Ansel Adams (38 page)

Technically, Ansel was to have completed his Guggenheim national-park project by the end of 1948, but he stretched it across 1949 to bag Maine’s Acadia National Park; that he was unable to make it to the Everglades in Florida became a lifelong regret. Ansel purposely chose to travel to Maine in November: he wanted stormy weather with surging seas, and he got it, although he found the form of the Maine coastline less striking than that of California’s, so he focused on the ocean, not the land.

The Newhalls acted as his guides on this trip. Since they adored lobster, many meals were centered on that delicacy. But after a visit to a lobster pound, where the surface of the water was thick with green algae, Ansel could no longer enjoy the crustacean, claiming its predominant flavor was penicillin.

The effects of decades of loneliness on Virginia are hard to gauge, since she was rather quiet by nature. But years later, seated at a table at Old Bookbinder’s restaurant in Philadelphia, she recalled how Ansel had talked of his lobster dinners with the Newhalls. Since then, any reference to lobsters had served as a keen personal reminder of just how much she had missed while she stayed at home to parent their children and keep the doors of Best’s Studio open. Thirty-three years later, she was finally eating her first, live Maine lobster. Ansel sat across the table and ordered chowder, warning her that she was making a mistake: the lobster would taste like medicine.

By August 1949, Ansel estimated he had made 2,250 negatives specifically for the Guggenheim project, over and above the 229 he had taken in 1941 and 1942 for the Department of the Interior.
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Nearly twenty-five hundred negatives is an amazing number and accomplishment, all the more so because they were all large format; none was in the convenient and quick 35mm format.

It had been ten years since Ansel’s retrospective at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. A sixty-print show, mostly of work made since that exhibition, opened at that museum in June 1949. Ansel exhibited
Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake
for the first time; a price list stated that all five prints of
Surf Sequence
could be purchased directly from the artist for a hundred dollars.
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The public attended in droves, and the critics ran out of synonyms for “superlative
.
”

Ansel’s Guggenheim odyssey had taken him some seventy-five thousand miles,to twenty-three different national parks and monuments, the preponderance of which were Western.
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His definitive photographic statements on the national parks finally appeared in 1950 with the publication of
My Camera in the National Parks
and
Portfolio Two
:
The National Parks and Monuments.
The book was another beauty, identical in presentation to both
My Camera in Yosemite Valley
and Edward’s
My Camera on Point Lobos
: on heavy paper stock, with special varnish coating each photographic reproduction, the images of large size, the best printing possible, and the whole spiral bound so that the pages could lie completely flat. Ansel dedicated the book to Virginia, acknowledging her patience with his wandering ways in pursuit of his art.
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After Virginia published the three
My Camera
books, the Park Service informed her that it did not approve of this expansion into the publishing business on the part of its concessionaire Best’s Studio. In 1952, Ansel and Virginia formed a separate company, 5 Associates, to act as an independent publishing house. This entity was the publisher of some of Ansel’s books during the 1950s and 1960s, and also printed a whole line of postcards and notecards.
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Portfolio Two
:
The National Parks and Monuments
was issued in an edition of 105, each comprising fifteen prints from negatives made throughout the 1940s. Ansel dedicated the portfolio to the memory of Albert Bender, who had believed in “Ansel the Photographer” right from the beginning.
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Those first years after the end of World War II were the most measurably productive of Ansel’s life, with a parade of excellent books, articles, and portfolios that earned him national recognition and high regard from both the larger world of art and the smaller one of photography. Art critic Alfred Frankenstein proclaimed that Ansel’s 1949 San Francisco exhibition “could easily fill the whole museum without repetition or satiety, for the photographer in question is Ansel Adams.”
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A more deeply personal reaction to his work came to Ansel in a letter from Imogen Cunningham, who wrote, “If anyone admired only one of my prints with the intent interest and appreciation I put on every print except one [photograph not identified] in your present exhibition, I should feel a big reward had come my way. You make us all feel so inadequate and futile. What shall I do.”
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Chapter 15: A Documentary Approach

Ansel wanted to believe he could do it all. He could not be satisfied with becoming merely the most celebrated landscape photographer of all time so long as the whispering voice of Stieglitz in his subconscious argued that it was a time not to photograph rocks and trees but to turn his camera, instead, on the most important subject: man.
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Ansel longed to make his mark in the great documentary tradition with true and revealing photographs of people and their lives. He reasoned that the subject should be his for the taking.

