Ansel Adams (30 page)

Feeling like a boomerang, Ansel returned home to San Francisco on October 1 and then headed to Yosemite for just a few days before leaving on a two-month-long trip to the Southwest for a full slate of commercial assignments. The Newhalls cabled tragic news: their baby had died in utero at eight months’ gestation. Nancy was told that it had drowned inside her in her hemorrhaging blood; an emergency cesarean section had been necessary to save her life.
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As soon as he heard, Ansel telegraphed his deep concern to both of them, following up with a good long, affectionate letter.
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On December 7, 1941, as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Ansel was photographing a new Ted Spencer–designed building.
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Ansel hoped to be commissioned into the military so that his photographic skills could be directly applied toward winning the war; since he would be turning forty in February 1942 and was seen by the government as the sole support of six people (Virginia, Michael, Anne, Charlie, Ollie, and Mary), he was not considered draft material.

Around the time of Ansel’s birthday, a phone call from Edward Steichen buoyed his spirits. A director of aerial reconnaissance during World War I, discharged with a bevy of hero’s medals, the sixty-two-year-old Steichen had been commissioned as a lieutenant commander at his own insistence. His mission was to form a special photographic unit to document the Navy’s use of aircraft. Steichen offered Ansel the job of building and directing a state-of-the-art photographic darkroom and laboratory in Washington, D.C., where the unit’s films would be processed and printed. Ansel replied that he would be honored to serve in that capacity, under two conditions: he asked to be commissioned as an officer and advised Steichen that he would not be free until July l.
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To his increasing consternation, Ansel heard nothing further from Steichen, even after he cabled him in June to request clarification of the situation based on their earlier discussion.
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Ansel did not fully fathom the exigencies of wartime. Steichen waited for no one; he needed his men immediately. All five members of his unit, who came to be known as Steichen’s Chickens since he acted very much the mother hen to his brood, were commissioned as officers and working by early April.
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The military decided it could find some use for Ansel as a civilian and gave him a variety of assignments that he judged less than central to the winning of the war. Frustrated, he went from job to job, teaching photography to the troops at Fort Ord, making prints of top secret negatives of the Japanese forces in the Aleutian Islands, documenting the Ahwahnee Hotel before it was transformed into a Navy convalescent hospital, and photographing soldiers on maneuvers in Yosemite Valley.
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Artillery guns arrayed before Half Dome provided an eerie subject.
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Beaumont, meanwhile, knowing that his time as a civilian was limited, curated a string of exhibitions under the banner of the Department of Photography, including a wonderful little show in December 1941 called
American Photographs at $10,
where original prints by Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, László Moholy-Nagy, Arnold Newman, Charles Sheeler, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston could be purchased for a mere ten bucks.
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(Oh, for a time machine and just a hundred dollars!)

Ansel returned to New York in later February to oversee
Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier.
Although Mathew Brady has often received credit for many of the greatest Civil War photographs, Beaumont and other historians knew that Brady himself had made few exposures (for one thing, he was nearly blind). Instead, he employed a brilliant cadre of photographers who went out on assignment, bringing back negatives that Brady copyrighted under his own name. One of these assistants, Alexander Gardner, finally rebelled, leaving Brady in 1863 to become the official photographer for the Army of the Potomac. Gardner in turn hired other photographers, including Timothy O’Sullivan and George Barnard, to create the greatest photographic document of the Civil War, the two-volume
Photographic Sketchbook of the War.
Each photographer received full credit for his pictures.
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For much of photography’s history, people have assumed that photographs never lie. Beaumont was no less susceptible than most to this fallacy, vaunting the medium’s inherent ability to tell the truth through the example of Gardner’s famous
Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg, 1863.
In this image, a young soldier lies dead, sprawled faceup, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open, frozen in the motion of his last breath; his jacket is unbuttoned to reveal white shirttails, his rifle propped against the rocky lair that ineffectively sheltered him. This photograph has long been an icon of war and death, and Beaumont’s reaction to it was heartfelt:

Gardner’s dead sharpshooter, his long rifle gleaming by his side, is not imagined. This man lived; this is the spot where he fell; this is how he looked in death. There lies the great psychological difference between photography and the other graphic arts; this is the quality which photography can impart more strongly than any other picture making.
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Is the power of the photograph diminished today by our knowledge that Gardner moved the body, arranging it to better satisfy his sense of composition? The viewer’s perception of an image is completely altered when the possibility of artifice literally enters the picture. The truth about photography is that almost from its inception, photographers have manipulated subject matter, negatives, and prints, whether by moving a soldier’s body, scratching detail into the emulsion, printing clouds from a different negative into a previously cloudless sky, or printing parts of several negatives into a seamless, though far from real, whole. Now, with the technology of digital imaging, no photograph can be trusted to tell the truth about a situation.

After years of further research and experience, Beaumont became more than wary of any photograph’s veracity. One of his most popular and often repeated lectures was “The Unreality of Photography,” in which he revealed and addressed the medium’s inherent nature.
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Ansel firmly believed in the righteousness of photography to reveal not the obvious truths, but those that lie deeper, and that may be discovered by a photographer with a sensitive eye coupled with a searching mind. For Ansel, it was one thing to increase an image’s power by manipulating tonal values and emphasis through framing and lens choice; he would have thought it quite another to digitally move Half Dome so that it might provide a more “satisfactory” composition.

