Pictures at an Exhibition:
The Ansel Adams Centenial at SFMOMA
2002


Full-page ads in all the papers, museum stationery (on emphatically recycled paper, of course) announcing "special guest" previews sent to all patrons and cognoscenti, banners strung from lampposts all over town (even in the Tenderloin) animated radio commercials on Public Radio and the local classical music station advertise SFMOMA’s newest blockbuster: Ansel Adams at 100!

If this is a blockbuster then George W. Bush is a semanticist. I loved Ansel and I have always been an admirer of John Szarkowski, especially his excellent book, Looking At Photographs, but somehow, the law of Physics (a plus and a plus) conspire to make this an embarrassingly ineffectual show. Perhaps the virtuoso curator (Czarkowski?) loses his touch no less than the fiddler does after a certain age. Perhaps the SFMOMA was going through a curatorial/administration crisis ("I just want to make some money!") when the show was being organized and it was actually thrown together by an intern at the last minute. All we know for sure is that the first major posthumous show of this particular San Francisco photographer, perhaps the most well-known photographer of all time…the hundred-year celebration in the city of his birth and life, is a flop beyond the gray scale of imagination.

Although perhaps the most widely known, at least in this country, Ansel was by no means the best photographer of the Twentieth Century as some corporate-art junkies might have us believe. Edward Weston was clearly his master. Ansel was to Weston what Telemann was to Bach. Strand was his equal as was Brandt. As an artist Harry Calahan stands above Ansel. Nonetheless, Ansel WAS a wonderful photographer and deserves more than only half of a third floor in the museum of his birthplace (actually, he didn’t even get that, in as much as two large walls are conspicuously bare). He was indeed, a giant of a man and single-handedly, put photography on the pecuniary art map (once, his Moonrise sold for the highest price ever paid for a photograph…something like thirty thousand dollars, a sum unheard of until then). But this so-called "blockbuster" show pales in comparison to the Avedon show a few years ago. If this is the best we can do for native son Ansel, it bodes ill for local talent. Duh! So what else is new in San Francisco?

First of all, why are we treated like matriculating students compelled as we are, to pass through a poorly-lit art-appreciation camera with one Hartley, one Piazonni, one Marin, one Dove, one Strand, one Weston, one O’Keefe and one or two other things suggesting early "influences" on the young Ansel Adams? I don’t mind didacticism but then lets do it properly and thoroughly. Other than the Steiglitz and the Piazzoni, all the paintings and photographs in that room were made in the mid to late thirties. If I remember correctly, Ansel was born in 1902. A blithe remark that Ansel was "self-taught" suggests that he single-handedly turned himself into the fine artist he became. Needless to say, virtually every photographer prior to 1950 (prior to the post WW II GI Bill academic frenzy) was, of necessity, more or less self-taught. Now that all of us have MFA’s such a remark about a contemporary artist would have some significance. The fact is, Ansel was born into a wealthy, cultivated home and was privately tutored in the three R’s, music and the arts by the very best that lumber-baron money could buy. He grew up in a stately home west of the city overlooking the Golden Gate (long before the bridge). Before he was twenty, aspiring to a career as a concert pianist, he bought himself a Mason-Hamlin grand piano. Among all the vapid text on the walls of this exhibit I recall no mention of Ansel’s exceptional musicianship and how this shaped his later photography (Ansel always emphasized his early training as a musician and he loved the analogy that the negative is the score and the print the final performance.)

So, what were the really big influences for Ansel early on? First of all would be the spectacular landscape of west San Francisco before the Golden Gate Bridge. How about John Muir and innumerable trips to Yosemite? How about his father-in-law, the Yosemite landscape painter Harry Best? How about a musician, teacher, friend and excellent photographer who mentored Ansel, Cedric Wright? Cedric taught violin at Mills College, was a devoted Sierra Clubber and was himself a highly accomplished photographer (see, Words of the Earth). No mention is made of these things. To say that Ansel was a self-taught photographer makes about as much sense as saying Daniel Barenboim is a self-taught conductor. It is an insult to history, art and the mentors who nurture such accomplished individuals.

Conspicuously absent from this show are portraits, Polaroids, color work, early pictorialist (fuzzy) images and politics. Can you imagine a posthumous blockbuster show of Mondrian and not seeing a single early landscape? How about a Picasso show without his Blue Period? Or Bonnard without some (nude) photographs? I mean, are we supposed to pretend that Ansel did not do a lot of fuzzy landscapes trying to be hip like Coburn, Steichen and others, before Strand especially, celebrated the phenomenal rendering gifts of the camera?

Ansel showed little interest in color and what work he did do in color reflects a distrust if not indifference, maybe even hostility. Nevertheless, while we might not think Irving Penn’s cigarette butts or Halsman’s jumping celebrities are all that exciting, we deserve to see them in the context of a man’s life’s work. Ansel did, in fact, make thousands of color images. I think we have a right to see a few of them.

One of the important things to know and admire about Ansel was that he was not without courage. He openly disapproved of our treatment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor and he made a number of poignant images of Manzanar, one of the internment camps in Owens Valley. Ansel’s work at Manzanar was for him like Goya’s "Horrors of War" or Picasso’s Guernica, that is to say, an important artist protesting the perfidy of his own government. There is not even a mention of Manzanar in this show.

