Ansel Adams: The Role of the Artist in the Environmental Movement

by Robert Turnage
Reprinted courtesy of the Wilderness Society from The Living Wilderness, March 1980
In the history of American conservation, few have worked as long and as effectively to preserve wilderness
and to articulate the wilderness idea as Ansel Adams. Entering his seventh decade of active involvement,
he remains as much a crusader. Wilderness has always been for Adams a mystique: a valid, intangible,
non-materialistic experience. Through his photographs he has touched countless people with a sense of
that mystique and a realization of the importance of preserving the last remaining wilderness lands. This
inspirational legacy of Adams art constitutes his major significance as an environmentalist. In addition, he
has been an important activist in the work of several conservation groups and has personally lobbied
congressmen, cabinet officers and Presidents on behalf of wilderness values.

Ansel Adams was born on February 20, 1902, in San Francisco and grew up in the dunes area by the
Golden Gate . In those days the Pacific surf and fog were a much more evident influence than the
surrounding city. Ansels earliest memory is of lying in his carriage watching low fog move across the sky.

Because the lad found difficulty fitting in at school, his parents decided to have him tutored at home. The
lack of siblings and schoolmates may well have helped turn him early to an interest in nature. As a
youngster, he has recalled, he was always more responsive to wild environments than to urbanthe surf
and dunes, the storms and fogs of the Golden Gate, the thickets of Lobos Creek and the grim headlands
of Lands End. As a small child I had played in the crisp winter snow at Carson City, and seen the stately
oaks at Atherton on the hot, brittle fields rising towards the San Mateo Hills and beyond to the madrone-
lush folds of the Santa Cruz Mountains. A few months among the beaches and rain forests of Puget Sound
had made indelible the scents of sea and spruce, tar and sawdust. Such early images are often as clear
and compelling in memory as the actual vistas of today.

At 12 he began to play the piano. His talent quickly became apparent, and it was decided that he should
take lessons. Thus began years of musical training that would later carry over into the precise craft and
interpretive subtlety of the photographer.

Ansels father, Charles H. Adams, a businessman who in his own youth had been discouraged from
pursuing a passionate love of nature and science, was determined that his son would be free to follow his
own interests, wherever they might lead. So in 1915 he bought Ansel a years pass to the Panama-Pacific
Exposition. Almost every day that year the 13-year-old wandered through the fair, experiencing whichever
of the myriad exhibits attracted his fancy. He also began to take pictures of the fair and of the Golden Gate
area with a Brownie box camera. He would then painstakingly assemble them in albums which he later
described as photo-diaries.

The following spring came a more momentous experiencea first visit to Yosemite National Park . A
month before the great event I was given Hutchings In the Heart of the Sierra , and pored over it, building
fantasies of Indians and bears, of huge waterfalls and precipicesof remoteness and magic. The known
qualities of the sea merged with the unknown qualities of rivers and waterfalls, the redwoods of Santa Cruz
with the Sequoia-gods of Wawona. The days became prisons of impatience and restlessness. Finally, the
train at Oakland ! All day long we rode, over the Coast Range down across the heat-shimmering San
Joaquin Valley , up through the even hotter foothills to the threshold of Yosemite . I can still feel the furnace
blasts of air buffeting through the coaches, and hear the pounding, roaring exhaust of the locomotive
reechoing from the steep walls of the Merced Canyon . Then arrival at El Portal, and a night spent in an
oven of a hotel, with the roar of the river beating through the sleepless hours until dawn. And finally, in the
bright morning, the grand, dusty, jolting ride in an open motor bus up the deepening, greening gorge to
Yosemite .

That first impression of the valleywhite water, azaleas, cool fir caverns, tall pines and stolid oaks, cliffs
rising to undreamed-of heights, the poignant sounds and smells of the Sierrawas a culmination of
experience so intense as to be almost painful. From that day in 1916 my life has been colored and
modulated by the great earth gesture of the Sierra.

With his Brownie camera he eagerly set out to explore the new-found beauty of the valley. Returning to
San Francisco with a consuming desire to learn photography, he went to work for a photo-finisher. The
following year he was again photographing Yosemite and, indeed, he has photographed Yosemite every
year since. In 1918 he had his first intoxicating trip into the high country of the Sierra under the trail-wise
guidance of Francis Holman, an ornithologist. From this trip, much to the horror of his mother, he came
back with a wispy beard. Obligingly he shaved it off, but in later years his big black beard would become a
trademark.
The next summer Ansel got a job as custodian of the Sierra Clubs Le Conte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite
Valley . Despite myriad duties he found ample time for photography and early morning runs up to Glacier
Point. These early years also afforded him an opportunity to meet some of the great conservationists of the
day, among them Joseph N. LeConte, William E. Colby and Stephen T. Mather, first director of the National
Park Service. Ansel continued working summers at the Le Conte Lodge until 1924. In 1925 and 1926 he
accompanied the Le Conte family on long journeys into the Kings River Sierra. Through the 1920s he
made many climbs in the Sierra high country, including several first ascents. Francis Holman and I would
scramble, he recalled in an interview in Backpacker . We used window sash cord, an eighth of an inch
thick and very strong. Of course, if one of us fell, it would have cut us in twoIn a sense, its a miracle Im
alive because we did have some hazardous experiences and didnt know anything about climbing
technique.

