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Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library

University of California
Berkeley, California

Ansel Adams
CONVERSATIONS WITH ANSEL ADAMS

With Introductions by
James L. Enyeart

and
Richard M. Leonard

An Interview Conducted by
Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun
in 1972, 1974, and 1975

Copy No.
(c) 1978 by The Regents of the University of California

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a
legal agreement between the Regents of the University
of California and Ansel Adams, dated September 15,
1978. The manuscript is thereby made available for
research purposes. All literary rights in the
manuscript, including the right to publish, are
reserved to Ansel Adams during his lifetime or, if
deceased, to the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
until December 31, 1989. No part of this manuscript
may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library
of the University of California at Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for
publication should be addressed to the Regional
Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted,
anticipated use of the passages, and identification
of the user.

The legal agreement with Ansel Adams requires
that he or, if deceased, the Ansel Adams Publishing
Rights Trust be notified of the request and allowed
thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be
cited as follows:

Ansel Adams, "Conversations with Ansel
Adams," an oral history conducted 1972,
1974, 1975 by Ruth Teiser and Catherine
Harroun, Regional Oral History Office,
The Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley, 1978.

Photograph by Pirkle Jones

Ansel Adams receiving honorary degree from the University
of California, Charter Day, 1961.

Left to right: President Clark Kerr, Ansel Adams, Professor
Joel Hildebrand

TABLE OF CONTENTS — Ansel Adams

•

INTRODUCTION by James L. Enyeart i

INTRODUCTION by Richard M. Leonard vii

INTERVIEW HISTORY viil

INTERVIEW I — 12 May 1972 1

Education and the Creative Process 1

Family Background and Childhood 2

Studying the Piano 6

Beginning in Photography 7

Youthful Experiences 9

Visualization and Music 12

Anticipation in Music and Photography 13

Mariner Photographs of Mars 16

"Monolith, the Face of Half Dome" 17

Literary Titles for Photographs 18

Portraiture 20

Manzanar 23

Early Days and Scientific Concepts 26

The 1915 Fair 28

Religious Concepts and Cemeteries 32

Aesthetics and Ecology 36

INTERVIEW II — 13 May 1972 37

Photographic Equipment 37

Photography and Technology 40

Innovations and Patents 43

Innovations and Aesthetic Demands 44

Making Photographs and Printing Negatives 44

Photographs as Commodities 47

Photography and Politics 49

Group f/64 49

INTERVIEW III — 14 May 1972 52

Stieglitz 52

Influences 56

Taste, Perspective, and Distortion 58

The Photogram 62

Nuclear Bombs and Photographic Materials 63

Nature Photographs: Points of View 64

Quality Levels and Portraits 67

Albert Bender 69

Commissions 70

Albert Bender and His Friends 72

Cedric Wright 75

Musicians and Artists 77

Cults, Controls, and Creativity 81

Prints: Tangible and Intangible Aspects 83

INTERVIEW IV — 19 May 1972 87

The Group f/64 Exhibit 87

Meters, Lenses, and Film Speeds 91

Brigman, Van Dyke, Edwards, and Cunningham 94

Parmelian Prints 97

Noskowiak, Weston, Swift, Holder, Kanaga, and Lavenson 99

Brett Weston and Edward Weston 102

Applied Photography 104

Giving Photography Museum Status 105

Camera Clubs, Groups, and Galleries 110

The Golden Gate International Exposition Exhibit 113

Timing in Photography 115

Edwin Land and the Polaroid Camera System 117

INTERVIEW V ~ 20 May 1972 121

Mortensen 121

Vision and Photography 122

Flash Mishaps 125

Photographic Printing Papers 127

Writing the Basic Photography Books 129

The Zone System 131

Meters and Automation 133

Technique in Relation to Aesthetics 137

Science and the Creative Photographer 138

Sensitometry as a Creative Tool 142

Contemporary Images 146

The Nude 147

Contrivance, Arrangement, and Simulation 149

Meaning, Shape, and Form 151

Time and Reevaluation 153

The Photo League and Politics 154

Working With Dorothea Lange 158

Early Visits to New Mexico 159

INTERVIEW VI — 26 May 1972 159

Indian Art and Architecture 165

Ella Young 168

Santa Fe People 172

Taos Pueblo 175

Paul Strand and a New Approach 181

Santa Fe People, Continued 183

Taos Pueblo, Continued, and The Land of Little Rain 186

More Southwest Friends and Experiences 190

INTERVIEW VII — 27 May 1972 197

The Reproduction of Photographs 199

Viewing Photographs 206

Light Sources and Light Measurement 209

Technological Advances in Photographic Films 211

"The Negative is Like the Composer's Score" 215

Beauty or Therapy? 220

Astronomical Photography and Videotape 221

INTERVIEW VIII — 29 May 1972 227

Early Years in Yosemite 227

Mountain Trips With Francis Holman 232

Perils and Close Calls 236

Sierra Club Trips 240

Yosemite, Continued 244

Photography Workshops and Aspiring Amateurs 246

Joseph N. LeConte in the Sierra 249

The Half Dome Cable 252

Logic and Faith 254

Panchromatic Plates 256

Dreams and Heavenly Bodies 261

Concepts of Conservation and Wilderness 264

Yosemite Concessions 265

INTERVIEW IX — 2 June 1972 266

Sierra Club Photographers 266

Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail 267

Skiing in the Mountains 276

The Sierra and Other Ranges 279

Alaska 281

Aerial Photography 283

Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada 287

Yosemite Photography Workshops 291

INTERVIEW X — 3 June 1972 296

Skill in Music and Photography 296

The Friends of Photography 301

Museums and Critics 305

Proper Disposition of Photographs 311

Financial Practicalities 313

Original Prints 314

One-Man Shows 318

The Creative Intention 320

Exhibit Prints and Archival Factors 321

INTERVIEW XI — 4 June 1972 324

Printing Earlier Photographers' Negatives 324

Eastern Visit, 1933 328

The Stieglitz Exhibit and the Adams Gallery 335

35 Millimeter and 2 1/4 Cameras 337

Photographs for Magazines 342

Assignments 346

Working With Dorothea Lange, Continued 348

Wartime Work 351

Problems Encountered 353

"Making" and "Shooting" Photographs 359

Printing and Papers 361

INTERVIEW XII — 30 June 1972 363

More on the Friends of Photography 741

Future and Recent Events 743

INDEX 748

BOOKS BY ANSEL ADAMS 768

INTRODUCTION, by James L. Enyeart

Ansel Adams has often said that he is "incapable of verbalization on
the content" of his photographs. "If a photograph does not say it, words or
explanation cannot help." However, as the following interview will reveal,
Ansel Adams is a most capable spokesman on his work and a great many other
topics. When he says "verbalization," he means his inability to interpret
or put into words the meaning of his photographs and, in that, he is not alone.
Eloquent words by critics or historians may compliment, describe, or serve in
other ways an artist's creations but, in the end, must yield to the muteness
of the pen when applied to the visual arts.

Two series of events early in Adams' life stand out as significant land
marks in the development of his aesthetic predilections. Chronologically, the
first of the two was his chance meeting with Paul Strand in Taos, New Mexico,
in 1930. Strand had at the time only negatives to show Adams and, as he held
each one up to the light of a window, a dramatic transformation took place in
Adams' understanding of the medium. He felt he understood for the first time
the poetic strength and structural power potential to the photographic medium.
Up to that point, Adams felt that he had been "mostly adrift with my own spirit,
curiosity, and vision." This revelation was of sufficient intensity to inspire
Adams to give up a growing career in music and to devote his life to photography.
(He had for many years trained as a concert pianist.)

For Adams, a commitment to photography encompassed the whole of photography
and all its possible communicable aspects: commercial, documentary, political,
and most important, aesthetic. This experience also revealed to him for the
first time the relevance, spirit, and intent of the work of his friend and

peer, Edward Weston. Prior to his meeting with Strand, Adams had become a
friend of Weston's but had not liked his photographs; however, two years later,
he, Weston, and several other photographers (Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham,
Sonya Noskowiak, and Henry Swift) with similar aesthetic ideals founded Group f.64
a visual manifesto of what they believed the straight photograph to be. In that
same year, Adams had his first important one-man exhibition at the M. H. deYoung
Memorial Museum in San Francisco.

The second series of events which most affected Adams and his subsequent
life as an artist took place between the years 1933 and 1936. In 1933, he made
his first trip to New York and met Alfred Stieglitz with the purpose of showing
Stieglitz his photographs. Stieglitz was supportive and encouraged Adams in
the direction manifested in his photographs. In 1936, Stieglitz gave Adams
a one-man exhibition at An American Place, making him the first young photog
rapher to be shown at Stieglitz1 gallery since Paul Strand in 1917. Following
the opening of the exhibition, Adams wrote a letter to a friend which detailed
the success of the show and the impact Stieglitz was having on his life. The
following is an excerpt from that letter: "To describe what Stieglitz is and
what he does is impossible. He has dedicated himself to an idea and he has
worked like hell for forty years to put the idea over. And it seems to be
going over now with all the inevitability of the tides. The Marin show at
The Museum of Modern Art exceeds anything of its kind shown in America. The
work O'Keeffe is doing now is remarkable. Stieglitz promised me a picture of
New York that will send chills up and down your spine when you see it. And
here is Mr. Adams suddenly handed the most important assignment of his short

iii

life—to maintain photographic standards as one of the Stieglitz group. I was
quite a little stuck-up over the obvious material success of the Chicago show
but what has happened to me here has thoroughly deflated everything but a
sense of humility and responsibility. Nobody has conceit when they are with
Stieglitz. The essential honesty transcends everything. You are or you are
not. The pattern-sequence seems to indicate that I am." Humility, a sense
of responsibility, and a commitment to the art world are all important aspects
of Ansel Adams' character, as is his immutable sense of humor reflected in
his love for puns and limericks.

As an artist, Adams gained an understanding and appreciation of the
"equivalent" concept from his association with Stieglitz. Combined with his
stylistic preference for the straight approach and his love for nature's
grandeur, the "equivalent" aesthetic became for Adams an idea and mission
uniquely his own which remains unrivaled today. Although his famous "Zone
System" serves the science and technology of the medium, its primary purpose
was one of providing a means for attaining the highest quality representation
of the philosophical implications inherent in the straight approach and one's
own personal vision. Equally important is Adams' attempt to make his photo
graphs "equivalents" of his experiences, emotions, sensations, and thoughts.
It is Adams' forging of the straight and equivalent photographic concepts into
a unique style and philosophy of his own that has brought him the many admirers
and honors he enjoys today.

One of Adams' greatest supporters and technical collaborators, Edwin Land,
has said better than any other just what this unique Adams aesthetic is: "Adams
realized that even the most precisely representational photograph is so far

removed from external reality that he was free to use such photography as a
point of departure for his own kind of abstraction. That Adams has chosen
what appears to be the most representational of media and subjects most
prone to be represented, that he has chosen these to be the basis of his most
abstract perceptions, is the first essential step in his genius. The challenge
of making a non-sentimental statement about a grand insight into the abstract
is multiplied a thousand-fold when the components of the subject have names
and reminiscences to characterize them—tree and twig, rock and boulder-
components assembled furthermore not as accidents but in their natural habitats
as ordinary 'beautiful' arrangements. The greater the photographic skill brought
to bear, the more elegant the technology employed, the more serious the threat
to the artist who would lead us step by step in his own direction. For, as
compared with the forms in ordinary abstract art, the direct derivatives from
reality are distractions of deadly power.

"Thus the challenge which Adams undertook to meet was to show that these
meticulously beautiful photographs, these instruments of distraction, could be
directed by him towards unified new insights. He demonstrates that there is
no greater aesthetic power than the conversion of the familiar into the
unbelievably new."

Aside from the inventors of the medium, there have been few photographers
who have made greater or more lasting contributions to the field of photography
than Ansel Adams. His books on the aesthetics and technology of photography
(including those books of his own photographs) are basic to the literature of
the medium. Since 1949, he has been a consultant to Polaroid Corporation,
and he was a major force in the creation of the Photography Department at The
Museum of Modern Art, the Photography Department of the San Francisco Art

Institute, the Friends of Photography in Carmel, and the Center for Creative
Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He has helped to establish
major collections of his work and the work of others at major museums and
recently, with his wife Virginia, established the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall
Fellowship at The Museum of Modern Art. In a different vein, but still through
his photography, Adams has been a major spokesman for the Sierra Club (Board
Member 1934-71) and remains today an ardent conservationist; that is, an
active advocate of the preservation and protection of the natural environment.

Ansel Adams is perhaps the most well-known 20th century photographer
throughout the Western world. In fact, his name is probably more familiar to
a greater variety of people (and thereby a greater number) than any other
visual artist, regardless of medium. This fame is not based on the murmurings
of an elite art world and economy, but is the result of fifty years of pub
lishing and exhibiting his photographs in those forums which allowed him to
reach the broadest spectrum of society possible.

If Stieglitz and his circle are considered the pioneers of photography
in modern art, then Adams may be considered the master of those earlier horizons.
His legacy to the art world will be the institutions he helped create, the
technology he subdued, the photographers he inspired and, most importantly,
what he terms his "affirmation of life"--his photographs.

September 14, 1978 James L. Enyeart

Director

Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona, Tucson

INTRODUCTION by Richard M. Leonard

The life of Ansel Adams is happily condensed and exemplified in a photo
by his close friend Cedric Wright. "Sermon on the Mount" shows Ansel with
tripod and large view camera on the summit of Mount Whitney speaking with almost
religious fervor to a large group of Sierra Club friends. He was telling of the
gentle beauty of the "Range of Light," Muir's favorite subject. Ansel continued
his love of the Sierra Nevada for more than sixty years , to a culmination in the
[forthcoming] publication of his great scenic book Yosemite and the Range of Light.

Ansel always was, and is, a very generous, outgoing person. Hundreds of
his finest prints have been given, without charge, to "the cause" — any
publication that would help public appreciation of the beauty of nature. One
time Ansel and my wife, Doris, were on photographic business in Yosemite. At
Valley View, the great scenic vista of the valley, two little old ladies in
tennis shoes approached Doris asking her to take their pictures with their
camera. Doris suggested the kindly man with the handsome beard. They did, and
Ansel calmly analyzed the controls of the box camera and took a truly beautiful
picture of them. They never knew the fee they missed.

