Adams did not even use a filter. In other words, this is an objective photograph in the ordinary sense of the word. What he saw is pretty much what you get. Which brings us to a central problem: just exactly what is Adams trying to do?

Along with other giants of American photography in the 1920’s and 30’s, Adams thought and wrote a great deal about the medium, trying to establish an identity for it as part of the cultural scene. Naturally there were competing schools of thought and disagreements were intense. In 1934, Adams wrote, “Photography is an objective expression; a record of actuality. The photographer who thoroughly comprehends his medium visualizes his subject [as] a thing-in-itself.” [6] And Mirror Lake is objective for the most part. [7] So are his portraits and still lifes—in some cases they are painfully objective.

Joyce Yuki Nakamura, Manzanar Relocation Center, c. 1942 is a thoroughly objective picture of a pretty little girl, obviously of Japanese descent but with the long curly hair and Peter Pan collar speaking of American acculturation. A viewer must inevitably enjoy the image because it is so cloyingly cute. It is not until you realize that the child is an internee in a U.S. concentration camp that you experience any strong emotional reaction. You may then read meaning into several aspects of the picture, the lopsided smile, the partial closure of the right eye, the fancy blouse.

Contrast the portrait of Joyce Yuki Nakamura with the thoroughly non-objective photograph of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay by Berenice Abbott. Millay was a true Greenwich Village bohemian known as much for her voracious bisexual exploits as for her exquisitely sensitive poetry. The image is meant, I think, to highlight the latter and Abbott has posed it brilliantly with the man tailored shirt and tie contrasting sharply with the distant expression on the subject’s face. The same expression appears in many Millay pictures including the famous one of the 22-year old poet under a dogwood tree at Vassar by Arnold Genthe. But it is rare to see her teeth and the slight overbite that suggests vulnerability. The clincher is the knee that tells you she is wearing a skirt. The apparently masculine suit is a façade, a suit, if you will, of armor. Abbott always included the knee in the prints she made. Other darkroom technicians did not, thereby unbalancing the composition and betraying its meaning.

The difference between the two photographs is stark; the meaning of Joyce Yuki is totally dependent on the words of its title and the viewer has to know what a “relocation center” is. The meaning of the Millay portrait is entirely in the photograph. It requires no words. It may help to know who the subject was but, possibly, words would actually detract from the meaning. It is as much a product of the photographer’s conscious planning and intelligence as Moonrise or Sand Dunes and every bit as successful.

As acknowledged in the first sentence, Adams is among the greatest of American photographers. He is also the best known. Twenty-six years after his death, both his coffee table books and his technical works remain best sellers and a print of Moonrise recently sold at auction for $360,000, almost 90 times the price of an Abbott print. He deserves the gratitude of those of us who enjoy his work and those of us who try to learn from it. At the same time, it does no harm to acknowledge with Professor Harold Hill that there is a fine line between magic and flim-flam and that Mr. Adams was a masterful practitioner of both.

Notes

1. Candela per square foot. Until 1948, the measure of luminosity varied but was based on a specified candle or flame. Today it is defined as the luminous intensity (the amount of light emitted or reflected), in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 X 1012 hertz (a yellowish green) and that has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per steradian. (A steradian is a standardized cone-shaped solid emanating from the center of a sphere and, thus, a pin source of light. There are 12.5664 steradians in a sphere.) In other words, luminosity is the brightness of light and is independent of the source’s context, in this case, the sky. The source in Moonrise is the sun the light of which is reflected by the moon. The moon is a tiny fraction of a sterdian so its radiant intensity is a tiny fraction of 1/683 watts. What is more interesting is that business about c/ft2 falling on Zone 5. I’m not expert in Adams’ zone system but it seems a long way from 250 (Zone 7) to 60 (Zone 5) to an exposure factor of 3X with his Wrattan No. 15 (G) filter to the actual exposure. Especially if the 250 is wrong (I suspect he misplaced a decimal point and the actual figure should be 2,500). Adams of course was not the first or last great artist to bullshit people about what he did. Nor was he unaware of what he called “the compelling impulse of photographers…to discuss equipment and materials…down to the smallest detail.” It’s the fine line between the detail and the bullshit that gave him trouble.

2. Adams, Ansel, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Little, Brown and Co., 1983, p. 41. I’m not sure about that ASA 64. The American Standards Association (now the American National Standards Institute) did not get into photographic standards until after 1946 so my theory is he meant to say “an ASA equivalent of 64.” That would imply a fairly fast film for the time but still agonizingly slow given that both the earth and the moon were moving.

3. Even though Half Dome is the definitive image of Yosemite, this picture could have been taken anywhere. Nothing jumps out and says Yosemite or Half Dome. Adams, of course, had climbed the Dome frequently and knew it intimately. Thus, he recognized this face of it but did not bother to communicate that to the rest of us except in the title he gave it.

4. “On The Pulse Of Morning,” Delivered January 20, 1993 at the Inauguration of President Clinton.

5. There are several untestable hypotheses here. It may be that I have invented the evidence to support a preconceived opinion about the air being not nearly as clear in the afternoon.

6. From an article titled “An exposition of my photographic technique” quoted in Eisinger Joel, Trace and Transformation: American Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period, University of New Mexico Press, 1995 p. 68.

7. The main exception is the reflection of the tall tree in the center of the image. The tree itself is without detail, its reflection is highly detailed—exactly the opposite of what you might expect. The water at that point is considerably brighter than the sky which suggests that Adams made it brighter specifically to bring out the detail. Not any easy thing to do.

The photographs discussed in this essay are all readily available on the internet and have been omitted here for copyright reasons and because they need to be seen in a size larger than possible here.