Through these early high-country experiences, Ansel became aware of aesthetic qualities in the
wilderness that he had not anticipated. I was climbing the long ridge west of Mt. ClarkI was suddenly
arrested in the long crunching push up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light .I saw
more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand
shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the
peaks. There area no words to convey the moods of those moments.

By this time his photography was becoming increasingly important, exercising a claim on his time and
energy that was competing with a beckoning career as a concert pianist. One spring day in 1927 he
perched precariously on a cliff with his camera and the unwieldy photographic glass plates of the day. He
hoped to capture an imposing perspective of the face of Half Dome, the snow-laden high country and a
crystal-clear sky. Only two unexposed plates remained. With one he made a conventional exposure.
Suddenly, he realized that he wanted an image with more emotional impact. I knew so little about
photography then, it was a miracle I got anything. But that was the first time I realized how the print was
going to lookwhat I now call visualizationand was actually thinking about the emotional effect of the
imageI began to visualize the black rock and deep sky. I really wanted to give it a monumental, dark
quality. So I used the last plate I had with a No. 29-F red filterand got this exciting picture.

A half-century later, Monoliththe Face of Half Dome remains one of Adams most compelling studies. It
bears clear witness to that pointed awareness of the light which he experienced on the ridge of Mt.
Clark .

In 1927 Ansel met Albert Bender, a perceptive and generous patron of the arts. Bender took to the young
photographer at once. Recognizing an extraordinary talent, he proposed that Ansel issue a collection of his
mountain photographs. The result, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras , was stunningly beautiful. Thanks
to Benders encouragement, Ansel became aware for the first time of the potential of a photographic
career. He also found a degree of financial security, enough so that the next year he married his Yosemite
sweetheart, Virginia Best, daughter of the painter Harry Best, who had a studio in the valley. For years
young Ansel had come to the Best home to practice on their piano. In Virginia he found someone sharing
his interests in both music and the natural world.

Through Bender, Ansel found stimulating friendships with poets and writers such as Robinson Jeffers and
Mary Austin. He made the photographs to illustrate a Mary Austin text on the Taos Pueblo, receiving equal
billing with the author. This was unusual for a photographer in those days and a measure of how rapidly he
was distinguishing himself. Yet he was still ambivalent about the future. Many of his friends insisted that
photography, unlike music, was not capable of expressing the finer emotions of art. But there was
persuasive counter-evidence. On one of his visits to Taos he met the noted photographer Paul Strand.
Chancing to see some of Strands negative of the New Mexico landscape, Ansel was mesmerized. On the
strength of the negatives aloneit was sometime later that he first saw Strand s printsAnsel became
convinced of the expressive power of photography and resolved to devote himself entirely to its challenge.

The perception of photography as too mechanical and realistic to be a truly fine art was then still
widespread. Partly in reaction, pictorial photographers tried in various ways to soften realism, resorting to
soft-focus lenses, brush strokes on the negative, soft-texture papersanything that would make their
photographs not look like photographs. But some independent spirits such as Edward Weston were taking
the opposite tack, producing sharply focused pictures and printing on glossy papers. Such prints retain
most of the original negative quality. Subterfuge becomes impossible. Every defect is exposed, all
weakness equally with strength. I want the sharp beauty a lens can so exactly render, said Weston.

Ansel realized that, as Imogen Cunningham said, there are fewer good photographers than painters.
There is a reason. The machine does not do the whole thing. He also realized that the two-dimensional,
monotone nature of a black and white photographic image was in itself a radical departure from reality and
needed no further embellishments. He was readily converted to Westons and Strand s approach. Looking
over many of his negatives, he saw he would have to start over. After 1931 he steadfastly objected to use
of the word pictorial in reference to his work.

With West Coast photographers of a similar bent, among them Weston, Cunningham, and Willard Van
Dyke, he formed Group f /64. The number designates a very small lens aperture capable of producing an
image with maximum definition. The groups advocacy of straight photography had a revolutionary
influence on attitudes in the world of photography.