For almost sixty years Ansel has been a member of the Sierra Club. It has
been one of his greatest joys, and in later years one of immense frustration.
He was of the old school, with views similar to the founders of the club and to
Colby, LeConte, and Farquhar. He loved the knowledgeable negotiations for more
park protection, based on facts as to the beauty and importance of the areas
involved. It hurt him to see the leadership of the club pass for a while into
bitter antagonism to the land protection agencies, "kicking their shins," as he
called it, instead of supportive negotiation based on reason.

He comments in his text that I called him "the conscience of the Sierra
Club." That is true. Frank Kittredge, Regional Director of the National Park
Service, told the board of directors of the club one time that "the administrator
almost always has to make financial and political compromises. If the Sierra
Club's position is not far to the 'white,' then the compromise may be a darker
shade of gray."

So at page 67 of my own oral history I stated in a discussion of the
"purists" of the environmental movement that:

"Ansel is so pure he tried for at least ten years to resign (from the
club) before he finally accomplished the resignation after his (1971)
heart attack. Every time he would want to resign, he knew me so well
and seemed to respect my views that I was always able to talk him out

vii

of it. He would say that nobody paid any attention to him and his
views. I would say, 'Yes,' quoting Kittredge again, 'but you don't
know how much more closer to the black we would have voted if it
hadn't been for you arguing for the absolute pure white position.'
In those days the Sierra Club did compromise much more than it does
today. Ansel was an absolute purist and still is."

Upon Ansel's retirement in 1971 the board of directors, in appreciation of
his thirty-seven years on the board and his exceptionally high quality contribu
tions, unanimously elected him an honorary vice-president of the Sierra Club.
Because of Ansel's objection to the new "shin-kicking" method of negotiations,
Ansel refused the honor. In 1974 he was again unanimously elected honorary
vice-president, and again refused the honor.

Finally, in 1978 Ansel had "mellowed" a bit, and the Sierra Club had
matured beyond the strident attitude of the past few years and had clearly
accomplished an immense amount of environmental good. So Ansel graciously
accepted the honor, a fitting rapprochement in the fine work of Ansel and the
Sierra Club over so many years.

Richard M. Leonard

Honorary President, Sierra Club

A July 1978
Berkeley, California

viii

INTERVIEW HISTORY

The interview with Ansel Adams was held in twenty-six sessions. The
first twenty-four began 12 May 1972 and concluded 8 September of that year.
Of them, the last five were devoted to Sierra Club affairs, although the club
had been referred to and some aspects of it discussed in earlier sessions.
The final two sessions in the series were held on 19 May 1974, and 23 February
1975, and were concerned principally with events recent to those dates.

All of the interviewing was done in Ansel Adams's home at Carmel
Highlands, California. Most were held in the comfortable living room; the
only exception was the darkroom tour described in the interview. All of the
sessions were held in the late afternoons on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
Most lasted about two and a half hours. Mr. Adams, who had usually spent the
day working in his darkroom, viewed the interview sessions as periods of
relaxation. He preferred not to consider the subject matter in advance but
to discuss spontaneously whatever was brought up. The result is this informal,
wide-ranging, informative series of conversations.

Mr. Adams's editing of the interview transcript, which was sent to him in
sections, was done over a two-year period, in time fitted into a busy schedule.
(He read one section while confined to bed with the flu, another on a trans-
Atlantic plane.) He made brief additions, most in response to queries by the
interviewers, and some corrections, but no extensive changes.

The Regional Oral History Office is grateful to Mrs. Helen M. Land, whose
generous contribution to the Friends of The Bancroft Library made the project
possible, and to the Sierra Club for a contribution toward the part of the
interview that deals specifically with the Sierra Club. In addition, thanks
are due to Helen M. LeConte, long-time friend of Ansel and Virginia Adams and
of the interviewer, for valuable assistance in the project.

Ruth Teiser
Catherine Harroun
Interviewers-Editors

18 August 1978

Regional Oral History Office

486 The Bancroft Library

University of California at Berkeley

[Interview I — 12 May 1972]
[Begin Tape 1, Side 1]

Education and the Creative Process

Adams: My father [Charles Hitchcock Adams] was a very broad-minded man,

and I guess he must have known that I was a bit of a nut, but he had
faith, and they sent me to various schools. I didn't do at all well,
so then I got into music and decided that was pretty good, and my
father said, "Well now, if you want to you can go to the university,
or study music, and if you do music all I'll ask you is to take some
languages and sciences because they are useful."

So I studied with several private people — a little Greek, and
my father taught me a little French. Had a miserable time with
German — didn't go anywhere with it. And so I was free to do pretty
much what I wanted. All that he wanted was the satisfaction that I
was getting somewhere.

It would have been extremely difficult today to have done that
because of your school regulations and the conventions of education.
This tends to worry me a little bit, because I know our own children
just had to go to the grammar school and the high school, and a lot
of things seemed to be a great waste of time. My son [Michael Adams]
-had a compelling interest in flying. It was later on that he
decided to become a doctor. But I just can't help thinking of the
difference.

Now, Russell Varian (he's dead now, but he was the head of the
Varian Associates, he and his brother) and I understood that even in
high school he couldn't read. He could read silently, and he could
write pretty well, but if you asked him to read this, he couldn't
read it out loud. So of course he was considered a prime nut, but he
was a genius in mathematics and physics, and on the basis of that he
got into Stanford.

That's impossible today, because he didn't have any of the
"credentials."

Adams :

Then his brother, Sigurd, was a very fine engineer. You don't
realize that they were one of the dominant powers, forces, in
the development of radar. And here's a guy who couldn't read
out loud in high school! [Laughter]

So the creative process is something that is inevitable.
You can't control it. You can't stop it. There's nothing you
can do with it. You can wreck it, I suppose, but if a person
was really creative, I don't think he would get into drugs and
things. I think the impulse is there and it's strong.

I guess I'd say that with me the impulse must have been
there, but certainly the family support had a great deal to do
with it.

Family Background and Childhood

Adams :

Teiser :
Adams :

My Adams family came from New England, and my grandmother*
spent the last decade of her life trying to relate us to the
presidential family, but it doesn't work. [Laughter] They are
very distantly related, but nothing that you'd say would be
family.

Were there creative people in your family?

Well, Henry Adams was closer. I don't know just what the
relationship was, but that's almost to the point where any
quality that they had would be so distributed in the genes that
you couldn't count on it after so many generations of diffusion.
My grandmother's family was from Thomaston, Maine. That was the
Hills family, who, it seems, are related to the Hills coffee
people. She found that out. She could trace the ancestry back
to England, to Lord Rosse**, the astronomer. And that's all we
can tell on that side.

On the other side, the Bray family — [to Mrs. Adams] there's
not much known about the Bray family, is there, other than they
came from Baltimore?

Mrs. Virginia

Best Adams: Well, they had Oliver Cromwell as a relative.

Adams :

They had?

*Cassandra Hills Adams, wife of William James Adams.
**William Parsons, Third Earl of Rosse.

V. Adams:

Adams :
Teiser:
Adams :
Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :

Yes. Auntie "Crumell" they called her; she belonged to the Cromwell
family.* I don't know whether that's an honor or not.

I didn't realize that. So that would be several generations remote.
That was your mother's family?
That was my mother's family.**
How did her parents get to Nevada?

Well, they both in '56 came across the plains and went to Sacramento—
a business — then moved to Carson City, and they lived in Nevada. My
mother was born in Iowa, though, on the way over. My father's
father came west one or two times — started a business and then went
back again and married and came back by ship. I guess he always
came by ship. But the Brays came across in a covered wagon.

So then my grandfather [William James Adams] got in the lumber
business and several things. If all had gone well I might have been
a real playboy, but it didn't. He was at one time supposed to be the
wealthiest lumber man on the coast, and there was a series of
disasters, a couple of crashes, and he lost twenty-seven ships by
fire and shipwreck — lumber ships — in twelve or fifteen years. Just
disaster after disaster. Several mills burned, and in those days
the insurance cost almost as much as what was insured, so if anything
happened, that was just a dead loss. But of course, the accounting
in those days — you just had money in the bank, and if a ship was
destroyed, you just took the money out and built another one. I mean
there was no such thing as cost accounting or — if they took in a
great deal of money, they just took in a great deal of money, that
was all. There were no taxes. It was so simple compared to today.
And offices for these big plants had none of the present style — I
remember as a kid there 'd be a great big shed, you know, and all the
steel work of a lumber mill, and the office would be about as big as
this alcove, a kind of mezzanine supported with rods from the
ceiling, and a staircase. And then there were a couple of ladies,
maybe somebody with an old-fasioned typewriter, and a couple would
be writing in books, and that was the office.

For the lumber mill?

The whole business went through just this little office,
a couple of office boys, and paymasters, you see.

Oh, maybe

*She was a great aunt of Ansel Adams.
**Ansel Adams's mother was born Olive Bray.

Adams: I know years ago my father was secretary of the Merchants Exchange
[in San Francisco], and they controlled the Merchants Exchange
Building. Every Friday it was payday for the men, and my father
would take the voucher to the treasurer to be approved, and then
go to the bank and get the money — greenback money which was put in
little envelopes. And each man had his name on it and the amount
due him. There was no withholding, nothing, just the amount. Then
they'd line up, the janitor, the engineers, and I used to help my
father sometimes. You had to say the names: "Mendota," and Joe
Mendota gets his envelope. Compared to today, you know, it's
amazing that business was that way. But that's getting a little bit
away from your mission.

I remember the whole family. My uncle [William L. Adams] was a
very fine doctor, and he died when I was about ten or twelve, I
think, of diabetes. That was before insulin. And he was a very
prominent doctor, what they called a diagnostician, and a diagnostician
in those days was the equivalent of an internist, an internal medicine
man, today. But I think in the last fifteen, maybe twenty years of
his practice, he saw patients only referred to him by other doctors,
whereas now the internist refers to specialists. All the other
general men around would say, "Well, better go see Dr. Adams on that."
He was the "diagnostic expert."

Teiser: Were you friendly with him?

Adams: He was a very nice man. He was a good student of French, translated
French poetry. His first wife was a nurse whom he met studying
medicine in Paris. She converted him to Catholicism, and he
succeeded in converting half the family. So half of us are heathens,
and the other half are Catholics. [Laughter] I think we're supposed
to be Episcopalians for the record.

Teiser: Did people read to you before you, yourself, read?

Adams: Yes, my father would — very patient. I read very early, though. I
could read at a very early age.

Teiser: Teach yourself?

Adams: Oh, I guess so; just read, you know. I had a phenomenal memory. At
the age of twelve I could look at a page and recite it. In fact,
even when I was first studying music I could take a thing to bed and
read it at night and play it the next morning. I could see the notes.
That facility left me at about sixteen, seventeen. I lost that. Now
I have one of the world's worst memories. But that's all right. It's
perfectly natural that you lose that kind of memory because so many
other things come into the mind. I think that the reason I have a bad
memory now is that there isn't any room. I've got so many things

Adams: going on and thinking about, that I meet somebody and I hear the name
and I forget it. I forget how to spell it. And then it's very
embarrassing, because I remember the face. I can't remember the years
the pictures* were taken in, but I can remember the situation of
taking them. I can go right back, and in most cases I can see the
camera, the lens. I can tell you the exposures. I can remember that
phase very clearly, and a great many things way back to the middle of
the 1920s. I can pretty much point to the camera, the lens. I can
remember I did this with the second Zeiss Protar I had. I remember
that this was a very wide-angle lens with the smallest stop, which was
actually f/56, and you know, I can remember these things. But as for
the dates, I can't remember those at all, and that drives my friend
Beaumont Newhall, the historian, out of his mind because some of my
pictures appear with three or four different dates on the back, so I
use the word "circa" now. So it will be "circa early twentieth
century." [Laughter]

Another very important thing was the location. When I was one
year old we moved out to the new house in San Francisco because my
father wanted to be in the country. It was right in the middle of
the sand dunes near the ocean, and an old house a block or so away
from us was the nearest house. I can remember — just a little kid — I'd
sit at the window and watch my father — in the carriage (they had a man
at the end of the line at First Avenue) — he'd come out on the street
car to First Avenue, and there were two carriages that ran up and down
Lake Street. And you'd have to wait maybe fifteen, twenty minutes,
get in the carriages, and we'd see Papa and the horse clumping out
Lake Street and he would get off at Twenty-fourth Avenue and walk
down on a board walk through the sand to the house. I've got all
those memories — the wild country and the beautiful flowers and Lobos
Creek, and the fog horns, and Bakers Beach right down below. You know,
you had a feeling of very close contact with nature.

And a very interesting thing, when they started developing the
area, there was a man named S. [Stephen] A. Born, a contractor, who
built the houses now in Westclay Park. He did some of Seacliff, but
Westclay Park was his area. And he was a very fine builder, I mean
he always put more wood in than was needed. Some of those houses are
just as sturdy as a rock. I know a friend of mine has a house that
he built in 1918, 1916 I guess, and that house is absolutely solid.
You know its timbers — wonderful construction! But he used to let me
go over to the work room and shed and draw plans, and the architect
and draftsmen were very kind and would show me how to draw, you know,
building plans — what an elevation was, and space problems. I still
remember all that very clearly. I could have been an architect.

*Ansel Adams's photographs.

Teiser: How old were you when you were interested in this?

Adams: Ten, eight or ten. So I learned a great deal of that. And that
helped precision of thinking. Now, this is all very important,
because that gave me a certain precision. Well, you draw a straight
line and measure it, you see. Even showed me how they form a drawing,
leave spaces for the rug, how to figure all the different dimensions,
and how to draw an arch. You know, I just learned — the guy loved to
teach me these things, and he'd give me a T-square and a little desk,
and I'd sit over there in the corner and work.

He said once that I had a couple of good ideas and he was going
to use them. I don't know what they were.

Studying the Piano

Adams: Well, the next thing as far as precision goes, the training in

music, which was with an elderly maiden lady, Miss Marie Butler, who
was a long-time associate with the New England Conservatory of Music.
She came from a Unitarian family from Boston, very precise and
extremely accurate, and had the patience of Job because I was really
pretty scatterbrained. She told my father that I had talent, it was
obvious, but I never was going to get anywhere unless I had discipline,
and the discipline might take anywhere from six months to five years.
Was he willing to stick it out? I mean she was perfectly frank. She
said, "He's extremely scatterbrained. He looks out the window. He
thinks of something else." My father said, "Keep at him," so I had
her for years.