Ansel was highly unique in as much as he had the sensitivity of an artist while at the same time embracing the latest technology. He especially loved his densitometer and state-of-the-art spot meter. Imogen Cunningham (the same friend who gave Ansel a marijuana plant for his seventy-fifth birthday) loved to make fun of all his blinking lights, gauges and digital aparatii and remind us that one’s film did not necessarily have to be decimal point whatever "gamma above film-base-fog density" in order to make a great image. (Ansel was so particular about technique that, for example, when he was going to Hawaii to photograph he spent weeks testing various film and developer combinations to determine the most satisfying response to the color green) Ansel was nothing if not eclectic -- musician, photographer, amateur scientist and teacher. He was a close friend and collaborator of Dr. Edwin Land and was probably somewhat responsible for the development of Polaroid Type 52 and Type 55 materials which he used regularly. One of Ansel’s portfolios even had an original Polaroid print in each set. I seem to remember an entire book of Polaroid images. But not a mention of any of this at this 100th birthday blockbuster show.

Frankly, I have always had the theory that Ansel was basically a shy man. Yes, he was enormously gregarious and the life-blood of many a party including the famous Christmas celebrations in the Ahwanee Hotel in Yosemite Valley, but, in terms of the global community he was painfully shy and naïve (he made only one trip to Europe late in life and rarely traveled outside of his beloved West). Ansel was bereft of any talent for casual bullshit. He simply could not muster any interest in automobiles, sports, clothes, gossip or television for example. This, I believe, accounts for the paucity of portraits in his oeuvre. And what portraits we do have are rather stiff (which is to be expected if one uses a large-format camera)…although I rather like his late portrait of Brassai which he did in the back yard of his house in Yosemite about 1975. His portraits of Maynard Dixon and the sculptor Robert Howard are as good as anybody’s…and I would be lying to say I am not rather fond of the soft-focus portrait he did of my father in 1930. I think Ansel shared a fear many of us photographers have of doing portraiture, of being rebuffed along with impatience at having to explain every time why one wants to make a particular portrait; it is tiresome. But, again, lets see ‘em darn it.

Ansel was one of the most important environmentalists of the Twentieth Century. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Sierra Club for many years. He fought tenaciously against unnecessary road-building in Yosemite, especially the one along Tenaya Lake. Ansel played such a leadership role in the impeachment of James Watt that President Reagan had the foolhardiness to invite Ansel down to his ranch for a talk one day. Needless to say, Ansel was not mollified by the "great communicator" and had the courage to say to journalists, "I still hate him."

So, there is no color, Polaroid or portraiture in this show and yet in one room high above the same ole, same ole alpine landscape stuff in frames are some monstrous unframed, un-mounted images of Mt Robson in Canada. What the hell are they doing there one wonders. Is this some sort of curatorial concession to post-modernism, like the plethora of studies and "works in progress" and casual droppings of young artists so much in vogue these days? They are slightly sepia, matte, uncharacteristically dull and repetitive and simply tacked to the wall. Must be some jive artsy thing thrown up by the Art Institute intern at the last minute.

To comment on the show in general would be to repeat ad nauseum whatever has been said about Ansel for fifty years since there is nothing new in the whole place other than those strange Robson pictures. In the penultimate room the statement on the wall suggests something about "artistic growth" and how Ansel, in his late work (of which there was very little other than re-printing of old negatives) began to address "darker themes" through subtle changes in printing. This is hogwash pure and simple. What changed was Ansel’s age, vision and perhaps equally important, the photo-sensitive materials available to him. There is no way even the most adept darkroom wizard can produce a print today, with today’s paper and chemistry which will look exactly like a print of fifty years ago. Secondly, just as the violinist cannot reproduce the same vibrato he/she had as a thirty-year-old, the photographer, at seventy-five or eighty, cannot see the same nuances and subtleties he could when he was thirty. These are facts which can be corroborated by several people (such as Alan Ross) who worked with Ansel in his darkroom.

However, having said all that, one print did, in fact, go through much evolution before arriving at its present state and that is, of course, Moonrise Over Hernandez. If we have to go through a room introducing us to major art trends in Twentieth Century American Art, and then read tiresome instructive curatorial comments stenciled on the walls of every room (while others listen to mini lectures with their walk-about headphones)…that is to say, if the museum is, in fact, a lecture hall, then why not tell the people about this, perhaps the most famous (and significant) of all Ansel’s images, and the rather frenetic way it was made and the subsequent evolution of its composition and contrast. Anecdotes are the spice of history and character. Moonrise Over Hernandez is quite likely the quintessential Ansel Adams image with its reverent elegance, grand Nature, universal aspect and diminutive humanity; in short, it is one of the great photographs of all time and yet it sits there in the corner just like another rock or tree. Which reminds me; why are there three almost identical images of some lake in Alaska? The fact that two large walls are embarrassingly bare and then this silly triplet convinces us that this show is an ignominy.

And lastly, that pathetic room of proteges, "photographers who have been influenced by Ansel" or whatever they are…because it IS confusing in as much as, for example, there are four banal Lee Friedlander "landscapes". I am unaware that Lee Friedlander had any contact with Ansel whatsoever. Lee Friedlander has made some excellent images in other genres but wilderness landscape is not one of them. Harry Calahan is there too. Ansel had a huge, almost incalculable influence on hundreds of us, largely through his annual workshops in Yosemite (of which there is no mention either). A thoroughly curated show would have been obliged to show that not all of us who knew and worked with Ansel are still re-photographing the same old trees and rocks. Several of America’s best photographers went to Ansel’s workshops and taught there, most notably Judy Dater, Sally Mann, Leland Rice, Ralph Gibson, Roger Minnick and Ted Orland. It is scandalous that we are shown just two or three "proteges" and leave out the hugely rich panoply of this present generation of fine, independent, art photographers.

This show is an insult to Ansel, us, San Francisco and photography. Whoever is responsible for this sorry spectacle should be fixed and sent packing back to the suburbs where they belong organizing weekend "Art in the Park" shows for the local scented soap venders, daubers, pet photographers and macramaists.