Running counter to the work of Adams and Weston in the 1930s was another viewthat artistic themes
should be socially significant, meaning directly concerned with mans works and ideologies. Many,
especially East Coast and European intellectuals, felt Ansels love of the beauty of nature to be
sentimental and nave. French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was saying, The world is going to
pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks! In his response to such criticism,
Weston spoke for Adams as well as himself. It seems so utterly nave that landscapenot that of the
pictorial schoolis not considered of social significance when it has a far more important bearing on the
human race of any locale than excrescences called cities. By landscapes, I mean every physical aspect of
a regionweather, soil, wildflowers, mountain peaksand its effect on the psyche and physical
appearance of the people.

In 1933 Adams met the old master Alfred Stieglitz, who exerted a further clarifying influence on his artistic
direction. Adams wrote to Paul Strand, I am perplexed, amazed and touched at the impact of his force on
my own spirit. I would not have believed before I met him that a man could be so psychically and
emotionally powerful. Stieglitz was very impressed with young Adams and his photographs. He introduced
him to the artists OKeeffe, Marin and Dove and presented a one-man show of Ansels work at his New
York studio, An American Place, in 1936. Adams was the first new photographer Stieglitz had introduced to
the public at An American Place since Paul Strand in 1917. In a letter to Ansel in 1938 Stieglitz said, It is
good for me to know that there is Ansel Adams loose somewhere in the world of ours. Lovers of
photography were not the only ones glad to have Ansel Adams loose in this world. Lovers of wilderness
echoed this feeling. Referring to Adams relationship to the wilderness, David Brower remarked: That
Ansel Adams came to be recognized as one of the great photographers of this century is a tribute to the
places that informed him.

Brower, first executive director of the Sierra Club, once wrote: It is hard to tell which has shaped the other
moreAnsel Adams or the Sierra Club. What does matter is that the mutuality was important. The Adams
tie with what was to become one of the nations best-known conservation organizations began to assume
significance in the early 1930s when Ansel served as a guide and official photographer on the clubs
annual high-country outings. On several of these trips he produced mock Greek tragedies with such
exuberant titles as Exhaustos and The Trudgin Women. On the 1934 outing the group decided to
christen a beautiful unnamed peak Mt. Ansel Adams in honor of their irrepressible playwright-
photographer.

In 1932-4 Virginia Adams served on the Sierra Clubs board of directors. Then someone nominated Ansel,
which precipitated a humorous situation. Ansel insisted that Virginia , having done a fine job on the board,
should remain on it. Virginia insisted with equal force that she was too busy with their baby son Michael
and that it was Ansels turn. In the end Ansel was elected. He quickly proved such a valuable member that
he repeatedly was reelected by the club membership until his voluntary retirement in 1971.

Adams was chosen in 1936 to represent the club at a national and state parks conference in Washington
to be attended by the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture. The club wanted him to present its
proposal for a wilderness park in the Kings River Sierra, feeling that his photographs of the area would be
very persuasive. The Sierra Club was mindful of the key role photography had played in the creation of
earlier parks. The photographs of Carleton Watkins (for whom Yosemites Mt. Watkins is names) had
influenced the unprecedented decision to set aside Yosemite Valley as a state park in 1864, and the
photographs of William Henry Jackson had figured in Congress decision to create the first national park,
Yellowstone , in 1872.

When Ansel reached Washington , he carried his portfolio to the offices of the heads of the National Park
Service and U.S. Forest Service and to key congressmen to show them why there should be a Kings
Canyon National Park . One happy result of the visit was an invitation from Secretary of the Interior Harold
L. Ickes to do a photomural of his landscapes for the new Interior Department building. The desired park
legislation did not materialize that year, but the effort continued. In 1938 Ansel brought out an elegant
limited-edition book entitled Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail . It was subsidized by a prominent Sierra
Club member, Walter Starr, as a memorial tribute to a son who had died on a climb in the Minarets. About
this volume Stieglitz said: What perfect photographyI am an idolater of perfect workmanship of any
kind. And this is truly perfect workmanship. Georgia OKeeffe described it as like a trip in the high country
again.

A letter from the National Park Service the following January said, Recently we transmitted to Secretary
Ickes the complimentary copy of your new Sierra Nevada portfolio which you sent to the National Park
Service. Yesterday the Secretary took it to the White House and showed it to the President, who was so
impressed with it that the Secretary gave it to him. In later discussion, Secretary Ickes expressed his keen
desire to have a copy for his use also.

Shortly thereafter, Ickes wrote: My dear Mr. Adams: I am enthusiastic about the book The John Muir
Trail which you were so generous as to send me. The pictures are extraordinarily fine and impressive. I
hope before this session of Congress adjourns the John Muir National Park in the Kings Canyon area will
be a legal fact. Then we can be sure that your descendants and mine will be able to take as beautiful
pictures as you have takenthat is, provided they have your skill and artistry.