William Henry Jackson, born in 1843, had photographed the American West for the Hayden Survey between 1870 and 1878; his images of Yellowstone had been influential in the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872.
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Ansel and Beaumont found the ninety-eight-year-old Jackson living in a New York hotel, very much alive and “full of beans.”
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Again dissatisfied with the quality of older prints, Ansel borrowed a group of Jackson negatives and used them to make “new and improved” prints for the exhibition.

When
Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier
opened on March 3, 1942, Jackson was the guest of honor. Making the rounds of the exhibit, he stopped in front of a mammoth eighteen-by-twenty-two-inch plate photograph of an old cart at the Laguna Pueblo and, remarking that it was quite good, asked who had made it. Because Jackson was hard of hearing, Ansel shouted back that he, Jackson, had. With a twinkle in his eye, the old man allowed as how now he remembered.
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When they came to a group of O’Sullivan photographs, Ansel yelled to ask if Mr. Jackson had known him. Jackson nodded sure, adding that he and O’Sullivan had often traded negatives. At that remark, Ansel caught Beaumont’s eye, knowing that this piece of information would forever bedevil his historian’s soul.
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McAlpin was commissioned as lieutenant commander in the Navy and assigned a desk job in Washington, much to his frustration. His absence from New York was keenly felt. As Beaumont’s draft number came closer to being called, he enlisted, hoping that way to get a better assignment. In August 1942, he left for basic training as a first lieutenant in the Army Air Forces.
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With Beaumont’s abrupt departure, Nancy was appointed assistant in charge of photography by a reluctant museum administration, which would have preferred simply to close the department for the war’s duration.
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Ansel assured Nancy that as long as he was free to do so, he would help her however he could. Nancy kept the department alive through the war years, although its power as an independent entity, fragile even at the war’s beginning, was steadily eroded.

From boot camp in Florida, Beaumont was sent to Air Force Intelligence School in Pennsylvania. He called and begged Nancy (who needed no begging) to come down for his graduation on October 31; both had a premonition that he would be shipped out immediately. Nancy asked the museum for a short leave of absence and was berated for even considering taking such a trip when she was so new at the job. Heartsick, she wrote Ansel about her predicament.
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A true friend to both Nancy and Beaumont, he told her to stick by her guns. He affirmed her priorities—Beaumont was number one and photography was number two—and reminded her that she was the center of her husband’s world.
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In the end, Nancy went to Beaumont, and the museum fumed, but nothing more. Ansel held dear Beaumont and Nancy’s relationship, so different from his own marriage.
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Just before Beaumont left for Egypt, and then Italy, where he worked as an analyst of photographic aerial reconnaissance (a role of vital importance in the winning of the war), he, Nancy, and Ansel drew up a five-year plan for the department. They had not yet presented even one solo exhibition. They had long hoped that the first photographer to be so honored would be Stieglitz, but they finally had to conclude that Stieglitz would continue his teasing game of “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t” forever. They decided to offer retrospectives to Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel, in that order.
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In early 1942, Edward Steichen had begun his move to take over the department. Shortly before Steichen reentered the Navy, McAlpin invited him to direct a major exhibition for MoMA, with the assurance that he would have “carte blanche.”
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Neither the Newhalls nor Ansel had been consulted about this unilateral decision. Steichen took the proffered ball and ran all one hundred yards as impresario of the massive exhibit
Road to Victory.
Featuring a text by Carl Sandburg, Steichen’s son-in-law, and designed by Herbert Bayer, formerly of the Bauhaus, the exhibit hosted huge crowds from May 21 to October 4, 1942. The museum touted
Road to Victory
as a “spectacular use of photomurals scaled and planned in space and sequence to arouse an emotional response.”
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Even the art critic of the
New York Times
responded as intended, finding it all “magnificent and stirring and timely . . . A portrait of a nation, heroic in stature . . . As such needless to say, it is art.”
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Plain and simple, it was propaganda for the good guys.

In the estimation of Beaumont, Nancy, and Ansel,
Road to Victory
was awful and did not belong in a museum of art. They could not see the similarities between it and their own
Image of Freedom.
From their perspective, there were huge differences between the two shows, first in the person of Steichen himself, whose very touch desecrated the medium; and second, in Steichen’s lack of respect for the essential qualities of a photographic print, and his insistence on enlarging many images to such an extreme that the photographic grain took on a pointillist effect.
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Because of the war, Ansel was unable to travel to New York for nearly two years; in that time, letters had to suffice. After his long absence, he arrived at MoMA in April 1944 loaded with energy and enthusiasm, planning on a two-month stay. Never one to waste a moment, let alone a day, Ansel bounced back and forth between the Delaware Camera Club and MoMA, presenting a total of ten lectures in ten days, all sellouts.

To celebrate its fifteenth birthday that May, MoMA gave over its entire building to one exhibition that included all the departments,
Art in Progress.
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Ansel assisted Nancy with photography’s contribution, 274 prints from the young department’s growing permanent collection of more than two thousand. Their selection reflected the content of the collection itself, which was strongest in the work of contemporary American masters from Stieglitz onward. Stieglitz had fifteen prints in the show, Strand twelve, Weston twenty-five, and Ansel nineteen.

Over many dinners at the Newhalls’ favorite restaurant, Café St. Denis (also a Stieglitz haunt), just down the block from their apartment, with the sad murmur of homesick French men and women singing nostalgically over their
vin rouge
in the background, Ansel began to confide to Nancy his life’s story and his hopes for his future. This was the start of their work together on his biography.
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