It finally got to the point when I would do, say, a Bach
Invention, it'd have to be note perfect. I mean it, there was no
compromise, and if I didn't, "Bring it back next Friday." I mean no
soft decision. I'd get so damn sick of that thing that I'd just go
out of my mind. But I finally, by feeling obligated, I just did it.
So, I would do it. Fine. I would go to something else, and on, and
on. Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann. And this perfection, and the quality
of tone which I learned from her and, of course, my finger technique —
my hands weren't heavy, so it was impact, you know: lift, strike and
relax. The idea is you strike a key but you relax immediately and
slightly lift the key; that's part of the first exercise you do, to
get that dynamic thing, and then the release. So that gave you a
terrific tempo, you see, and very crisp sound — and that built up,
well, a dependency on accuracy. She wouldn't tolerate any sloppiness.
I remember one day she said, "Well, now, I'm very happy about you,
and you've gone as far as you can go with me, and I think you now
should study with Professor [Frederick] Zech. (Old man then, seventy-
eight.) And he had studied with and assisted Von Bulow.

Adams: And he was a real Germanic — you know, incredible, I'll never forget--
he'd demonstrate technical passages, the only thing he'd ever demon
strate with me. And he said, "Well, you're a little weak on your
double fourths and thirds and sixths." He said, "You must play sixths
like this." And here was this chromatic cascade of double sixths, you
see. [Laughter] I'll never forget hearing this, but it was a totally
impossible thing. But I did it, I got it! But never any one of the
teachers played for me just the plain music, on an imitative basis.
It was all done by encouraging that you ask yourself, "Did this sound
right?" or, "Do you think you really shaped that phrase?" You know,
this dialectic thing.

After Zech I went for six weeks to a woman called Elizabeth
Simpson in Berkeley, who was one of those most satisfactory teachers
as far as the facility of her class was concerned, and she taught
with two pianos, which is I think the most deadly thing you can do,
because all of her class sounded just like her; no individuality.
Now, my father was pretty sensitive, because I came back after a
couple of lessons, and I was playing Schubert, and he came over and
he said, "What's happened, it doesn't sound like you?" And I said,
"What do you mean it doesn't sound like me?" He said, "Well, the
style is not you. You know, I've been listening to you now for quite
a few years." And it occurred to me, well, my gosh, she was "showing"
me. She was playing a phrase — leading me on — and I went a few more
weeks and went to a recital, and it all became perfectly clear that
it was parroting. And she just simply taught that way. She had
immense success. They all played exceedingly well, but they all
sounded just like she did. (Do cats bother you? Because this one is
very friendly.)

Well, then I went to Ben [Benjamin S.] Moore who was an organist-
pianist, and he was a very great influence on my life because he was
also a philosopher and gave the music another dimension. He was also
a purist. And that was the end of my musical training. I worked
with him for years — five or six years, I guess.

Beginning in Photography

Adams: Then gradually I got off into photography, and pretty soon I'm in
photography professionally!

But the important thing is that these precisions were un
obtainable in the photographic world. There was no school of
photography, nothing but going out and apprenticing yourself to
someone who did photof inishing, which I did for a couple of summers,
You know, you learned how to "soup a print," as they called it and,

Adams: oh, terrible stuff — but there was no school relationship, no

academic contact or anything, and there were just two or three very
good photographers who were terribly jealous. [William E. ]
Dassonville was very kind to me. He made photographic papers, and
he helped me a great deal. The other photographers were nice enough,
but, gee, they just hated to give away secrets, you know — as if there
were secrets in simple technology!

I remember Moulin*, the old man. He had a big factory — I'm sure
you know of it — in San Francisco. A big place. He called me up once
and he said, "Mr. Adams, I know we photographers don't like to give
away our secrets because it's all we've got. I don't know how you
feel about it, but I've got to ask a question. Something I just
don't know, and it bothers me." I said, "Well, Mr. Moulin, I have
no secrets, but I'm not an encyclopedia." He said, "What does
potassium bromide do in the developer?"

Now, that is like asking, "What does salt do in soup?" or "What
does yeast do in bread?" It is one of the fundamentals, a restrainer,
and it's been around for nearly a century, and it simply keeps the
developer grains from developing themselves where they have not been
exposed to light, so it prevents fog, and most developers are active
enough to always develop a certain amount of grains that have not
been affected by light, and then you get this fog. You see, if it
has a little restrainer, which is bromide, it puts bromide back into
the halide crystals, and this "clears the whites." But here is this
man who was the biggest photographer in the city, and had the biggest
business and the biggest staff, and nobody on his staff or he knew
what potassium bromide did.

But of course if I really had to tell you what potassium bromide
did and describe the chemical structure, the reaction, that would be
far beyond me from the point of view of a chemist. This is a very
complicated physical chemistry step. But for all intents and purposes,
you know what it does when you add it to the developer. You add
seasoning to food and you don't chemically analyze seasoning; you ask
for saffron or, you know, pepper or something, but you don't give the
chemical analysis of it. But at that time, you see, we weren't getting
information from anybody. Everybody either didn't know or wouldn't
tell.

Teiser: This would have been when?
Adams: The twenties.

*Gabriel Moulin, founder of a major San Francisco photography studio.

Teiser: I see. That late.

Adams: The end of the twenties. And the Moulin episode came in the thirties.
At that time there were only a few — there was Ann Brigman, there was
Imogen Cunningham, there was Dorothea Lange, Consuelo Kanaga, William
Dassonville. As far as I know, they were the only photographers in
the area who had any creativity. (Well, I was on that side of the
fence.) And Dassonville did portraits, pretty good ones, although
to the "trade;" it was soft-focus, and on soft papers. Imogen was
doing portraits. I guess she was the best; she had the greatest
variety of approach. Dorothea Lange was doing portraits and some
Indian work, not very good. Didn't have any technique. Consuelo
Kanaga was a delightful woman and imaginative artist, but again, no
technique. They were trying to say something in a language you can't
write.

So then when I first started in serious photography — that's
1930 — it was people like Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston that
came on the scene. Of course, they found that here we had all these
damn camera club people with hideous taste, imitative stuff, soupy
sentimental business. A lot of them had a very fine mechanical
technique, which was always very irritating to me. [Laughter] They
knew a lot about it, you know, but what they did was terrible
aesthetically. And that led into Group f/64, and this is probably
another chapter entirely. I'm going way ahead.

Youthful Experiences

Adams: I'd say that my first experience in nature was a regional

experience; of Bakers Beach and that whole western part of the City,
which profoundly influenced me; the storms and the fogs and all this
open space. Why I didn't get killed a hundred times on those
Golden Gate cliffs I don't know. I used to go out to Land's End and
climb all over without knowing how to climb, and all alone. I got
into some tight situations.

Teiser: Did you play alone a good deal of the time?
Adams: Oh, yes, yes.
Teiser: You did?

Adams: Yes, I didn't have — well, there were a few boys in the neighborhood.
Nothing really happened that way. It was interesting; I didn't have
any real friends. I just didn't need them. I don't know.

Adams: But the other experience was then going to Puget Sound to my father's
plant. It was after 1912 when he started the plant to recoup the
family fortune, and we had this property on Puget Sound. He acquired
the rights to the Classen process. Now, this is chemically interest
ing, but today things have superseded it. It was a way of making
industrially pure alcohol, ethyl alcohol, not methyl or wood alcohol
but just industrially pure ethyl alcohol, 200 proof, from cellulose.
They decided that that area was magnificent because of all the
sawdust and the slash, and all the available wood material which the
lumber mills would just love to get rid of, and they'd send the barges
around all over the Sound and collect tons of this stuff, and then
come back and go through this Classen chemical process which involved
treatment by sulphurous acid, and they made — we still have some — 200
proof alcohol. It's as pure as anything you'll ever get, and more
potent, easily drinkable. The residue of that, the cellulose, was
then mixed with molasses and a few other things (they didn't know
about vitamins then, but "enrichments") and it was sold as cattle food.
It was called Bastol, and that had a great future because it was
relatively light in relation to energy, and it could be mixed with
hay or grain.

And what happened in this case was that industrial alcohol was
at that time a by-product of the sugar industry (the sugar cane
residue). And the Hawaiian sugar trust — you can literally say that
the group got together and decided that this company can't go on.
And they bought out every share of stock they could get, and my
father's brother-in-law* was bribed and he sold out and betrayed him.
It was a terrible blow. My father's lawyer betrayed him. They sold
their stock and got out of it, for a price. It was a terrible blow
to Papa, and they got 54 percent control of the stock, threw everybody
out, put in a dummy board, and wrecked the plant.

Now, it was so important to them, they didn't even try to
salvage some of this beautiful equipment — the machinery was wrecked.
Of course with the S.E.C. today and the rules we have, that couldn't
happen. There's no possible way that you could do a thing like that.
You could buy the stock, but you couldn't put it out of business, you
see — protection of other stockholders is important. Of course, a lot
of people lost quite a little money in it, and my father was just
ruined, and of course in a terrible state over this financial
catastrophe, because he was always a person of the highest integrity.
But when someone of his own family, whom I was named after...! That's
why I don't use my middle name. Ansel Easton was unspeakable as far
as I'm concerned, because I know what he did. My father in fact felt
so much for him he named me after him, Ansel Easton, and unfortunately,
I have to use that name legally, and I just hate it. But you notice I
don't use it in any correspondence or in relation to my work. My

*Ansel Easton; see paragraph following.

Adams: professional name is Ansel Adams. But that was a family disruption
and, of course, part of the family went with them, and the other
part stayed with us.

Teiser: How old were you when that happened, about?

Adams: Oh, I guess I was about twelve or thirteen when it happened.

Teiser: Were you upset by that?

Adams: Well, I knew something had happened, because we went from a cook and
a maid and a governess to doing it all yourself! [Laughter] You know
what I mean — quite down and out. Papa spent a lot of time after that
trying to recoup his plant. And they had an antimony process, and
inferior people in management. The Bank of California, which my
grandfather helped found, had carried the loans and mortgages on the
properties for years and years, and finally the law caught up with
them and they said, "We have to call the loan." But it was with
great regrets. I mean my father's word was like my grandfather's.
He'd go in and say, "I need a thousand dollars." "Well, here it is."
It was just this kind of an honorable thing.

I haven't had to lately, but in the last twenty years — fifteen —
I had to go to the Wells Fargo or the Bank of California and borrow
five thousand or so — got a job coming up — and they'd say, "Oh, yes,
sure, Mr. Adams, we don't need any collateral with you." And, you
know, you think, "Well, that ain't bad," [laughter] to have that
reputation. Of course, legally, they have to show something
protective.

Yes, I think it did have an effect on all of us, and I think it
probably was something that stirred me to think realistically when I
first went to the Sierra with my family in 1916, when I was fourteen
years old. I think my mother reacted very badly to this catastrophe,
and I think that tension probably encouraged me to go more into the
mountains.

So, as I said I went early to Puget Sound, and then we went down
to the Santa Cruz mountains, and then my father became secretary to
the Astronomical Society [of the Pacific], and we used to go down to
Mount Hamilton often. I never went East until 1933. Oh, yes, we did
make a trip to Los Angeles when I was about nine or ten, and we
stayed at the Alexandria Hotel, and I remember going around and
seeing oranges and snow peaks and ostriches, and I can remember this
brilliant, clear airl Still can recall it! Something like Santa Fe,
New Mexico, has today. Certain moods in areas. I still remember
that well in Los Angeles; we were there about six weeks.

Harroun: That was about 1910?

Adams: That was 1910 or '12, yes. We went on the streetcars — the Pacific
Electric Railway. But absolutely clear, you know, I recall that
whole feeling of clarity. It was like this place, really, as it is
now. [Carmel Highlands]

Teiser: Were you conscious as a youngster that things impressed you visually?

Adams: Yes, very much so. (Do you want anything now to drink, soft, hard,
moderate?)

Teiser: No, not a thing.

Adams: You've met Jim Taylor?

Teiser: No, we haven't. How do you do.

Adams: I would have introduced you, but I was swallowing.

Visualization and Music

Teiser: You said you were aware that you had a particular visual sense?

Adams: Yes, I think I always had. There comes a romantic period when you
can visualize literary realities. Say you hear music, and you —
well, you're reminded of certain things. You see tangible images,
and that's the basis of all these terrible titles some music has,
like Moonlight Sonata. Whoever thought of moonlight rippling on
the water? I never got that corny. The Moonlight Sonata was
always a bad example, but you did get such things as the "Legendes"
of Liszt, "St. Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds," and "St.
Francis of Paulus Walking on the Waves." This is pictorial music.
Well, at one age of life I'd get into that kind of direct pictorial-
ism. I guess you'd call it "literary." But then it wasn't very
much later — about five years — before my visual impression of music
was quite abstract. I guess I got that mostly from Ben Moore and the
music of Scriabin. But I'd remember everything I'd seen very clearly,
and that's why the camera was so rewarding. I would capture what I
saw, and the dissatisfaction that the image wasn't what I'd really
"seen" was one of the things that kept me going. The average person
just goes "click" and there's Grandma, and that's the satisfaction
with the image. But in my case, the required image or the ideal
image which we see and hear was not casually seen in the photograph;
therefore I worked hard to get it. And when I got it, that was the
beginning of my real photography, and the actual visualization,
where you look into the world, you see a combination of shapes, and
you see them in terms of the final picture. You don't see them

Adams: "outside" any more. And then you've got to get your eye, your
camera, and everything around you into that position which will
support that visualization. It's all intuitive. It has to come
very quickly. That means you have to practice. If I don't go out
with the camera for quite a while, I find myself very, very clumsy.
I've just lost physical contact with the camera.

I have a little difficulty seeing and framing my images. Like,
what would I do with you [Harroun] sitting there with your pencil
and pad? I could go "click" and get a perfectly good record of you,
which you would date on the back, and it would be very valuable. I
think I have enough mechanics to get a good exposure, but that
wouldn't be a picture. The picture would be the combination of all
the relationships, the black line on your dress, and the black lines
on the blanket [on the couch], and- the element of light, and the
distractions of the environment to get rid of. If you can't get rid
of it, use it. But it's all quite plain in the end! Thousands of
things are going on at one time, and you can't be aware of all those
things, and you can't add conventions to it, because if you did that
you'd ruin it.