Kings Canyon National Park finally became a reality in 1940 after energetic lobbying by Ickes and
President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Of the Kings Canyon campaign, Ansel later recalled: With what one may
call arrogant modesty, I think many of my pictureshave an excitement in them which commands more
attention than if they were the same scene not composed or adequately printedI think the pictures I had
of the Kings Canyon-Sequoia region did have a helpful effect in getting Congress to pass the bill. But no
one will ever know whether it was one percent or five percent, or whether it was entirely imaginary.

After establishment of the park, National Park Service Direct Arno Cammerer wrote the photographer: I
realize that a silent but most effective voice in the campaign was your book,Sierra Nevada: The John Muir
Trail . So long as that book is in existence, it will go on justifying the park.

In 1941 Adams began the photomural project for the Interior Department, only to be interrupted by the war.
During the war he served as a photographic consultant to the Armed Services and worked with Dorothea
Lange for the Office of War Information.

In 1946 a Guggenheim fellowship enabled him to visit and photograph many of the national parks and
monuments. The fellowship was renewed in 1948. From this body of work came a series of portfolios and
books which document what by now was a firm personal dedication to celebrating America s natural
wonders through the art of the camera.

Dear Mr. Adams, a woman admirer wrote in a letter in 1975, In writing to you, I almost feel that I am
writing to John Muir, or to Yosemite Valley itself. I am overawed, but I will try to speak. Ansel Adams has
had a love affair with the grandeur of Yosemite for nearly three fourths of a century. He was married at
Yosemite . His son Michael was born there. He was one of the originators of the Bracebridge Dinner, a
Christmas festival at the parks Ahwahnee Hotel dating from 1927, and continued to direct this traditional
pageant through 1972. In 1937 Virginia inherited Bests Studio and the Adamses became full-time
Yosemite residents. Virginia has operated the studio in marked contrast to the cheap curio quality of so
many national park concessions.

Each year increasing multitudes have visited the park, a trend that became acute after World War II. In a
story Ansel likes to tell, William Colby and John Muir around 1910 were gazing at the magnificent vista
from Glacier Point when Muir said to Colby, Will, wont it be wonderful when a million people can see what
we are seeing today? To both men a million was surely a fanciful number. They hardly could have
anticipated that two generations later Yosemite visits would exceed 2.5 million per year.

This crush of people visiting Yosemite and other national parks, which had been set apart for the use,
observation, health, and pleasure of the people, puts pressure on another mandate of the Park Services
founding principles: that the national parks must be maintained in absolutely unimpaired form for the use
of future generations* Not only are the numbers of visitors of concern; so are the attitudes and activities
they bring with them, which sometimes are more of the resort genre then the contemplative appreciation of
nature practiced by John Muir.

*The National Park Service Act, which established the service in 1916, directed it to promote and regulate
the national parks and monuments so as to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic object and
the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will
leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.
In letters and articles Ansel raised an early voice against these potentially destructive attitudes. The
imposition of commercial resortism violates the true function of national parks, he wrote in 1945. One
weakness in our appreciation of nature is the emphasis placed upon scenery , which in its exploited aspect
is merely a gargantuan curio. Things are appreciated for size, unusuality, and scarcity more than for their
subtleties and emotional relationship to everyday life. In a 1948 letter calling for some regulation of these
activities, he asked: Is it a matter of snobbery that the priest does not permit the sale of peanuts in the
aisles of the church? Is it snobbery that the Metropolitan Museum of Art objects to my playing my portable
radio in the Egyptian Room?

Writing in 1959 to Bruce Kilgore of the National Parks Association, he declared: Our difficulties lie in the
fact that we are always worrying about the symptomswe should be attacking the root cause of the
desecration of wilderness and park ideals. Curios are simply one kind of symptomThe syndrome is what
we have to overcome.

In the 1950s, the National Park Service, responding with a more the merrier attitude to the spiraling
numbers of visitors, instituted a program called Mission 66: designed to provide more roads and
accommodationsand thus to promote still more visitation. Mission 66 exhibited a sort of Chamber of
Commerce mentality. Ansel described it as a very two-dimensional idea when we consider mood and
experience and emotional state-of-being. It never enters these peoples minds at all. They just want
everybody to see it; isnt it beautiful?something to be seen and note experienced.

