Closing Accounts

By Richard Lacayo

In the spring of 1916, a 14-year-old San Franciscan was taken to see Yosemite National Park. There he was presented with a simple box camera. It was an epochal gift: over the next 68 years Ansel Adams was to become America's best-known photographer and a major champion of its imperiled wilderness. Even now, when every stump in creation has been subjected to a portrait sitting, his pictures retain the power to startle.

Until his death in 1984, Adams was photography's mountain man. He has even made a posthumous climb: Adams' autobiography is probably the most expensive book ever to scale the best-seller list. The volume owes its $50 price largely to its 277 pictures, many of them never before exhibited or published. Some have been reproduced with too little contrast, but the photographs throw as much light on Adams' genius as anything in the text. Looking back in an amiable mood, he has produced the kind of memoir given to noting that a 1944 New York City hotel room was "most agreeable" and that Walter Mondale could be "most cordial and patient" when sitting for Adams' camera.

Yet as the pictures testify, this apparently prosaic man harbored a true poetic vision. A passionate student of the piano, Adams reluctantly concluded in his late 20s that his hands were too small for a concert career. After an encounter with the photographer Paul Strand, he decided to devote himself to his second love, the camera. His mother and aunt were dismayed. The camera, they informed him, could not express the soul. "Perhaps the camera cannot," he retorted, "but the photographer can."

By the late '20s, Adams had become a pivotal figure in the rescue of photography from the genteel posturing of pictorialism, with its perfumed moods and swampy prints. Like-minded photographers such as Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham joined him to found f/64, the now legendary group that promoted the principles of sharp focus and pure, powerful form. On sunrise camera treks through Death Valley or the Canyon de Chelly, he showed that stony facts could engender the deepest feelings.

As his narrative continually reveals, Adams possessed a rare talent for winning the friendship of brilliant but difficult men and women, including Weston, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe. Perhaps it was because he so seldom raised his voice. The memoir boils over only once, on the subject of the Reagan Administration's environmental policies, which spurred his worst fears about human predators nibbling at the land.

It may have been his acute awareness of illumination and shadow that gave Adams his elegiac outlook. At one point he recalls a moment when he and his companions came upon the scene that would become his most famous image, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941). With the last rays of sunset striking the tiny settlement, Adams scrambled to set up his camera, shouting "Get that, for God's sake! We don't have much time!" Not much, but enough for an artist of sublime sensibility to catch light on the run and keep it forever. --By Richard Lacayo