It's just the way you practice the piano for years to get a
facility in your fingers, tone control, shaping, dynamics, and when
you play you can't think of all the elements; you just do it. One
example, a friend said, "Well, you take the C Major Sonata of Weber
and you take the last movement, the Perpetual Motion and the Rondo.
You're playing four parts, sixteen hundred notes a minute." You have
to have your harmonics, your dynamics (which is phrase shape), your
rhythm or your accent, and then above all that, the pecular thing
in music — the style — the intangibles. And you practice. You're a
musician; you've spent ten years or twenty, and you play this thing.
And if you tried to even put it in a computer (it is going through
a mental computer) — but there's no ordinary computer made that can
handle what you're doing.

Anticipation in Music and Photography

Adams: I was talking about this just a little while ago. The mind is so
far ahead of the computer except in some things, but in music, you
see, we're anticipating. We have a whole new pattern of thinking,
unconscious thought. You are anticipating things with appreciation
of a tenth of a second's psycho-physical lag. And you're hearing
harmonics, and the harmonics are developing in such a way that at
a certain point you instinctively know you're ready for the next
note. If you waited a tenth of a second until those harmonics had
resolved, you'd be late. So, that's part of the structure that

Adams: people don't think about. I mean, when you hear music, that's what
you hear. You hear this tremendously complex thing which can be
broken down into a few categories, but it's really beyond literary
definition. You can make a record of it. Of course, you don't get
everything, even the finest records are not complete, but they are
very close to it. You can break those records down on oscilloscopes.
I've seen violin records broken down, recorded and then re-recorded
slow, cutting out, cutting down to one-hundredth the time, and then
making oscillographs and measuring the harmonics. I was absolutely
fascinated with the complexity. You finally get a pattern where
this other note — this thing which on the piano would be touch or
on the violin which, I guess, would be intonation — why one is
beautiful and the other isn't, and yet they are the same notes, and
everything superficially the same.

And the same thing with the camera. I mean ten people can go to
exactly the same scene and get ten totally different images, although
they might have the cameras in the same position. Superficially the
tree and the rock would be the same, but there's something else, you
see. There's the way they felt it, visualized it, composed it,
exposed it, developed it, and printed it. I guess I'm wandering a
little bit.

Teiser: No, no, this is just fine. Is there a parallel in the sequential
character of music as you were just discussing it and the sequence
of events in a photograph — or is that stretching it?

Adams: No, no. My work is fundamentally static. In other words, I see the
scene, and the scene is changing at a very slow rate. I'm not
talking about a spectacular wave coming in or clouds moving, but I
mean the natural scene is there, and I can think about it and compose
and move around and get this rock or tree right. You know, I have
command of it. Now, you take somebody like [Henri] Car tier-Bresson
(and I've done some of his kind of work, I know directly what it
means). His things are in motion. And the average candid so-called
photographer just gets people on the fly. But, there again is this
anticipation, and this might interest you. I was teaching at the
Art Center School. We were working with students (this was before
the second [world] war), Signal Corps people, photographers.

Gee, it was pretty hard. We didn't have much time with them,
and they were in the army, but they were studying to use the Speed
Graphic. Well, a very intelligent general, one of the few intelligent
generals I've known, said, "I know you people are interested in the
art phase, and that's why we want you to do this, because we can find
all kinds of mechanical people who can give us the answers, but
they're not the kind of answers that we want. We'd like to get these
boys to see and to anticipate. Say you're out in combat, something
is happening. You can't wait until something happens and then take a
picture of it. It's happened so fast that you'll be late.

Adams: So part of the training that went on for weeks — I'd be upstairs
looking around in the street for something, and suddenly see a
streetcar, a block away, and I'd yell downstairs, "Let's go!" They'd
all arrive with their camera cases and I'd say, "Catch the front of
the streetcar in juxtaposition with that big power pole — I must see
a precise juxtaposition." Well, they opened the case, they got out
the camera, they judged the distance (we had a lot of focus controls)-
"That's a hundred feet." They'd taken the light value measurements
and they knew the approximate exposure, and then they were ready.

Now the point was, if you waited until you saw that car line up
with the pole, then it'd be way over and beyond, because you have at
least a tenth of a second lag. About a third of the students could
hit it right on the nose, could anticipate the juxtaposition. Some
of them would get nervous, you see, and more than anticipate, so
they'd shoot too early. Then, well, after several weeks we'd have
about 90 percent of them doing an exact job. Of course we wouldn't
go back to the same subject, but they'd be more relaxed and see the
problem more clearly as time went on.

[End Tape 1, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]

Adams: Well, to take this element of anticipation, which is essential, I

think I explained that is inevitable in music, although people don't
think of it in that sense, but in the event — seeing that the event
doesn't trigger itself, at the point of the event, but goes. through
our ears, our "computer" recognition, motor impulse, and nerve and
muscle. I still have a very high reaction, but as you get older it
gets slower, and I still run I think a twelfth, and as high as a
fifteenth of a second on light impulse. You know, you can have
standard tests, and when the light flashes you react. Well, you'd be
surprised; you think you are fast, but then you see the graph, and
here's the light impulse and here's your response, and if you're
tired the response shows more delay.

Anyway, creative people like Cartier-Bresson use this anticipa
tion factor in a highly creative sense, and he was able to get these
marvelous compositions of people in motion. It wasn't only one
person; there may be as many as five all functioning together. He
has an uncanny sense — gestalt patterns, perhaps. We don't know how
to explain it, but in many, many of his pictures, four or five
people will be seen in the ideal moment, and that's why the title of
his book, The Decisive Moment is so apt, because it is that decisive
moment. When he operated the shutter, his "computer" decided the
decisive moment. The real decisive moment is when the shutter
operated, which was at least a tenth of a second after he'd given
the signal. So, he must have anticipated in the creative sense of
the term.

Adams: I can make a probe and hit this metal and in a millionth of a
second I'll get a response from this dial, but that's a direct
contact. But if this is moving, and it has to go through my
mechanism, then operate the shutter, at the moment when I think
that's right it'll be too late. So this is a terribly important thing,
and I think in music it's essential, and I don't know in most
photography — well, different degree I'd say in everything. You
anticipate light, you anticipate your position in relation to the
object. You don't think it out, you feel it out. If I'm looking at
you [Harroun] I would move in such a way that that string back of
you would be out, I wouldn't see it. If I can't do it, then I have
to use that string, so I see it another way. But I can't say to the
camera, "Move over on a track six feet and go click." When we think
of all the things photographed. .. 1 1 1

Mariner Photographs of Mars

Adams: I have a whole set of the new pictures of Mars taken on the last

Mariner flight, and they are wonderful technological achievements.
A good friend sent them to me. They're not really restricted, but
it's unusual to have so many. And you see in them one of the great
miracles of our time, scientifically speaking. The pictures have
absolutely no aesthetic quality at all except what you read into
them. Now if I were a painter, I could take some of the designs and
spots and features and I could expand them, and I think if I could
be there in space I could have made a better composition. But
[laughter], one, I can't be there in space and, two, I'm a little too
far away. And three, these don't come back as pictures, they come
back as a series of bits, one to a hundred and twenty-eight numbers,
and are recomposed in the computer. A picture is made, and it's
only this big [gesture], as big as your thumb, and scanned with a
television micro-scanner, and —

V. Adams: [In the background] Oh, don't let the cat out!

Adams: — every time the probes come across a change in density in this

image, they give a different number. That relates to intensity and
comes back to us as a continuous tape, and the computer is set up to
receive and interpret the signal.

Now, the scanner works two ways. It records in one direction
the intensity of the image and, returning, it is sending data from
a number of other scientific instruments. When it goes one way, it's
giving the image information, and when it goes back it's giving other
scientific data gain. Hundreds and thousands of lines are involved.
When you see the picture it's really sharp, this big [gesture], but

Adams :

Teiser
Adams :

Teiser;
Adams :

the image is only as big as my thumb to begin with. Well, that is
not art. People like, oh, [Gyorgy] Kepes or [Laszlo] Moholy-Nagy or
[Herbert] Bayer would say, "Ah, this begins art; this is the new art."
Well, it's another reality you're confronted with, but it doesn't
represent art in itself because you're not seeing and controlling it.
The machine is doing it, and I don't know whether we can always
control it! [To assistant, Ted Organ, holding framed photograph] That
went all around the world, God knows where, and I took the tape off
and it was perfectly beautiful. It has to be cleaned, though.

Travelling exhibit?

Mrs. [Estes] Kefauver.
Embassies program?

Yes.

Remember Mrs. Kefauver, the Art in the

That was part of her project. That's been out for years. And I
opened one box today, a whole box, three hundred pounds of pictures
and frames.

How many photographs in all?

Forty or fifty. I've got a showl I just unpacked one to look at it.
Most beautifully packed stuff you ever saw.

"Monolith, the Face of Half Dome"

Adams: Well, anyway, back to anticipation! Now, what does the artist

really do? I'd go into the mountains as a kid, and I had unbounded
physical energy, which is something that I don't have now. Of
course, nobody realizes when they've got it, you just look back and
you wonder! You know, I could climb two peaks a day with a fifty-
pound pack and still want to photograph in the evening. [Laughter]

But I think the element of anticipation enters into this picture.
Something tells you this is something you recognize, and you begin to
see the picture — visualize it — and you make it. In the early days,
in the early twenties when I was out in the Sierra with the LeConte*
family (LeConte was a marvelous man, a very intelligent man, a really
very important person in Sierra history), he made any number of
photographs on five by seven plates — but hardly any that contain this

*Joseph N. LeConte

Adams: particular quality. They're immensely valuable as records, and

they're pleasant. You know, you look at them and they bring back
scenes, but his mind wasn't in the creative direction at all.

See, compare him with William Henry Jackson; he was about the
same. He made thousands and thousands of pictures. Now, another
man of the Jackson period — 1870-1880 — called T.H. O'Sullivan had
another level of vision, and his pictures are always superb composi
tions. While the Jacksons historically were tremendously important,
O'Sullivan had that extra dimension of feeling. You sense it, you
see it. This Half Dome picture* of mine [on wall] was my first really
fine photograph. (I was ready to say, "Well, maybe I should have
stopped and gone into the ready-made clothing business.") Because
this was my first real visualization. I felt the monumental quality,
I saw it intensely. I had two plates with me, I took one with the
standard K2 filter, and I began to realize, why, I'm not creating
anything of what I feel, because I know the shadow on the cliff is
going to be like the sky; it's going to be gray. It will be an
accurate picture of Half Dome, but it won't have that emotional
quality I feel. I had a deep red filter and I used it on my last
plate. And that's the interpretive result — that's what I felt at the
time.

Literary Titles for Photographs

Adams: And this might be the time to bring in the term "equivalent" that
Alfred Stieglitz used, because he made the bridge between the
pictorialists and the creative people. Very difficult I Even today,
the so-called pictorialists have to title everything, you know:
"Autumn Tranquility ," or "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," or "The
Smile of Spring," and all this incredible [laughter] literary
imitation. And Stieglitz said, "Of course, it's all right to say
this is 'Fifth Avenue, Winter;' that's fact." Edward Weston would
say, "Cyprus Number Twenty-three, Point Lobos." But when you begin
to say, oh, "Time to be Home," [laughter] you know, that's an awful
thing.

Well, anyway, Stieglitz tried to break way from that with the
idea of saying, "When I see something I react to it and I state it,
and that's the equivalent of what I felt. So, therefore I call my
print 'equivalent,' and I give it you as a spectator, and you get it
or you don't get it, you see, but there's nothing on the back of the

*"Monolith, the Face of Half Dome," Yosemite Valley, 1927(7). See
also p. 38 and other entries as indexed.

Adams: print that tells you what you should get. I put no literary title."
That was a very important thing, and I instinctively felt that way
back in the twenties. I rarely if ever gave a title, a literary
title. I'd give a definitive title like "Rocks, Bakers Beach" (if I
had only put the date on it, Newhall would have been happy), "Golden
Gate Park Number Sixteen," or "Red Slate Peak," and sometimes "Red
Slate Peak, Evening," another might be "Red Slate Peak, Morning."
But it was never a literary thing. This is terribly important, to
avoid this — I call it literary; maybe that isn't the right term. I
think from the very beginning I was relatively free of that because
after going through a certain stage I was in, in photography and
music, I realized how shallow it was.

Teiser: It not only is literary, or romantic, or whatever, but it also

reflects what the picture is like. I mean, you don't find that kind
of title on a picture that would be called "Rock and Sea."

Adams: You're right there.

Teiser: I don't know what I'm trying to say, but —

Adams: The person who would accept that philosophy of a title could not do
a Weston-approach picture, you see.

Teiser: That's what I'm trying to say.

Adams: Yes. I remember one of the criticisms that got me really worried was
James Huneker, the great music writer, critic for the Globe or New
York Times or something, but boy, was he floridl Wowl And his dis
cussions of Chopin's Sonatas and other works were memorably bad.
Now, the sonata is usually in four movements, and in the B-flat minor
Sonata of Chopin you have the "Marche Funebre," which is the Adagio,
and in which he took the mode of the funeral march. Now, actually,
it should be played with the utmost stylization, without thinking of
a funeral cortege. It's been interpreted so that people always
relate it to a funeral, but it's actually a theme, not a theme but a
structure. Otherwise you have just a funeral march.

The last movement is Presto Furioso, and is an awfully difficult
thing, with terrific surges of sound. Huneker ruins it for millions
of people by saying, "This is the night wind rushing over the graves."
You see, it immediately cuts off a whole dimension because it's so
trite. That's part of the philosophy that you have to contend with
with me. I avoid this aspect of triteness, and if I ever slip,
please, you know, take me up on it because I might make allusions
sometimes that might give you that impression. But it's very easy to
get emotional.

Portraiture

Teiser: Somebody with an unpracticed eye would look at Julia Margaret

Cameron's portrait of Tennyson, say, and then look at a turn-of-the-
century pictorialist portrait and find them similar. What's the
difference?