As part of Mission 66, the Park Service expedited its redesigning and rebuilding of the Tioga Road through
the heart of the Yosemite high country. Ansel was especially upset by the dynamiting of a three-mile
stretch through strikingly beautiful glacially polished granite in the Tenaya Lake area. Ansel thought the
Sierra Club did not take a strong enough stand on this improvement. He fired off angry telegrams in July
1958, to the Secretaries of the Interior and Commerce and the director of the Park Service. As an
individual and not as a director of the Sierra Club, he wired, I wish to lodge a most sincere and severe
protest against the desecration of Tenaya Lakewhich is being perpetrated by the ruthless construction of
the new Tioga Road for the National Park Service by the Bureau of Public Roads. The catastrophic
damage is entirely unnecessary and violates the principles expressed in the National Part Organic Act of
1916.I consider this desecration as an act of disregard of these basic conservation principles which
approaches criminal negligence on the part of the bureaus concerned. I urgently request you order an
immediate cessation of work on the Tioga Road in the Tenaya Lake area until a truly competent group can
study the problems and suggest ways and means of accomplishing completion of this project with
minimum damage. I have never opposed appropriate improvement of the Tioga Road but in 40 years
experience in national park and wilderness areas I have never witnessed such an insensitive disregard of
prime national park values.

Simultaneously he tendered his resignation from the Sierra Club board so he could be free to protest
without embarrassing the club. In his resignation letter he wrote President Harold Bradley who had been
far more critical of the Tioga Road redesign than the board: I cannot go along with the Sierra Club in their
attitude of compromise and persuasion. In another angry letter he said, While we are acting like
gentlemenand, I fear, timid ones at thatthe Tioga Road will be losturbanization of Yosemite will
continue.

Bradley replied: As you know, I cannot myself accept a resignation. The Board will have to act upon it at
the next meeting.I appreciate your motives in proffering it, but I shall be greatly surprised it [is]
accepted. It was not.

Ansels Tioga protest drew wide attention both within and beyond the club. Work on the road was halted for
12 days, and club Executive Director Dave Brower inspected the route with Park Service Director Conad L.
Wirth. But the damage already had been done. Work resumed with only a minor modification. We wiggled
it a little, said Wirth.

In a Sierra Club Bulletin lament headed Tenaya Tragedy, Ansel wrote: I am an artist who also
appreciated science and engineering, and I know we cant keep everything in a glass casewith the keys
given only to a privileged few. Nevertheless, I want people to experience the magic of wildness; there is no
use fooling ourselves that nature with a slick highway running through it is any longer wild.While the
National Park Service is open to most severe criticism in this Tenaya Lake road mater, so are the
conservationists, who should have been alert to possible damage. I, personally, must assume my share of
the blame because I failed to do my part before most of the damage was accomplished. In a wistful later
letter he reflected: Wilderness is rapidly becoming one of those aspects of the American dream which is
more of the past than of the present. Wilderness is not only a condition of nature, but a state of mind and
mood and heart. It cannot be confined to the museum-case statusseen only as a passing diorama from
superlative throughways.

Ansel also became involved in other conservation organizations and issues. For a number of years he
served as president of the Trustees for Conservation, set up in 1954 to engage in lobbying activities that
the Sierra Club and other groups might fear to pursue actively because of possible jeopardy to their tax-
deductible status. He became vice chairman of the Sierra Natural Resources Council, organized in 1957 to
fight a proposed Mammoth Pass road.

In 1955 Adams and Nancy Newhall organized an exhibit at the Le Conte Lodge called This Is the
American Earth. Ansel described it as the first endeavor of its kind to relate to conservation at both the
sociological and esthetic level. The exhibit was circulated in the United States by the Smithsonian
Institution and abroad by the United States Information Service. In the course of 1959, with the editorial
help of Dave Brower and the aid of a McGraw Foundation gift of $15,000, it was made into a book, the first
of the Sierra Club exhibit format series which would have a profound success in awakening many
Americans to the beauty of our wild areas and the need to preserve them. Supreme Court Justice William
O. Douglas hailed This Is the American Earth as one of the great statements in the history of
conservation.

In 1962 Ansel moved to Carmel Highlands in Monterey County , where he still lives today in a house over-
looking the Pacific and the magnificent Big Sur coast. In the mid-sixties he was prominently involved in a
battle against construction of an oil refinery at Moss Landing, a fishing harbor on Monterey Bay with two
ecologically significant estuarine sloughs. The refinery proposal, which generated intense feelings, pro and
con, in the Monterey Bay area, also attracted national attention. Ansel and other opponents eventually
carried the day when Humble Oil decided to go elsewhere in 1966.

That same year the proposed siting of a power plant at Diablo Canyon in California started an internal
debate in the Sierra Club that eventually grew into a controversial board election in 1969 and the
resignation of Executive Director David Brower.

Adams and Brower first met on a Sierra trail in 1933, and they became close friends. As early as 1937 the
photographer had proposed creating the post of executive secretary for Brower, and he backed him
enthusiastically when the club finally appointed Brower executive director 15 years later. In a 1963 letter to
the clubs president, Ansel called Brower the greatest single force in conservation.