One of the most committed documentary photographers, Dorothea Lange, worked closely with Ansel over many years, although their relationship followed a bumpy road. Born in 1895, Dorothea was seven years older than Ansel. After working for photographer Arnold Genthe and studying at the Clarence White School of Photography in New York, she had stopped in San Francisco in 1918 on her way to the Far East, but found herself stranded when all her money was stolen. She was hired by a photo-finisher and soon met many Bay Area photographers, including Imogen Cunningham and Consuelo Kanaga. Within a year she had opened her own commercial studio and was in demand as a portrait photographer of the city’s well-to-do. She married Maynard Dixon, an illustrator and painter, and had two sons, keeping her portrait business alive all the while.
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One day in 1933, with the Depression at its nadir, Dorothea glanced down from her studio window and noticed a young unemployed laborer standing at the corner, looking about in every direction as if to find a way out of his personal predicament. Moved by the scene, Dorothea picked up her Graflex camera and walked down the steps, out the door, and into her new life as a documentary photographer, later stating, “I was compelled to photograph as a direct response to what was around me.”
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Ansel became Dorothea’s third champion, and maybe her most important, mentioning her name at every opportunity in print as well as in person.
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Her first had been Albert Bender, who encouraged her creative works during the 1920s and was the first person to purchase her photographs based on their artistic merit. Young East Bay photographer and Group
f.
64 leader Willard Van Dyke was her second promoter, writing a glowing, in-depth profile for
Camera Craft
published in 1934.
5
Ansel reproduced
White Angel Breadline
in his 1935 book
Making a Photograph
, the only image by someone other than himself and the first time one of Dorothea’s photographs was published for its intrinsic value, not to illustrate a government report or article. When this image was made, the year was 1933, and fourteen million Americans were out of work.
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A dejected old man stands at the picture’s center, his back turned away from a sea of others who wait for the food being handed out by a woman dubbed the White Angel. The old man’s stained and crushed hat is pulled down low on his forehead; a dark, shapeless coat hangs from his shoulders, which droop with resignation. He hugs an empty tin cup. Here was a picture truly worth a thousand words.

Dorothea was recruited in 1935 onto the first team of photographers for the Resettlement Administration to document the effects of the Depression on America. Joining her were photographers Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and, eventually, Marion Post Wolcott. Their unit, led by Roy Stryker, was renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937. In 1936, Dorothea made the photograph that became an icon for both the Depression and the efforts of the FSA, the deeply poignant
Migrant Mother.
By the project’s end, in 1942, over 270,000 negatives documenting the Depression’s effects had been made, all of which are now archived at the Library of Congress, owned by the American people.
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Weary from a month spent on the road, driving from one place of misery to another, Dorothea paid scant attention to a primitive hand-lettered sign indicating a Pea Pickers Camp. Shrugging it off as just another place like all the others, and eager to get home to her family and out of the rain, she sped straight past. Nagging at her, however, was the feeling that she must go back. After fighting her intuition for twenty miles, she turned around and entered the rain-soaked camp, where she immediately discovered an apparently abandoned mother with her three children.
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Migrant Mother
was a close-up portrait, the last image in the series of exposures that Dorothea made that afternoon. With a dirty, tousled child huddling against each shoulder and a sleeping, grimy-faced baby nestling at her breast, the mother looks off into the distance, her face deeply etched with worry. She seems to be asking herself, how much longer can I continue?

The crops had frozen in the fields, and with nothing to pick, the family had been living on peas and whatever birds the children could catch. The mother had just sold the tires off her car, and they were now stranded and desperate. Dorothea spent just ten minutes photographing, and her only subjects in the entire camp were this one family. She did not write down the mother’s name, merely the information that she was thirty-two years old.

That was the story that Dorothea told, the one that became history, repeated in articles and Lange biographies. The mother did have a name; it was Florence Thompson, and over time she grew angry that her picture kept appearing year after year in various publications for which she received no credit or money. Her version of the story, not known until after Dorothea’s death, was quite different.
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Thompson, her boyfriend, and her six children had been driving from the Imperial Valley, where they had picked beets, north to Watsonville to harvest lettuce. When their car broke down, the boyfriend and her two oldest sons had deposited the rest of the family at the Pea Pickers Camp, building them a rough shelter before heading into the nearest town on foot to get parts for the car. She had not sold the tires, and they stayed in the camp only that one day.
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Dorothea had posed the subject. This was not a problem for a portrait photographer, which she certainly had been, but it broke the implicit rules of documentary photography, which purports to tell the whole truth and nothing but. Dorothea made six exposures; in each successive image, something concrete has been changed—a chair moved, child removed, the baby nursing in only the third frame, the two other children directed to turn away from the camera in the last exposure.
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Thompson’s life did not get much better, but she and her children persevered. She became a union organizer in the camps. After they were grown, her children came to believe that she was unhappy with Dorothea’s portrait because it portrayed her as helpless and hopeless, rather than as the strong and proud woman they knew. Many have mistakenly credited Lange’s photograph with saving the family: soon after she sent these images to Washington, ten tons of emergency food were shipped to the camp. By then, Thompson and her family were long gone.
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Lange created an instant icon for the Depression with
Migrant Mother
, although today we might be tempted, given her staging of its creation, to see it more as a docudrama. Like Alexander Gardner, who moved the body of a sharpshooter for pictorial effect, Lange used a real location, real people, and a real situation but believed their message could be better communicated if she rearranged things just a bit. For Dorothea, the end justified the means: later Ansel would say that some of her photographs, including this one, were among the greatest ever made.
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Unable to process her negatives while on the road—which was where she was most of the time—Dorothea hired Ansel in 1935 on a per diem basis to develop her films and make occasional prints. She soon came into conflict with her boss, Stryker, who insisted that all FSA photographers send their undeveloped films directly to him in Washington. Dorothea rebelled, explaining that she needed to know what she was getting. Ansel agreed that Stryker’s rule was not in her best interests and met with him on her behalf. He was at least partially successful: Stryker agreed to let Dorothea (or Ansel, as her assistant) develop the negatives and make three prints from each. All would then be sent to Washington, with one print from each negative to be returned to Dorothea.
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