Adams: She was — I don't know if we can say she was a dichotomy, but she

exhibited a dichotomy in the sense that most of her pictures are the
most sickly, stylized, posed, Burne- Jones compositions of wan,
tubercular maidens in white drapes, and — boy, are they sentimental I
I mean, they're really Victorian! So that's part of Julia Margaret
Cameron. And they're awfully good for their time. The next step,
and the important thing, is when she got these great people to come
to her country house. (This is the story we get.) She was
apparently a very well-to-do woman, and had the equivalent of a salon,
and the people who'd come to visit would be trapped and photographed I
But what she did was so intense, and the magic in that is not just
putting somebody up in an iron brace and holding them for fifty
seconds (the poses were very long) , but developing an empathy or a
sympathy between them. So when you see the picture of Carlisle,
Herschel, or even Tennyson, there's something happening there that's
far beyond the ordinary photographs of the time — exposures of thirty
seconds or more, with the head gripped by the support. Her photo
graphs had motion, they moved, but that does not bother us. You
are aware of their great intensity.

Stieglitz did the same thing. He took portraits of [John]
Marin, and he'd believe if a person would sit relaxed for a minute
or more, something could come through that would never appear in a
snapshot. That's only a slice of time. That's another thing that
Cartier-Bresson did superbly: the anticipation of the body movements
and facial expression. And you know most candid photographs are
simply horrible, people speaking with their mouths twisted open or
showing incomplete action, etc. You have to study the person, and
you have to be speaking with him if you're doing a portrait of the
speaker. You phrase his passage or sentence, and just as he's ended
the phrase or sentence you may photograph — because at that moment his
face may have a moment of logical repose.

And Cartier-Bresson, and, again, Gene [W. Eugene] Smith, and
many other people in that field have that sense. The person-subject
does come through. But the difference between Cameron and the average
professional at the time was not that there was a romantic stage set
involved. I think there was just a very intense personal relation
ship. The subject and photographer knew each other, they were friends,
and they knew what she was trying to do. There's no resistance, and
there's no passivity in evidence.

Adams: Minor White made a big contribution in discussing portraiture in
the sense that it really was a stage play, a dramatic play. One
character was the subject, another character was the photographer, a
third was the camera. The interplay wasn't just between you and me,
but it was between you, the camera, and me. And sometimes this was
very vague for people to understand, but he did some very spectacular
portraits on that philosophy. You're really getting the person to
feel that they're part of the camera. That's what happens when
you're doing what's called "first person photography," when they're
looking into the lens. Most photographs you see, they're not looking
at the lens, they're looking over there or at the photographer. It's
all right to look here or there, but if there's slight indirectness
the effect is disturbing. When I talk to you and look this way at
your collar, why, it'd drive you nuts after a while. You'd think I
was, you know, ashamed, or afraid, or weak. You see the difference?
I don't know whether you can see my eyes, but now you're the camera,
and I'm looking at you. Now I'm going to focus on the tree outside.
Do you see what happens? The eyes diverge.

Teiser: Yes.

Adams: It's an extremely small point, but it's absolutely a dominant factor
in portraiture because it can be so ugly and so unhappy to have a
portrait of a person four feet from the camera whose eyes are focused
on a hundred feet or infinity. I'm talking to you, and if I had my
camera over here, these would all be crazy pictures, because it
wouldn't be far enough away. If I had the camera over there [gesture],
by accident I might get something, but of course, I wouldn't know.
So that's why the camera itself, with its single-lens reflex design,
or just the view-camera ground glass, the image (not the finder image)
is so valid. That's what's so wonderful about the new Land camera
[the SX70], the beautiful accuracy of the finder. You're seeing
exactly what the lens sees.

Teiser: This question of focus, is that a factor in the [Yousuf] Karsh
portraits?

Adams: Karsh is never very satisfactory when he has a first person. He has

the ability to make everybody look alike, because he uses a very con-
, sistent lighting without much regard for the person. I mean for mood.
The lighting, mechanically, is superb. When he photographs a profile
of somebody looking away from the camera he achieves very impressive
results. But when he has people looking almost at you, then his
portraits may go to pieces, because they're not looking at the lens,
they're looking at him, or looking a little above, or to the side.
The Hemingway picture and several others, the subjects are looking
above his head.

He has a habit — he made a picture of me at a stockholders
meeting at Polaroid several years ago, demonstrating a new big

Adams: format that hasn't been developed yet. He was going to take a picture
of me, and it was to be processed right there in the camera, and then
it was to be put in the printing press. This was called Project India.
It's a remarkable thing. It means that you will take a picture, wipe
the developer residue off, put it on an offset press, and you print
a hundred thousand copies. This because the print is a screen plate.

I would have simply said, "All right, take the picture but we'll
rehearse it if you want." He got so nervous we rehearsed it four or
five times. He'd never used this process before, you know, and they
had everything set: they gave him everything he needed. He'd come
in a private jet from Ottawa. I was getting awfully tired, because
I was supposed to be the subject and should look "bright." We had
worked everything out and had everything gauged to a quarter of an
inch. But when Karsh made the picture, he'd take the cable release
and look at you, and then he would do this [lifting eyes], and so
everybody sort of does this "lifting up." And it's a secret.
Everybody in his photographs has almost the same "lifting" expression.
I saw him do it with several people. He just sort of does that and
you go along too. [Laughter] He just sort of transmits a lift.

But of course, his lights are right here: they're blinding.
They glare, you know. Whew! [Laughter] And then after he did this,
here are these two thousand people out in front, and he's just white
with fear. They process this thing and out comes this picture.
"Well, that's pretty good, Karsh," Land says. "It's not your fault.
I know Adams can look better than that. Can't we do it over again?
Sure, the picture came out fine that way, but let's get a better one."
By that time Karsh was just ready to be put down the Disposall, you
know (and so was I). So finally we get the picture. "Well, that's
pretty good." And he turns it over to his assistant who washes it
off. He then puts it on this little press, and there's a print for
everyone in the audience. [Laughter] Very nice offset print. But
the sense of portraiture is that extraordinary moment of understanding
people. And a good professional portraitist is pretty much of a
psychologist. Are you a pompous businessman, are you a slightly timid
housewife, are you a dowager, are you.... And I have failed many
times with all these types!

I remember doing a portrait of Mrs. [James] Rolph, the governor's
wife, and I just expected to do her head, but, no, she had the
inaugural gown on. Well, I didn't have a studio — never had a studio
in my life with equipment to handle that, because somebody standing
against a simple wall in an inaugural gown is one of the silliest
things you can imagine. The light was all wrong. She was very
nervous, and she said, "I hope you know, I'm getting a little fleshy,
and I hope you'll do a proper amount of retouching." And I said,
"Good Lord, I never retouch anything." So, I made about ten pictures
of her, and they were perfectly horrible. They were so God-awful,

Adams: but I sent two proofs on. She thought one was simply lovely and

wanted to get retouched prints. So I thought, oh hell, I'd send it
to a retoucher and let somebody do it, and let them have it, because
I was obligated to get them a picture, but I had to cut the thing
down to kind of a panel. The inaugural gown, you know; I had to
print the thing down. If you do a thing like that and if you have
a studio and all kinds of lights, and you simulate a room or some
thing, you might produce an "effect." But imagine somebody in an
inaugural gown standing in front of this fireplace here, not in a
plush San Francisco home — it does not work! [Laughter]

Manzanar

Teiser: Your portraits of people in the Japanese relocation camp at Manzanar
have a great immediacy.

Adams: Yes, and that's a very interesting thing. This doesn't belong in
this section, but I'd better tell you about it.

Dorothea Lange and the group*, at the time of the exodus, when
they transported the Nisei to the camps (which was a really tragic
time), made photographs. They had a very grim sociological picture
of this event, which was a very grim event, no question about that.
Then I came along at a much later date. I was up in Yosemite and
was griping that I couldn't get anything to do in the army or navy,
and I wasn't going to just be a sergeant photographer. At first I
thought I'd have the darkroom for Steichen**, and then, well, they
got somebody else. I was just too old to do this and just too
young for something else, and I was really griping.

But Ralph Merritt, who was a great man, was the newly-appointed
director of Manzanar, and he came to see us in Yosemite. And I told
him, "I've got to do something. After all, I'm feeling like — not a
traitor — but I'm perfectly well, and I have a lot of ability along
certain lines, and I can't get in any photographic thing to do in
the defense picture. They don't want photographers." Brett Weston
was an extremely competent photographer. They put him cleaning film,
which is closer to photography than most photographers were. But if
I were a young man trained as a photographer and had joined, I'd
have been made a cook.

*working under the War Relocation Authority.

**Edward Steichen served as a captain in the navy during the war,

in charge of combat photography.

Adams: But these kids who'd graduated from high school, they had already
enlisted in the Signal Corps, so they were already designated.
Maybe they ended up as cooks, too, I don't know. But when I got to
Manzanar — oh, yes, let me go back.

Merritt came to Yosemite and told me, "I've got a great project
for you. Can't pay you a cent. I can put you up. I can get you
gas mileage, and I can get you tires, but I can't pay you a cent of
salary. This is something if you want to do it; we'll do everything
we can." He said, "We think we have something at Manzanar — (Hello,
Ernst!* One moment, I'm on a tape!) — we think we have something at
Manzanar. We've been able to get these people in all their
destitute, terrible condition to build a new life for themselves.
A whole new culture. They're leaving here with a very good feeling
about America. They know the exodus was a fundamental wrong, but
they said, 'This is the situation — make the best of it.' If you can
photograph that, it's a very important part of the record."

So I went down to Manzanar and photographed, oh, hundreds of
people, and practically everyone was positive. They'd rejected the
tragedy because they couldn't do anything about it. The next step
was a positive one. And I had them smiling, and cheerful, and happy,
And the photojournalists raked me up and down over the coals; you
have no idea. "Why do you have these people smiling? That's all
fake I They were oppressed, prisoners." And so I tried to explain
what really happened. Because of this adversity, about which they
could do nothing, they became a marvelous group of positive, forward-
looking people. They were the lighting candles type, you know, and
that's the way you see them. You look at this book** and you see
many who are very pleasant, and very happy, and beautiful kids, and
they really did a magnificent job of establishing a life out of
chaos. And I think that's my most important job. Although,
conventionally I should have shown them downtrodden and unhappy and
dirty — which was not true!

Teiser: You wrote the text, too?
Adams: Yes.

Teiser: As I remember, the copy I saw was poorly reproduced because of
wartime paper, and —

Adams: Oh, terribly. Tom Maloney, U.S. Camera, just thought this was one

*Ernst Bacon, composer, who had just arrived to spend the weekend.
**Born Free and Equal. New York: U.S. Camera, 1944.

Adams: of the greatest ever. He was so glad to publish this, to

recognize these people, and he thought American citizens would
respond and it would sell. Only about 3 percent of the bookstores
and news stands would carry it, because the Japanese were the
"enemy." They never paid any attention to the philosophy.

I must have had twenty, twenty-five letters. Some were very
touching. One man wrote me. He said, "Well, I've lost three sons
in this war, and you're glorifying our enemy." And I had to write
back and say, "Those in my book are American citizens. They were
born in this country, and their sons who were in the army would come
to see them." But their hurt was so great that there was no
reasonable solution to it. It was really quite a tragic experience
for me.

Teiser:
Adams :

I should think.

I think of what's going on in the South. This [George] Wallace
business, and the fact that "if you're a nigger, you're a nigger
forever," you know. And if he was a "Jap," whether or not he was
born in America, he's still a "Jap." The subtle thing was that the
old man that we had working for us for many years as family companion,
gardener, and cook, Harry, was an Issei, was born in Japan. He was
picked up on the second day of the war because he was a Japanese
national, and we just got a telephone call from a friend, "Harry Oye
has gone to intern camp." Well, that's expected during a war. He
had asthma. The government treated him incredibly well. He went to
hospital after hospital. He finally went to Missoula, which was the

He had the best of food to eat. He was

He would write us letters which would have

best for his asthma,
completely comfortable.

the censor's stamp on it in red: everything is fine. He comes out
to us after the war. He looks fine. He was really extremely well
treated. He immediately applies for citizenship and gets it.

So Harry Oye at the age of seventy- some thing becomes a United
States citizen, treated ten times better than the United States
citizens who were picked up by General DeWitt and moved into the
relocation camps. And that's the story that I tried to tell! We
followed the — what do you call it — Geneva compact, and prisoners of
war were magnificently treated. And, when he told us about where
he went and the doctors he had, and the care — and he was a prisoner
of war I [Laughter] The American citizen who just happened to have a
Japanese grandfather, oh no. He was put right in the internment
camp. And some places were very bad; well, not very bad, but dismal.

Manzanar had a beautiful setting. I always tried to bring in
the environment of the mountains. I knew a great many of the people
would look up at the Sierra Nevada. It was a beautiful place.
Merritt let them go out of the camp and collect rocks and helped
them get shrubs and build a Japanese garden. Just absolutely

Adams: beautiful. They had water running and flowers and shrines. I can
still pick out some remnants; they're still there in the desert.

Teiser: Did you ever show all those photographs?

Adams: They were shown in the Museum of Modern Art and were very severely
criticized.

Teiser: At the time?

Adams: Yes. People criticized the Museum and criticized me. It was a very
difficult thing. And even some of my liberal friends said, "You
made a mistake that time. You just got yourself in hot water." We
were talking about it. They said, '"It's not the thing to do. Japan
is the enemy and you shouldn't have done it." Nothing could be
further from the truth. So I really think I can go on record as
saying that from the social point of view that's the most important
thing I've done or can do, as far as I know. I don't know what '11
happen tomorrow. But it was a great experience.

Early Days and Scientific Concepts

Adams: Well, I'd like to go back to earlier days and people that I knew.

I'll never forget the doctor for us out there, a little woman called
Dr. [Ida B.] Cameron who lived on Twenty-fifth Avenue and practiced
homeopathy. And she would come over and see me when I was laid up
with a cold or something, and she'd have her little sugar pills
containing one billionth of a gram of something. Of course to my
uncle who was an allopath, this was like what's going on in Ireland
with Protestants and Catholics.

Homeopathy is "like cures like." Strangely enough they've
found out lately that some of this theory may work. [Samuel]
Hahnemann I believe was the man who developed it. But there were
many, many family doctors who were homeopaths, and would give these
tiny little sugar pills in a solution of alcohol with an incredibly
small amount of a certain chemical. But you got over your colds.
And they never would extend into anything serious, appendicitis, or
surgery, or anything — no kidding on that. They were really highly
trained doctors with this specific philosophy. It bordered a little
bit on the acceptance of acupuncture. Nobody could quite understand
how it worked, but it's probably the conviction up here [in the head]
that does it. But you still see the Hahnemann Hospital out by the
Children's Hospital, and Hahnemann was the father of homeopathy. It
was just a "school" of medicine. [To Ted Organ] (My friend, I know
that you are busy with prints, but could you remind Jim that I am

Adams: kind of dry and I'm becoming very eloquent, and this tape is very
important. A little vodka, a little ice, and a lot of water.)