But in 1968 increasing differences within the club on the proper management of club policy and finances,
as well as the Diablo Canyon question, led Adams to join with other directors and members in a move to
elect a slate of directors opposed to Brower. In the 1969 board election Adams headed the successful anti-
Brower slate. Defeated as a board candidate, Brower announced his resignation as executive director.

The Brower fight and the role he felt compelled to play in it were personally painful for Adams . This was
probably the most traumatic fight he has ever been involved in. Adams continued as a Sierra Club director
until 1971, when he voluntarily retired after 37 years of continuous service on the board. Brower went on to
found another conservation organization, Friends of the Earth, which now has members in 24 countries.
He is now chairman of its board. Time has diminished the intensity of feeling that was generated by that
election. Today Adams expresses great admiration for the extraordinary conservation achievements of
Brower. He was especially pleased when the club in 1977 gave Brower its John Muir award, which he had
recommended several times, even during the disagreement.

Sometimes I do think I get to places just when God is ready to have someone click the shutter! Adams
once remarked whimsically. An example of such a happy merger of preparation and chance is the story of
one of Ansels most celebrated images. Her is his own account, as published in Backpacker: When I took
my moonrise picture, the one with the church and the graveyard at Hernandez , New Mexico , I was driving
back to Santa Fe from the Chama Valley and I saw this wonderful scene out the window. The reaction was
so strong I practically drove off the road. I got out the tripod and camera, took the front part of the lens off,
screwed it on the back of the shutter and began composing and focusing. All the time I was trying to think
of what Id have to do to make the picture. I couldnt find my exposure meter, but I know the moons
luminance was 250 candles per square foot and that was placed on Zone VII of the exposure scale. That
gave me a shutter speed of a sixtieth of a second at f /8 with a film speed of ASA 64. The filter factor was
3X, so that made the basic exposure a twentieth of a second. I exposed for a long second at f /32, made
one picture, and while I was turning the holder around and pulling out the slide to make a duplicate, the
sunlight went off the crosses. I got the picture by about 15 seconds!
If I had spent more time in the Chama Valley , I would have missed the entire thing. If I had come home
earlier, I would have missed it. So theres always an element of chance in photography. If you have
practiced and practiced, the process is intuitive. You suddenly recognize something, and you react.

Adams photography has embraced a tremendous range of subject mater, but his most famous and
popular images are his landscapes of the American West. Most critics would probably agree that in the
realm of the grand landscape Adams is in a class by himself.

He dislikes the term nature photographer, but he seems even more dismayed by a popular
misconception that photography like his, which involves readily identifiable subjects, is realistic. He is not
concerned, he says, with the mere recording of external realitywhat he calls the external eventbut is
intent on conveying the emotional content of a scene, the internal event. Perhaps this is why he has
worked almost exclusively in black and white. As Wallace Stegner remarked, In black and white there is a
cooler distance between the world and its symbolic representation.

Inevitably, Adams has been compared to the landscape photographers of the nineteenth century, William
Henry Jackson and Timothy OSullivan, as well as nineteenth century painters of the sublime landscape,
such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt. It might be argued that Adams is one of the last in the
Romantic tradition. But there is a point beyond which such comparisons cannot be carried. Adams himself
feels that the Romantic artists were sincere but limited scene painters who were primarily
commemorating in dramatic style the huge external events of landscapes.Few examples of what I call
the internal event were revealed.

According to critic Jon Holmes, There is something in Adams spirit reminiscent of pioneer Western
photographers. Adams subject matterawesome natureis the same. Through the years he has
certainly put in enough miles leading mules laden with equipment over the Sierras to equal the stamina
and endurance of [Jackson and OSullivan]. His tools are better than theirs, but as both recorder and
printmaker, his craft is far greater. Adams , in addition, has that quality which, in 1932, his close friend,
Edward Weston, described in a letter to him as seeing plus.

John Szarkowski of New York s Museum of Modern Art has said: What Adams pictures show us is
different from what we see in any landscape photographer before him. They are concerned, it seems to
me, not with the description of objectthe rocks, trees, and water that are the nominal parts of his pictures
but with the description of the light that they modulate, the light that justifies their relationship to each
other.

The effect of the natural scene on the artist is an emotional one, Adams himself told me. He visualizes
his work, bringing in the quality of esthetics, to try to convey an emotion. On another occasion he
remarked: Its really the impact of recognition.Photographing scenery is the very thing I dont believe
in, because thats often a two-dimensional affair. So the element of immediate, emotional impact is very
important.

