The Old Master of Majesty

By Richard Stengel

Ansel Adams: 1902-1984

Nature never seemed so still or so spiritual as in his photographs. In their purity and precision, their balance of epic vistas and exquisite detail, Ansel Adams' photographs celebrated an ideal vision of nature and the American West. That black-and-white vision was of a landscape unsullied by neon and Day-Glo plastic, a majestic continent that still seemed for all the world like a new-found land. Passionate about art and nature, Adams tolerated the desecration of neither. At his death from heart disease last week near his home in Carmel, Calif., Adams, 82, the bearded and bespectacled photographer who composed his pictures first in his mind's eye, had become nothing less than an American old master.

For the amateur, Adams once wrote, photography is a "visual diary system." His more than a half-century of work recorded no events, captured no history. It was instead a kind of elegant unworded poetry whose lexicon consisted of mountains and trees, water and stone, the play of light and shadow. In a work like Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, probably his most famed single image, Adams' camera revealed the spiritual still point of a turning world. The heart of his own spiritual world was Yosemite National Park, a place he visited in his work and imagination over and over again.

The son of an insurance executive, Adams was raised in San Francisco in a chalet-like house overlooking the Golden Gate. He learned to play the piano under the stern tutelage of a German music instructor, who taught him, he later said, the necessity of technical excellence in the pursuit of artistic expression. In 1916 Adams took along a Kodak box Brownie on a trip to Yosemite Valley, and what he saw through that lens awakened the taste of a lifetime. The mountains gave him not only his subject but an occupation: as a youth he took a caretaker's job there for the Sierra Club. Later, he would sit on the club's board of directors for 37 years and become an unflagging champion of environmental protection.

His early photographs were influenced by the soft-focus pictorial tradition in which the image was retouched to make it more painterly. In 1930 he met Paul Strand, whose style was crisp, straight, unfussed. Recalled Adams: "I came home thinking, 'Now photography exists!' " Adams' new direction was fixed and his success launched by the dean of American photography, Alfred Stieglitz, who in 1936 gave him his first show in New York City.

Adams' uncompromising craftsmanship helped pioneer the growing public recognition of photography as an art form. His method was to control rigorously every element of the picture: lighting, composition, focus. The image for him broke down into ten distinct "zones" of tonal quality, ranging from deepest black to pure white, so that every picture was a careful symmetry of light and dark. "The negative is the score," he said. "The print is the performance." By the mid-'60s, Adams had virtually ceased taking photographs for public consumption, concentrating instead on making prints of earlier works (the performance grew darker and moodier) and updating his 40 books on photography.

Through the '70s, his pictures rose steadily in price. Bluff and leprechaun-like, Adams became a peripatetic public figure. Artistically, his popularity reflected the fact that his classic 19th century style possessed more than a trace of romanticism. "People look at my pictures," he said a few years ago, "and then accept them, in a sense, as reality." But it was the heightened reality of a photographer who made nature seem like Nature. "You don't take a photograph, you make it," he once said. Adams made himself into a photographer and then made others see the world through his eyes. The result of his work was not an instant captured in time but timelessness captured forever in an instant. --By Richard Stengel