Dr. Cameron had a great deal to do. She was the one we would
count on, and she was a very intelligent woman. So I had right in
the immediate neighborhood Miss Marie Butler, my piano teacher, and
Dr. Cameron (I forget her first name, it will come to me).

Then a family, Mr. and Mrs. Sattler, came next door and built a
house and cut out our view. My father when he saw the plans said,
"Can't you arrange this some way so you won't kill our view?" And,
by gosh, they did: my father, who was very broke, got a bill for
twelve thousand dollars. A demand. It was their court order because
they were going to build. Now, there's a strange thing about the
law. They were on a very steep hill. It would have cost twelve
thousand dollars to build the retaining wall, and we didn't have
anything.

My father went to a lawyer and he said, "What do I do?" He
said, "How far is your house from the property line?" He said,
"Fourteen feet." "Twelve feet is the limit. They have to hold up
the property." That two feet saved us. [Laughter] So he told Mr.
Sattler, "I'm sorry, I don't have the money and I was very worried,
but I consulted my lawyer and the lawyer says you're beyond twelve
feet." He said, "Well, I tried, but I'll hold it up. But," he said,
"maybe we can get some dirt from your property." My father said,
"Oh, yes." And we got along fine. So everything worked very well.

Teiser: But it did cut off your view?

Adams: Well, it cut off a good part of it, but still he moved back enough,
you see, which is more than most people would do.

The [Matthew A.] Littles built on finally in later years, and
cut it all off. Their name was Sattler, and she was a Christian
Science practitioner, and she tried to influence me in Christian
Science. Really, you talk about missionary work I There was always
something strange about it, because I was interested in astronomy
(through my father) and science generally, and then to be told some
thing totally unscientific was a surprise. I began to develop a
resistance, and argue — I remember this as my first experience of
being confronted with a very smart, very good mind, but it was on a
very difficult track for anyone like me to comprehend. But the
words "science" and "Christian," and "there is no such thing as evil"-
well, that was an offense to my kind of thinking in which two times
two does make four. I can remember that we had poison oak. "Poison
oak is a beautiful plant; it will not affect you." Well, I was
tremendously and sadistically impressed one day when this woman came
down with the worst case of poison oak I'd ever seen. And when I
asked her about it, she just said, "Well, I just let evil triumph."
[Laughter]

Adams: This was an interesting little phase, one introduction to what I
call reason and anti-reason. That was very important at the
beginning, that I had something to talk about with these people.

Then I met, later on, Orage, A.R. [Alfred Richard] Or age, who
was a disciple of [Georges Ivanovich] Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff was a
great mystical philosopher along with [Petr Dem'ianovich] Ouspensky.
I don't know whether he was related to the Gestalt theory or not.
And Orage was an extremely clever, smart man, and a good friend.
But he was absolutely scientific, you see. There was nothing phony
about him; except that sometimes he'd make some assumptions we'd have
reason to discuss.

The 1915 Fair

Adams: And then another very rewarding thing that comes back to me: the

1915 Fair [the Panama Pacific International Exposition]. My father
was very unorthodox. He took me completely out of school and
bought me a season ticket. I went practically every day to the Fair,
and I went through practically every bit of it. They even let me
demonstrate Dalton adding machines.

They had — I didn't realize it at the time — one of the greatest,
most significant shows of modern art, contemporary art, cubism and
so on, in the Palace of Fine Arts. A phenomenal show. It's been
written up lately. I do not think people realized what they had in
San Francisco at that time. Here were all kinds of geometric
structures, see, and I remember talking to a man, but I didn't
realize who he was at the time — but he was one of the great museum
people in the East; I forget his name. But there were several
people around, and I said, "I don't understand." I was kind of mild,
you know. He said, "What is it that bothers you?" I said, "There
are really no straight lines in nature." (A well-known sculptor had
made a gutter-like figuration.) Several of the people standing
there looked at me — brat, you know, talking about straight lines in
nature. Well, he could not give any answer to it . I'll never forget
this awful ten minutes in which he said, "I can't answer you on that—
there are straight lines in nature, in some cases." "Yes, I know,
there are some straight lines in crystals, and fracture planes, but
99.9 percent of nature is a fluid thing, which isn't the least bit
concerned with a straight line. There isn't a straight line on the
body." Of course I was embarrassing him because of this audience.

Well, I went over there about two weeks later and he was there,
and he said, "My boy, you put me on a very bad spot, and I've been
doing a lot of thinking. I think I could continue the argument, but

Adams: thank you for putting me on that spot." I'll never forget that.

"Because," he said, "you know, you did bring up something about the
difference between nature and the intellect," and that the mind sees
straight lines, like [Percival] Lowell and [Giovanni V.] Schiaperelli
saw straight lines on Mars, the "canals," which was a visual phenomenon
of disconnected points.

But I can remember these things, and reacting very strongly to
many of the paintings, and reacting very badly to the sculpture. The
paintings were abstract; you could do what you wanted with them in
your mind. But in sculpture you had a tangible thing, like a rock or
a tree. I had a terrible time with some of the sculpture.

Teiser: Have you looked at pictures of any of that art recently?
Adams: Yes. I often recognize a lot of the things I saw.
Teiser: Was there a good deal of Rodin there?

Adams: Yes, but not in this show — all this was avant-garde at that time,

early Picassos — oh, I can't remember the names. They'll come to me,
but this was largely the Dadaist group, you see.

Teiser: The sculpture of the Fair in general...

Adams: Oh, the sculpture of the Fair was God-awful. Who was the man who
did the firemen saving the child down near the cathedral in North
Beach?* Oh, the Fair itself was just filled with the most God-awful,
bad, romantic and arid sculpture imaginable. "End of the Trail,"
Stella — boy, was that daringl That was this nude — a terrible
painting, but the most popular. But the avant-garde thought this
was a very special show, one of the most significant shows ever put
together in America.

Teiser: The painting, however, what sort of painting was it?
Adams: Oh, now you've got me on names again — Picabia, Picasso —
Harroun: "Nude Descending Staircase"?

Adams: Duchamp, yes, he was in that group, I am sure. That was my first
exposure to the nonliteral contemporary art, and it made a great
impression.

[End Tape 1, Side 2]

*Haig Patigian.

[While the recording tape reel was being changed, Mr. Adams mentioned
his admiration for his house guest, the pianist Ernst Bacon.]

[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]

Adams: The only person who compared with Ernst Bacon who ever played here
was Victor Babin — of Vronsky and Babin, duo-pianists — he just died,
you know, two months ago — old friends. Last time they were here and
spent the weekend, we had some vodkas and reminisced and he played
Scriabin and you never had such an experience! A beautiful pianist.
I've been very fortunate in my friends.

Now, let's see. Where was I?
Teiser: You were telling about the 1915 Fair.

Adams: The 1915 Fair. Well, I saw a great many things. The organ in the
Festival Hall is the organ that is now in the auditorium in San
Francisco. It was a very good one. They've improved it, but it had
then great power. Being interested deeply in music, every noon I
went to an organ recital. And then I had some friends who managed
to let me play it a little. Then I studied organ after that.

But a very interesting story. You've heard of Tom Mooney and
the bombing?* Well, Rena Mooney was quite a fine musician. I met
her at the time. She wanted me to be her pupil. She was very
aggressive, but I didn't quite — I didn't think she was my cup of tea,
although I liked her personally. Tom Mooney worked for the Underwood
Typewriter Company as a technician. They had, I guess, one of the
greatest illusions of its time. The audience would look onto the
stage. There would be old people writing with quills. It would
gradually and beautifully fade into people with pens in their
bookkeeping shop in London. And then the picture would gradually
fade into 1890, 1900, ladies working old typewriters. And then it
would gradually fade into a new place. Well, this illusion just
fooled everybody. It was fantastic. He showed me how it was done
one time. It was a great mirror system and revolving stage. Very
advanced. And the lights would go down and the stage would move, and
the next one would come in and this one would be illuminated and
picked up in the mirrors. The mirror was the biggest glass I'd ever
seen.

We were very good friends. And imagine the shock one morning,
seeing in the paper that Thomas Mooney was accused of the bombing,
the Preparedness Day bombing. And there was his picture. This was
the guy I'd known during the Fair, and a very kind, gentle man.

*The Preparedness Day parade bombing, 22 July 1916.

Adams: Well, they were rather politically radical, but they didn't think

I was old enough to understand this, so they didn't talk much. But
this was a trauma. To suddenly see, for the first time in my life,
a picture on the front page of the paper, of a guy that was accused
of perpetrating that bomb outrage — it was terrible — a man that I'd
had a close association with as a good friend in my rounds of the
Fair. So that was my first brush with "reality."

Teiser: Do you remember the photography that was around the Fair?

Adams: The Camera Club show was so dreadful I looked at part of it and just
left, and the photography of the Fair, the commercial photography,
was, of course, competent but very bad — all their guide books and
things — terrible stuff. The whole Fair was the most amazing thing.

The Tower of Jewels was a geegaw, the biggest curio ever made.
And yet there were some things that were absolutely beautiful. Of
course the whole thing was a totally traditional plan. You had your
Venetian towers, you had the Alhambra Spanish courts, and the
architects really went all out.

The most impressive thing (the most curious thing I guess I can
think of) was that they had this great locomotive out on a pier,
which would generate steam — phsssh! — running on, just rotating wheels.
It would put up these tremendous clouds of steam on which colored
lights would play, and then fireworks were released back of it. Well,
the thing was a fantastic spectacle. I mean, Dufy never painted any
thing like that!

And then we knew [Bernard] Maybeck, and of course he did the
Palace of Fine Arts, and when that was lit up at the time of the
Fair, it was an extraordinary experience. A wonderful thing. At
night it was a real fairyland (I mean if you want to use that corny
term now). It was fantastic. And when they didn't take it down
along with the other buildings, Maybeck was disturbed. He said,
"This is not a permanent building I This is a fantasy I This is
supposed to go!" Oh, it was a beautiful building. To let it stand
after the Fair practically broke his heart, because in the cold
light of day, with the city around it — you know, it was a bit crazy.
And then a few years ago some guy spent six million dollars repro
ducing it! Maybeck has been rotating in his grave, I am sure.
[Laughter]

This is an interesting thing. I wrote a very strong letter to
this man and never got an answer. I said, "You're spending six
million dollars to perpetuate something which the architect was
broken-hearted wasn't terminated at the end of the Fair. The Fair
was a true Renaissance concept. Ninety percent of the Renaissance
was not permanent. It was festivals, sets made, performances. What's

Adams: come down from the Renaissance is mostly a lot of old monuments and

great style, but retaining that structure wasn't in the spirit of the
Renaissance. It was a very alive, transitory thing. I said, "If
you'd just taken that money and turned it over for contemporary art
and architecture, it would have been an infinitely greater balance."
But it's a monument. That guy put six million dollars into
duplicating that building. Can you imagine? It was originally built,
very well done, with a steel frame. Then it was faced with fake
travertine. I forget the name of the man who developed this, but he
could imitate any kind of marble or travertine that you wanted by
mixing clay, plaster, and color, and get the illusion — like Mrs.
Spencer* in Yosemite did a stylized fifteenth century glass window
she made of parchment. And people knew it was a derivation from
Sainte-Chapelle; that was her great theme when she was in Europe.
They looked at it and they were astounded. It is a stained glass
window, but it isn't like anything that's ever been done; it's all
parchment. But when you look at it with the lights behind it, you
can't believe that you're not looking at a perfectly gorgeous,
luminous window. That goes up every Christmas, and comes down
afterwards, and nobody wants to perpetuate it through the year.

Religious Concepts and Cemeteries

Teiser: Going back to your immediate surroundings when you were a youngster —
you were naming the people who influenced you, and people you had
known. You took Greek lessons?

Adams: I took Greek lessons from a Dr. Harriott, who I think was Canadian.
He was a minister, a total fundamentalist. And he was a terribly
good Greek teacher in the imitative sense. I mean he'd make you
write, go all through your verbs and nouns. And his pronunciation
was, of course, English. I don't think anyone knows how to pronounce
the original Greek, but this was the accepted English pronunciation.
I read a lot. I read Homer, the others, Pindar, etc., and I could
read it, by gosh. But he said, "What do you do? What literature do
you read?" He was a pompous man, very stuffy. His wife was a
little white woman, scared to death of him. He had a bristling
beard. He said, "What do you do? What is your favorite literature?"
I said, "Well, I have to confess, poetry. I just love Shelley."
"Oh — heathen]" He said, "You should be concentrating on the word of
God. Do you read the Bible?" "No, but we do have a family Bible."
(We had the births and deaths on the front page.)

*Jeanette Dyer (Mrs. Eldridge T.) Spencer.

Adams: Well, by that time he was just ready to pop a cork, you know. And I
said, "Well, you know, we're not a very religious family. We're
scientists. My father's interested in science, and we can't believe
this fundamental — " "Oh," he said, "this is heresy'. The world
began 4004 B.C. and," he said, "every God-fearing person must
accept that. This is the truth." And I said, "I can't — " Then,
"Dr. Harriott, how did all these fossils get in the rocks? You know,
four thousand years is not — " "Oh," he said, "my dear misguided boy,
God put them in there to tempt our faith." [Laughter] And from that
time on, my whole concept of traditional fundamentalist religion
held to a very low level. I actually heard that mythical "fact"
stated with total conviction. And I can imagine an old man with a
beard, with the kindest intention, running around in millions and
billions of rocks and poking in fossils, to tempt the faith of some
creature he invented in the very last varnish layer of the historic
column. [Laughter] But that actually happened to me! These people
are right around here today who would say the same thing.

Oh, another problem I had was with a man who was a physicist,
and he got talking about what church I belonged to, and I said, "I
don't go to church." He said, "I don't understand it," and I said,
"Well, are you a Catholic?" He said, "Oh, I'm a devout Baptist. I
actually believe in the Bible." I said, "Look, you're a physicist
and a mathematician, and you can't really believe certain things,
can you?" I forget his exact words. (This came along later.) He
said, "My dear boy, you don't understand. Faith is one thing, and
knowledge is another." And you know that was a great shock that
somebody could have all the knowledge in the world and yet have a
faith that denied it. Those things are perhaps formative things in
one's life.