Dave Brower aptly describes that impact. We say beauty because Ansel had seen it first and had
interpreted it with a strength that was identifiable at a hundred yards. If there were an Ansel Adams print
you would know it. It just sort of sang out.The last time I went to a show of hisI watched the other
people and I remember there was one young man, hed go from photograph to photograph and hed spend
about 10 minutes in front of each, looking, and exploring every tonal quality, every bit of what had
happened there.That was moving, just to watch that, to watch somebody absorbing Ansel.

Ansels photography has had great impact indeed, not only in awakening people to the beauty of nature
but in inspiring many other photographers to turn their efforts to the natural scene and to use photography
in the interests of environmental preservation. The publicizing of wilderness can be a double-edged sword,
however. In recent years environmentalists, including Adams , have come to an awareness of a dilemma:
that wild areas once publicized and saved from the depredations of the loggers or miners may, because of
their fame, become loved to death by backpackers and other visitors, through sheer weight of numbers.
Critic Szarkowski has suggested that to photograph beautifully a choice vestigial remnant of natural
landscape is not necessarily to do a great favor to its future. This problem is now understood, intuitively or
otherwise, by many younger photographers.It is difficult today for an ambitious young photographer to
photograph a pristine snowcapped mountain without including the parking lot in the foreground as a self-
protecting note of irony. In these terms Adams pictures are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the
last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition.It does not seem likely that a photographer of the
future will be able to bring to the heroic wild landscape the passion, trust, and belief that Adams has
brought to it.
One of the rewards of Adams fame is entre in important places where he can press his viewpoint on
conservation. In 1975 President Gerald Ford invited him to the White House, and Ansel did not hesitate to
turn the visit into more than a social call. He expressed concern to the President over what he saw as
negative trends in the national parks. Commercial exploitation and poor management, he said, were
threatening the primeval natural qualities of the parks. Now was Mr. Fords chance, he urged, to do
something. He handed the President a memorandum proposing new initiatives for the parks. Our National
Park System encompasses the Crown Jewels of the American Heritage, the memo said. The Park Idea
has not received the Presidential and Congressional support and concern that the time require. You have
an unsurpassed opportunity to make an historic and lasting contribution by initiating a major new effort to
bring the Park System and the Park Service into our nations third century.

He also presented a print of his Yosemite : Clearing Winter Storm and urged: Now, Mr. President, every
time you look up at this picture, I want you to remember your obligation to the national parks.

Mr. Ford, who had been a ranger in Yellowstone during one of his youthful summers, replied, If anyone
has the basic feeling for parks, I have. But to Ansels disappointment, only minor steps followed.

Since Yosemite is Ansels first love, he has always taken an active interest in policies affecting the park,
whether speaking to Presidents about its management in the broad sense or to superintendents about the
locating of road signs. In a letter to one superintendent, he wrote: Yosemite is a somewhat fragile
experience; you cannot do much harm to the cliffs but you can dislocate the mood and the subtle qualities
of the place which are without parallel in the world. To Will Colby he had written in 1952: Everyone has a
right to visit Yosemite . But no one has the privilege of usurping it, distorting it, and making it less attractive
to those who seek its experience in its simpler, unmanipulated state.The preservation of the primeval
qualities does not relate to the mere protection of material objects. The significance of the objects of
nature; the significance which concerns poets, dreamers, conservationists and citizens-at-large, relates to
the presence of nature. This is mood, the magic of personal experience, the awareness of a certain purity
of condition .

Ansels opinions on Yosemite have not always endeared him to the parks major concessioner, Yosemite
Park and Curry Company. Nor have they always been heeded by the Park Service, Tenaya Lake being
only one case in point. In the early 1970s the Park Service was drawing up a master plan for the future
management of Yosemite that could also serve as a model for other national parks. While
environmentalists essentially were ignored, much heed was paid to the views of the Curry Company.
When this and other facts became known, there was a nationwide furor. Assistant Secretary of the Interior
Nathaniel P. Reed exclaimed that the plan appeared to have been written by the concessioner. The Park
Service was ordered to start over, this time with public participation. Partly as a result of the controversy,
Park Service Director Ronald Walker resigned.

Adams had declared in 1971: Yosemite Valley itself is one of the great shrines of the world and
belonging to all our peoplemust be both protected and appropriately accessible. He urged a bold
management plan that would remove most of the automobiles and visitor facilities that now deface the
valley. But in 1978 another plan unveiled by the Park Service fell far short of that goal. Ansel complained
vigorously to both Park Service Director William J. Whalen and Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus,
telling the Secretary the plan was only a slight reshuffle of the status quo. The Park Service subsequently
accepted some of Ansels suggestions for reducing auto traffic in the valley, but did almost nothing about
moving commercial facilities. Ansels hope is that Secretary Andrus and if necessary Congress will insist
on better.

