A Legacy of Light

A LEGACY OF LIGHT AnselAdamswith Mary Street Alinder. AnselAdams:An Autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown& Co., 1985. 385 pp. Illus. MarkKlett,essay by Denis Johnson. Travelsin the Desert Southwest. Boston: David R. Godine,1986.42 pp. Illus. Patrick Maynard Beyondthe exhibitions, a foundation, many books and articles and other generous teachings, the legacy of America's great modern nature photographer, Ansel Adams, is of course a collection of forty-thousand negatives, templates for the most serene and expansive photographic images of the American landscape. Adams' pictures will speak for themselves, and thereby, for him. What can an autobiography, eked out in the last days of his active eighty-two years, add to such riches?About a third of the chapters of Ansel Adams: An Autobiography are titled by others' names, and toward the end Adams, considering fame, muses: "The individualis but a cell in the larger body .... Superior minds and spirits emerge, yet whocan deny that countless others ... might have been revealed had circumstances favored them ... ?'' Adams thought himself favored by friends and this book is in large part testament to that. The first of these might be Adams' father, for the venerable, familiar, crumple-nosed mountain gnome of an Ansel Adams we see on the book's cover emerged from a frenetic elf or-as Adams writes-"an adenoidal brat." We can only guess what would have happened had not Adams' fatherplucked his hyperactive son first from school (encouraging him still in piano lessons which brought into Adams' life a sense of discipline, an abiding understandingof art, and a sense of rhythm and anticipation), then out of San Francisco for trips to Yosemite. It was in that then unpopulated Park that Adams' wild exuberances could have scope-provided they did not kill him, as they almost did on several occasions he relates. And it was there that his commitments to the natural environment and to photography were sealed. 128 Patrick Maynard Among the last of these friends was his assistant, Mary Street Alinder, through whose help the book was finished just in time. Adams' editing angel, rather than ghost writer, tells us that he saw the book through revisions to completion, except for more than two-hundred and fifty black and white photo reproductions. These have been carefully selected, printed, and arranged. Where Adams mentionsa picture it is usually close at hand. When he treats a theme, there is something enhancing it, chosen from among his six decades of negatives. General readers need not fear technical accounts of these by the craft master: Adams had already written sufficient books of guidance. Where in Natural Light Photography Adams showed his picture of Mt. McKinley with commentary upon use of a no. 12filter "to reduce the shadowed foreground values and the sky value above the summit of the mountain'' here he tells us about the trip to Alaska, where he achieved what he "visualized as an inevitable image" of McKinley (its National Park now renamed Denali, with Adams' hearty approval-he tends not to favor Republicans , from the handsome McKinley to the seemly Reagan), among constant cloud, drizzle and mosquitos. If we examine this recurrent term ''visualize,'' paramount in Adams' teaching, I think we shall find a way which leads through the anecdotes about friends, the wilds, constant commercial work and travels, to a source in which are combined three themes for which Adams is famous: (1) consummate craft in a kind of photography, communicated for many years by examples, teaching, books, etc.; (2) creative artistry in a field many deny to be an art; and (3) defense of wild nature against persistent political and economic pressures. What combines these? Visualizing is an activity, requiring experience, technical knowledge, and sensitivity. In Adams' words, The photographer visualizes his conception of the subject as presented in thefinal print. He achieves the expression of his visualization through his technique-aesthetic, intellectual, and mechanical. The visualization of a photograph involves ... the projection of the image-format on the subject. The image forms in the mind ... and anotherpart of the mind calculates the physical processes ... and anticipates the qualities of the final print. (78) There is more to this than age-old precepts of the painter: see the motif...