This is probably a good time to say that my very dear friend
Dr. [Edwin H.] Land of Polaroid — really, a great genius in science
and technology today, and his heart is as big as his mind — he was
talking about problems, solutions, and human directions; we all have
human and political problems. And he said, "The key to the whole
thing is a clinical approach and ability in 'management1 of any
situation." In other words, if something happens, if something hits
you, you should immediately become "clinical." Don't let your
emotions take the control from you. Just analyze what's happening,
and then when you figure out what's happening, then you may begin to
manage it. You don't deny it, you don't condemn it, you just say,
"Here's the situation, and one parameter is here and another there,"
and you solve it. The instant you become emotional, resentful, or
over-respond — you have lost.

Jim Taylor: It's getting time for dinner.

Adams: All right. Tell them to hold it. We're doing fine.

Teiser: We'll stop whenever you like.

Adams: Now, a very interesting thing that really goes back to the twenties.
I'm not a victim of necrophilia or anything to do with death.
Cemeteries have two qualities. One is human in the sense that one
human being is putting up some kind of a stone which relates to
another human being. In many cases on that stone are carvings,
sentiments, indications, which is profoundly human and is, in a
sense, folk art. So I've always had an interest in such things.
I've got a tremendous collection of cemetery stone photographs. Dr.
Land has said, "I see so many pictures of tombstones. You come here,
I give you a new film to try, and you go to work in Laurel Hill
Cemetery!" I say, "Yes, because the stones are static. Some of them
are very beautiful and I can work thoughtfully on them."

This is a theme that affected me and affects a great many
photographers. The early gravestone carvings and sentiments are a
link — the closest link I know — to the past. And you get that
assurance in New England in the old graveyards; you really sense a
contact with past humanity, and the stones photograph beautifully.

I have one negative here that I've been working on for years.
It was a little thing from Laurel Hill Cemetery. It's gone; it's
part of Bay breakwater now. It's just a sphere, a little spirit, a
little angel leaving, floating off. Probably when it was made it
might have been corny, but it was beautiful with age and erosion.
I'm going to make a print of that if it's the last thing I do, because
it's one of the most beautiful, poignant images, and it relates so
wonderfully to so many themes. Here is the earth, the symbol of the
crescent, and the little spirit leaving it.

So to make these junctions between expression, personal feeling,
history, we can then send tentacles out to other people through art.
The human interpretation of history is just not dates and facts but,
as my friend Newhall says, "We historians don't think of the past or
present, we think of a continuous line." And now a lot of people
want to cut life into periods — everyone tries to compartment ize it:
contemporary art, new sculpture, pop art move in — in all such
compartments. Any good art historian goes around a great ellipse,
you see, right back to the pre-Egyptians. And we just came across
some pictures today of some Egyptian things in the Boston Museum.
And you look at these pictures, and they have qualities which a lot
of the contemporary artists are really trying to capture in the new
mediums.

So my interest in cemeteries is not anything to do with death,
or even the fact that the art is "art." It's a kind of a folk art,
but it has a tremendous human significance. It's just a theme which
because I suppose it stays quiet [laughter] I like. So I have a very

Adams: complete set of Laurel Hill Cemetery pictures in the late twenties
and thirties. That little figure — see the figure on the urn? — that
was the most beautiful gravestone there, and I went over and I
talked to the guard one day and I said, "Where's that going?" And
he said, "Oh, that's going down to the breakwater." I said, "I'd
like that. Tell me how I can buy it, anything; I want it." He
said, "Ahhh! Scram!!" But I went back the next morning and found
it had been broken up, and I pinched just this little part, which I
think remains a perfectly beautiful thing.

Now the contemporary gravestone is a horrible thing. But these
early ones were really carved. There's one stone in Utah, I think
Glendale, that was done in 1890-something by an itinerant sculptor
who went around the country when people were trying to carve
primitive stones. This one could have been done in the middle
thirties; it relates to contemporary sculpture. It's one of the
most beautiful things I've ever seen. I just hope it hasn't been
vandalized. I have several pictures of it.

Teiser: Your photographs of the sculptures in Sutro Heights —
Adams: Yes, I've a series of those.
Teiser: Are they —

Adams: Well, you see. The whole Sutro thing was a great colossus, a
benign fake. This man [Adolph Sutro] was very wealthy, and he
bought these things made of cast cemental imitations of classic
sculpture. They still had their own nostalgic value. The one I
have of a woman classically draped and looking down on Seal Rocks
is still one of my best pictures. From the point of view of art,
it's an atrocity, you know, but here again is the "nostalgia" thing
(a bad use of the term) . What that meant in history was related to
the concept of the benign ruin. Sutro really wanted to accomplish
something, and could buy anything he wanted. Sutro Baths, you know,
was his private indulgence. So with the idea that "classic" was
the "in" thing at that time, he ringed this parapet with these
statues. I remember them when they were complete. I wish to
goodness that I had been able to photograph them all. They were
of cast cement, and they didn't stand the salt air erosion, so
they weathered within relatively few years and gradually went to
pieces. But I have the torch bearer, a woman, and I had another
one that was burned up in the fire in Yosemite (unfortunately it
was the best one) .

Aesthetics and Ecology

Adams: All those things are so poignant because they meant so much

emotionally to me, as I was at the time exploring several parameters
of thinking and doing — into society, into history, aesthetics, and
nature. And the whole thing makes a complex, abundant, and eventful
pattern. So it's awfully hard for me to point out any one thing, you
see, and say, "This is important," because it's sure to tie in to
something else. I often went down to Bakers Beach. A beautiful fog
would be coming in, and great waves — but you talk about pollution!
The sewer for the whole Western Addition dumped off the beach, so
you had to watch your step. Nobody ever thought anything about it.
That didn't affect it any; the beach was still beautiful. I have a
picture of my mother and father and me about this big [gesture] (I
don't know who took it) sitting on the platform of the old lifesaving
station at Bakers Beach, and you know, such an image brings you back
to the particular qualities of the world as it was at the time when
it meant so many things to you.

If the beach was in that condition today it would be roped off
and covered with warning signs! You wouldn't come within a quarter
of a mile of it today. But I lived! I mean this is a very important
thing. The average human society lives in a biological slum — India,
for instance, is a prime example — and up until just recently, a half
century ago, we really lived in filth. We had garbage all over. We
didn't worry about anything. You'd go into the Sierra on a camping
trip, and there were so few people you knew the water was clear, but
even back in 1912, I think, William Colby got typhoid fever from
some high mountain stream.

In some ways we're so damned sterile today. Probably that's
one of the things that's the matter with us [laughter], that we've
achieved sterility and we're not conditioned. My son is a doctor,
and if one of the children drops something on the floor they have to
eat it. They should absorb germs, they should develop a resistance.
What is there on the floor? You walk outside, well — if there's an
epidemic, if there was something here we'd take care of it in another
way. So my whole experience at Bakers Beach all my life was that the
sewer emptied into it, and literally the whole mile — the whole coast
there — you had to watch your step, if you know what I mean. But it
didn't make any difference. That was it. The situation — what do
you do? You manage it. You watch your step.

Teiser: What you were saying of Dr. Land — *

*See p. 33.

Adams: Yes, Dr. Land's incredible ability getting along with people,

situations — just don't react, except to art — art and music. But you
come across a situation with people, don't feel worried about it.
Just say, "Now, what's this situation?" You'll usually find out it's
something that can be solved. Maybe it can. Maybe it's a sour
marriage over here, or somebody wants to put Mama in a retirement
home over there, usually bothersome family things. Other things
become emotional — you get mad because someone's appointed a director
of a museum, and you know he's a fake, and you think, why was he
appointed? He had something to offer, and if he offers it and
achieves it, it's all right. If he doesn't, they'll get somebody
else. Don't worry. And clinical things. Although Dr. Land is
concerned about the situation now (he thinks it's pretty bad), he is
one of the few who could point to a way out of it. There are more
than two hundred million of us, and about one million at the most
are interested in conservation and ecology. We just talk to ourselves
and we think we represent the whole world. We mismanage because we
don't realize that the vast majority of the people — the ghetto people,
the farm people — are not interested in "conservation" as we believe it
to be. Their whole history of man is taking down wilderness and
building farms. We must "manage," not just always oppose the world.
That's one of the reasons I got out of the Sierra Club. I felt
perfectly useless in the face of what I felt was irrational thinking.

Teiser: Let's stop on "irrational thinking."

Adams: Yes. [Laughing] Next time we'll really go into irrational thinking!
[End Tape 2, Side 1]

[Interview II — 13 May 1972]
[Begin Tape 2, Side 2]

Photographic Equipment

Teiser: When you took your first photographs, had you seen photographs that
you wished you could take pictures like?

Adams: No, no, I don't think so. I have to think. The family had an old
Kodak Bullseye, 3 I/ A, 3 I/A; I used to take pictures down at the
beach. They were just scenes, but there never was anything of con
sequence. And then I went to Yosemite in 1916, and I had a No. 1
Brownie and took pictures. Then I wanted to take some more pictures,
so I got a choice between a pair of two-wheeled skates or a Vest

Adams: Pocket Kodak, and I chose a Vest Pocket Kodak, which was probably a

momentous decision. Then I got really interested, and my cousin gave
me a 1A Speed Kodak, 2 1/4, 4 1/4. That was when Folmer & Schwing
was still part of Kodak. They made this focal plane roll film
camera, which was an exceedingly good one. There were several
cameras made, but it is still a very superior instrument. I don't
know what happened to that; I guess I turned it in.

That gave me a larger image, you know, 2 1/4, 4 1/4, in relation
to the Vest Pocket, and then I felt I really ought to do something
good size, so I got myself an old four by five Corona view camera —
kind of a classic item. It was the cheapest and best camera of its
kind then, having back swings and tilts on axis and a rising front.
The one I had was in pretty bad condition. It sagged and had to be
levelled up for almost every exposure, but I used it for a long time.
Then I got for trips a 3 1/4, 4 1/4. (nine by twelve centimeters,
actually). It was a Zeiss Mirroflex, which was a very good camera.
And then I got a 6 1/2, 8 1/2 view camera. I used plates on that,
although I did later have film holders. That's the one I did the
early Half Dome picture* with.

I graduated from that to an eight by ten Folmer view camera.
Somewhere in there I had a Deardorff that I didn't like and got rid
of it, and then I had a five by seven Linhof, early style, and in
the early 1930s I got a Zeiss Contax, one of the few 35 mm cameras
made at the time — it still remains one of the best designed cameras,
although there are others that are equal to it mechanically today.
And then I sold the Folmer view camera and got Miss Louise Boyd's
Kodak eight by ten camera, which was of aluminum, made on the same
pattern as the wooden view camera. Silliest piece of engineering.
I still have it, but it's just ridiculous to look at. But it worked
beautifully.

And then I thought I really would go "contemporary," so I had
several Zeiss Contaxes over the years. And I then got a Sinar, a
five by seven camera with four by five reducing back. That was
really a pretty good camera, but it's very heavy and it didn't have
the tilts in the right place. The tilts are on base instead of on
axis. The later system is so much quicker in adjustment. So I
finally got rid of that and got the Area-Swiss, which I use now.

In the meantime I received a camera from Hasselblad, the first
camera they made called the 1600, which had a focal plane shutter at
1/1600 of a second maximum speed, which never was over 1/800. They
changed that model to a 1/1000 shutter design. Then they developed
what they called the 500C with the Compur leaf shutters — a far more
dependable system. I've been sort of a consultant to them over the

*See p. 18 and other entries indexed under "Monolith, the Face of
Half Dome."

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams :

years. I had almost everything that I could use — I mean, an awful
lot of stuff! And then, of course, Polaroid came along, and from
the very beginning I've had Polaroid cameras, and have been a
consultant to Polaroid. I had great interest in the cameras and
materials and in the quality control of films. And then I think it's
safe to say that I was rather instrumental in urging the four by five
system into production; the system includes the adapter which holds
the single film packet which is used with the view camera, and it
enlarges the scope of the Polaroid process tremendously. While I'm
no engineer, I just kept encouraging things to be developed.

The year before last, the sale was sixteen million just on the
four by five system, this four by five back and the film designed for
it. Now they have quarter-of-a-million-dollar machines, three of
them putting the backs together, and the whole system is going very
well. It is getting an enormous amount of use in science, industry,
microscopy, and creative work. I've had a pretty general experience
with Polaroid! Then just a couple of days ago the new camera — now
a whole new system — was announced. I must say it is fantastic!

I forgot to mention some Graflexes; I've had several Graflexes
over my life. I have a 3 1/4 by 4 1/4 and two 4 by 5s.

Do you still use those?

Not as much as I'd like, but I often use them with Polaroid,
fairly valuable instruments.

They're

I forgot to mention that in there after the Mirroflex, and after
the Linhof, the first Linhof, I had two Zeiss Juels. I still have
them. They're very handsome cameras, but they don't have many
adjustments. They're more of a folding camera with a revolving back
type.

Then I have also Louise Boyd's aero camera, the five by seven
Fairchild camera that she used in her exploration of Greenland, which
is a rather extraordinary outfit. She got some very interesting
stuff with it. It's big and as heavy as sin, you know.

How did you happen to have her camera?

Oh, we've known her for a long time and she was disposing of her
equipment. I sold quite a few things for her — some very elaborate
navigation instruments. These things went rather cheap. They were
not worth much financially, but now they have historic value. And a
set of optical glass filters that are hard to come by now. Grade A
glass, about 1/2 inch thick. Absolutely flat plane.

And then, let's see. What would be the next step? Hasselblad.
I never owned a Rolleiflex. I've had several enlargers. Also the
Polaroid MP-3 camera, an industrial camera.

Teiser: What use do you make of that?

Adams: Well, that's really a copy camera. It's on a stand, with lights,
for copying other pictures or documents, or objects in the round.
And you can use half-tone screens and get screened images on Type 61,
all ready to go for lithography, having an offset plate go to 200-line
screen.

I have the usual bunch of tripods and accessories, finders and
lens shades and all that stuff — filters, exposure meters, etc. You'd
be surprised what you can collect in a lifetime of photography. My
studio looks like a flea market. And, the trouble is few items have
any real value, but you hate to give them up. I've got filters that
don't fit any camera, but I just hate to let them go. They're
perfectly good filters.