The magnificent Big Sur coast south of his home in Monterey County has long occupied a special place in
Ansels heart. His great dream is during his lifetime to see the coast given lasting protection. He is actively
leading a national effort to check the development that threatens the magnificence of that region. Ansel
sees the present hodgepodge of regulatory agencies concerned with land use on the Big Sur coast as
incapable of controlling continued development. He has been working closely with The Wilderness Society
and California s Senator Alan Cranston and Congressmen Phillip Burton and Leon Panetta to establish
federal protection for the coast. In this cause he has made several trips to Washington, one of them
including a fruitful meeting with President Carter. After three years of work by Adams and his associates,
legislation is expected to be introduced this year to create a Big Sur National Scenic Area. Prospects for
passage appear very good.

In a recent statement to his fellow citizens of Monterey County , Adams said, I am nearly 78 years old and
I have lived in Carmel Highlands for the past 17 years. Perhaps the greatest joy I will ever find in my
lifetime is the opportunity to protect the unsurpassed natural beauty of our coastline for our children and
grandchildren.Let us not go down in history as the generation that stood silently by while the Big Sur
coast was developed and its natural beauty destroyed. Let us, instead, leave a splendid legacy for our
children.If we join together to accomplish the preservation of our Big Sur Coast I will feel I have had a
life fully lived.

Another major conservation priority for Adams is the preservation of Alaska lands, an effort in which he has
been an active participant since his first visit to Alaska more than 30 years ago. He is a member of
Americans for Alaska , a group of nationally prominent individuals committed to the preservation of Alaska
wilderness. As with Big Sur , he has worked primarily with The Wilderness Society on the Alaska National
Interest Lands legislation. In his meetings with the President and important members of Congress he has
spoken persuasively on behalf of Alaskan wilderness.

Ansel Adams will be remembered for his wide range of conservation activities and his inspirational
commitment over more than half a century. But his foremost contribution to the American Earth has been
the remarkable impact of his photography on the consciousness of Americans.

In the address entitled The Role of the Artist in Conservation, Adams declared, I believe the approach of
the artist and the approach of the environmentalist are fairly close in that both are, to a rather impressive
degree, concerned with the affirmation of life.Response to natural beauty is one of the foundations of
the environmental movement.

In a 1970 Chubb fellowship lecture at Yale University , he said, Wilderness, to me at least, is a mystique;
a valid, intangible, non-materialistic experience. The right to experience is a fundamental right, just as is
the right to possess, the right to believe or the right to work or right to security. The concept that there are
other (and equally important) values than those of obvious material and financial character is one that we
must nourish and support to the utmost.

Adams has been referred to as the visual John Muir. As Muirs contemporary writings had an inspirational
effect on the appreciation of Americans for wilderness, Adams photography has had similar effect in
modern times. Adams has celebrated the same essential qualities of wilderness as Muir and in particular
has celebrated the same Range of Light , the Sierra Nevada .

The broad philosophical effect on attitudes toward the natural world, while hard to quantify and isolate in
terms of dates and numbers, is the most fundamental and important element of the environmental
movement. It transcends any of the issues and events involved. It is the essence of Adams greatness that
he has so eloquently communicated a philosophical vision of the land and our relationship to it. That
vision, and its eloquence, is what make Ansel Adams one of the truly significant figures in environmental
history.

Brock Evans, now associate executive director of the Sierra Club, wrote a letter in 1968 to Ansel that
movingly describes the impact of Ansels photography. Ansel, I have never told you this, the letter said,
but you are in a most direct way responsible in large part for my love of the land and my passion for my
job. I was born and raised in Ohio , and never really had much contact with raw, wild nature, until about the
spring of 1961. I was just finishing my first year at the University of Michigan Law School, and I happened
to pick up a copy of Yosemite , that beautiful book edited by Charlotte Mauk, with John Muirs writings,
and your incomparable pictures. I remember rushing back to my room all during final exams, reading and
re-reading the book, being absorbed in the magnificent pictures, and playing beautiful music on my record
player. It was like another world, and the words and the pictures stunned me and moved me more deeply
about nature than I ever had been before. I had a job that summer in Glacier National Park, my first time to
see any mountains; and, having already been prepared by the book, stepping off the train into the
mountains and smelling the pines was as if a lost chord was touched deep inside me, and it has been
humming ever since. I have looked now for seven years to try and find a copy of that book for my own, but
apparently it is out of print and only available in libraries. But you were a hero to me, as you must be to
many, many others, long before I ever knew you. Than beautiful book helped to change my life in ways
that I still only vaguely understand.

Robert Turnage is a graduate student at Yale Universitys School of Forestry and School of Organization
and Management and a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has worked at The Ansel
Adams Gallery in Yosemite and as a trail crewman in Yellowstone National Park .

http://www.anseladams.com/ansel-adams-the-role-of-the-artist-in-the-
environmental-movement/