Teiser: How much strobe equipment have you collected?

Adams: I've done very little with artificial light. I've a ColorTran set,
I've a Graflex Stroboflash IV, and I've used it, but I just don't
like artificial light. Now these are the things that I should get
rid of, but if you do that suddenly comes some situation where you
need them.

Like last year, I photographed something and couldn't do it
outside, so I had to use my ColorTran (that's the new halogen lamps).

And I had my cars, with the big platform I transferred from car
to car, and I gave it to my former assistant as a wedding present to
put on her big car.

Photography and Technology

Teiser: After you started making pictures with those first cameras, I assume
the progression was in both your own skill and improved equipment.

Adams: At the very beginning you're just taking images at the diary level,

and I don't think you think at all about it. You see something there
and you want to make a picture of it. Now just the preservation of
what you see is one thing, but the excitement of making a picture
at the lowest level of technique is still an important factor.

The majority of people just work on that basis, and a lot of
cameras are designed to be foolproof so anybody can get a reasonably
bad picture. A lot of these cameras are automatic and you have no
controls. Polaroid has been very generous in that way of thinking
and has produced these automatic cameras with "lighter" and "darker"
controls. You do have some selection of exposure value.

Teiser: Do you remember at all your first consciousness of cause and effect,
of the whole span of the system that you're so very technical about
now?

Adams: I think about my picture of Half Dome, made I think about 1923 or '26.*
I got deeply interested after that and concentrated on visualization
and technique. The techniques don't do you any good at all, unless
you first visualize your picture. It isn't just exposure and
development, looking at a meter and thinking, "I give so much
exposure," etc. You have to "see" the image and must have enough
technique to know what you're doing. A man called me up today from,
I think, Ohio, and he wanted to know how to make a pinhole camera.

Teiser: [Laughter] He had to phone you for that?

Adams: Oh yes, and of course it was perfectly obvious from the beginning
he didn't know the first thing about photography. He wanted to do
color, eleven by fourteen color. Well, you have to tell him that
when you use eleven by fourteen color with a pinhole camera, that's
a problem! His exposure time would be something like two hours, and
the reciprocity effect of the film would be so distorted, as well as
the exposure values increased, that it would probably end up with a
six-hour exposure with filters — even more than that — and results
couldn't be guaranteed. Well, he hadn't thought of that, you know,
and he had the funniest ideas about the kind of depth of field you'd
get with a pinhole. If you knew the first thing about optics, you'd
know that you don't get any depth of field, you get a transmission
of pencils of light, from all parts of the subject through the
pinhole, and it's a perfectly beautiful "correct" image, but of
course it has chromatic aberration. As you extend your bellows, you
see, your image gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and your exposure
gets longer and longer and longer.

So we had about fifteen minutes of talk on that. It was his
nickel, but it was interesting to me to find out how little some
people know about photography. He said, "How do you know what
exposure to give?" I said, "Well, you have a sixty-fourth of an
inch pinhole, and you have a ten-inch focus extension of the camera,
and there you have f/640." "That small?" "I'm sorry, that's the
two times two equals four principle." [Laughter] You see, here he
was going ahead with his project and he couldn't find any data
anywhere so he calls me up. I'm not an encyclopedia, and there's
many things about pinhole photographs I don't understand, such things
as diffraction and vignetting. But you see, you have to think of
optical and chemical techniques. It's useful to understand complex
ity up to a certain point, and then it does the job that's needed in
photography in the ordinary sense. It's like an iceberg — only one
quarter above, and that's all a photographer really has to know.
But the scientist has to know the three-quarters below in order to

*"Monolith, the Face of Half Dome."

Adams: design lenses and make emulsions and papers and evaluate scientific
results. But we don't have to go that far. I don't have to know
the basic theory of the latent image. I console myself by saying,
"Nobody really knows much about it anyway!" but you should see some
of the purely technical works on such subjects!

Teiser: Were you reading technical papers all of the time?

Adams: I couldn't say I was reading truly technical papers. I was reading
books and papers on practical technique, and that's a distinction.
Of course in my early period, 1920s and '30s, very few knew what they
were doing. There were all kinds of contradictions and myths and
hocus-pocus going on. They were doing some of the funniest things
in photography you can imagine. And then the bad thing about
photography literature is that errors have been perpetuated. I've
been guilty of that myself, just assuming that because I see in
somebody's book that I'm pretty sure is an authority, that a certain
developer works a certain way, I repeat that, and then I'm called to
account by an advanced technologist who says, "I'm sorry, but your
statements are passe." Photography is complex and you cannot some
times define the separate actions of materials and processes. For
example, the temperature coefficient of Metol and Hydroquinone in
combination is not the same when they're singly used. And so I have
to correct that in the next edition of my book,* you see. So that's
the way it goes. Actual technical papers are something entirely
different; they relate to basic scientific investigation, and 95
percent of that is beyond me. And I have no need for it.

Teiser: Adolph Gasser said that your technical knowledge was quite profound
and that you often lost him, but of course he's not precisely that
kind of technical man either.

Adams: Oh, no. He's a very fine mechanic, but he's not a photographer.

I was at a scientific meeting, and a man from Kodak laboratories
said, "In spite of all the complex papers, your books, The Negative
and The Print,** give the only completely clear expression of the
process that there is." I said, "Well, there must be — " and he said,
"No, there's just a lot of things that you're told to do but
nobody's ever said why it works or how it works or what you can do
to control it." I said, "Well, my work just touches the surface of
technology." "Yes," he said, "but you test it far enough." You
have to make tests and trials of materials in terms of practical
photography. If you went any further than that, you'd be confusing
the general photographer.

*In the Basic Photo book series.
**In the Basic Photo series.

See below and index.

Teiser: How did you ever happen to make the decision (if it was your

decision) to devote so much of your time to writing that technical
series? It must have taken time away from your photography.

Adams: I guess it did. Looking back at it, I did far too much of it. It's
a matter of getting mixed up with galleries and museums, photographic
politics, you know, all those kinds of things. It does take time
and energy, but you seem to have an awful lot of it when you're
younger. I think any professional has an obligation to continue and
support his profession. You take doctors, for instance. A good
doctor has to do a lot of study as well as teaching and convention
work, writing, and reporting. Scientists' reputations really depend
pretty much on what they publish. Some scientists have got three or
four hundred papers to their credit. Dr. Land and the late Meroe
Morse, his famous chief assistant, got a coveted prize for the best
article on photo technology. I can only understand one-tenth of it!
But these things contribute hugely to the medium.

Innovations and Patents

Adams: The difficulty in industry is that pure science can be written about
whenever the nature of science is being directed to a project. But
then it becomes immediately very secret until the patents are
obtained. And then production methods remain very confidential.
You have to be a constant watchdog because once you allow a patent
to be breached in any way you're out of luck.

Teiser: Eastman does the same thing as Polaroid?

Adams: Yes, they undoubtedly do the same thing. They have a tremendous

laboratory, and they do a great deal of basic science. The problem
is they don't have much imagination. Polaroid's labs work on a
very different basis. They know they have to make money, and they
always have done extremely well, but the company as a whole doesn't
approach these programs only on finance. They approach them on
creativity. Now Land had no reason to present this camera to
scientific and technical groups other than that he wanted the
community of scientists to know what was going on. Eastman might not
do a thing like that. They'd present it to their own salesmen and
dealers. But to really go into depth the way Land did, for a
scientific group, which means not holding anything back, is remark
able. He has of course given many professional demonstrations of
various aspects of the Polaroid process.

Teiser: Will the new SX-70 camera have implications for designs of other
single-lens reflex cameras?

Adams: I don't know. I think it's Polaroid's concept for quite a time to
come.

Teiser: The SX-70 camera is for color only?

Adams: So far. They may have black and white some day.

Teiser: No reason there shouldn't be, is there?

Adams: No, I suppose theoretically you could say if you can do it in color

you can do it in black and white, but there's nothing sure about that,

Innovations and Aesthetic Demands

Teiser: Is there any work being done in any systems not making use of
silver?

Adams: Oh, the laboratories are spending fortunes on it.
just assume this. It's a very interesting thing:

I don't know. I
way back in the

1830s they found out that silver halide is light sensitive and
they've found nothing since then that equals itl We have what they
call Diazo; that's a dye image, pretty complicated and not permanent
and rather bad color. Very bad even in black and white because it
has to be a condensed color image. Then of course Xerox is electro
static image, which is very important. Again it's very slow and it
has a limited range.

This Polaroid print of a marble head and leaf is practically
what we call a "straight- line image." You can't make a print like
that on ordinary paper. I haven't been able to make a print to come
anywhere near it in quality. Now just why that is, is psychologic
ally hard to define.

I think there's a response, an instinctive response to creative
patterns. The highly gifted artist has that to a much greater
extent than others. It has either been developed or hasn't been.
Perhaps it is a truly instinctive quality.

Making Photographs and Printing Negatives

Adams: I'm sure if you heard some music coming out of the phonograph that
was Wagner you'd immediately recognize it, and yet you might play
Strauss or Beethoven and get the same sounds, but that isn't it, you

Adams: see. The same orchestra, the same instruments, but something else
"happens." That whole thing applies to photography in the sense of
values. The difference between a fine print and an ordinary print is
terribly hard to define; in fact you can't, in a physical sense. It
is a profound composite experience; putting everything together and
instinctively meeting internal demands.

So I think it would be hard to say just when did the casual
interest in making pictures with emphasis on subject change into an
awareness of the image as a thing in itself? You think of photography
as an analytic art. The optical image of the world is very precise,
so you've got to get the camera in a position where you get the
maximum formal arrangements that you want. Then you make all kinds of
tonal and spatial separations. That's one of the things that you
learn very quickly. Like I told you yesterday, you're sitting here,
and it doesn't bother me when I'm talking to you that the window cord
comes out of your left ear or right ear [laughter]. I move around
and control the relationship in space and time. But if I have the
lens here, the picture shows a curtain cord coming out of your right
ear, a highly unpleasant thing. This suggests the idea of following
lines without mergers or confusions. And then, what is the value of
the skin? I can measure the light reflected from your face.
Probably fifty c/ft (candles per square foot) on one side, and
fifteen c/ft^ on the other, but what does it feel like in terms of
the print? If you know the zone system, you know where you place
your values on the exposure scale of the negative, and that
automatically tells you how to expose and develop.

And then I think it is very important as a reference idea would
be to compare the negative to the composer's score and the print to
the performance. It doesn't mean what you call the photometric
equivalent. If you're getting a negative that has the same propor
tion of values as the negative, you'd be going through the photometric
equivalent sequence. That might have value in science, but it would
not have value as an expressive picture. In fact it might be
extremely unpleasant.

Teiser: Different performers have performed Bach, say, differently, so there

are variations in performance. Can you conceive of taking one of

your negatives — say that you made many years ago — and printing it
now in quite a different way than you did?

Adams: I do, I do. But it's not so different that it changes the basic

character. I might print it harder, or I might print it softer, I
might print it bigger, I can't really do anything fundamentally
different with it. I can't change the subject of it, but I can
change the interpretation. I was going through a lot of old pictures
just the other day, and I couldn't understand how I could have
printed them that way. They just looked tired. They had a small

Adams: density scale (the reflection density scale). So if I took the
negative and printed it so extremely different that there 'd be a
really different image, that might be questionable. Maybe it wouldn't
be.

Teiser: In this, you're both the composer and the performer yourself.

Adams: But I still would play differently, subtly differently within the
limit.

Teiser: You have printed negatives of, I think, Brady —

Adams: [Matthew B.] Brady and [Ben] Wittick and [Arnold] Genthe.

Teiser: Have you attempted to print as nearly as you could the way the
photographer printed it?

Adams: In the Genthe pictures I vastly improved it. Genthe used a terrible
paper, a thing they call Opal, had kind of a bad green tone and dull
surface. So most of his pictures are very romantic, have the turn-
of-the-century feeling, but never showed all the negative contained.
So I made the print, it was of the San Francisco before the fire. I
made it my way, and I took it down, was scared to death to show it,
and he loved it. I was afraid he might say, "Well, I don't like it
that brilliant." Then I made Genthe' s "The Street of the Gamblers,"
a fantastic thing, done in 1904 with an old Kodak, roll film.
Beautiful "anticipation." You could possibly pass it off as Arnold
Genthe or W. Eugene Smith or Henri Cartier-Bresson by the style.
But all his prints were sort of brownish green, soft, and "goofy."
As for using glossy prints — that was in earlier days only for news
paper reproduction, etc. An "art" photographer was ashamed to make
a glossy print, you know. Now we do the opposite thing. We want as
much brilliance as possible!

The Brady photographs, the photographs of the Brady group, were
informational pictures, and they were done on wet plates, and of
course, as they used the printing-out process, such were extremely
contrasty. The printing-out process is where you put a piece of
sensitive paper back of the film and expose it in strong light, and
the effect of the light reduces the silver halide in the print paper
to silver. You can see the picture building up. The printing frames
have little back trap doors you can open and see the progress of
printing. Now, as the silver builds up it acts as a shield for
further exposure. It is self-masking. As you get to the maximum
black, it takes a longer, and longer, and longer time, and in the
meantime your gray and white values come through, and you print
until you've got just the detail you want in all the values. As you
print more than required you get gray results. But a modern normal
negative printed that way would be so soft you would get very weak

Adams: prints. And so these wet plate negatives of very high density and

contrast, to print them I had to use A20 Number 0, the softest grade
of A20, and an extremely soft developer. I did get some prints that
were very close — simulated the originals — but any normal treatment
given would result in far too contrasty prints.

Teiser: Eastman wouldn't make you a special emulsion for this sort of thing?
Adams: Well, they could. It would probably cost five or ten thousand dollars.
Teiser: I see. [Laughter]

Adams: It's got to the point now where with certain items you have to order
a minimum of three or four hundred dollars' worth. For instance, if
I want to use a roll of paper and make a big print the size of this
door on No. 4 Kodabromide double weight glossy, I have to order about
three hundred dollars' worth. They don't stock it. They stock the
G surface and they stock something else. They have the paper, and
out of their huge rolls they'll cut you three hundred dollars' worth.
But they won't make up rolls in boxes and send them out in the country
for sale, because it has a relatively short shelf life and not much
if sold. If you keep it cool it's good for around two years, and
I've used paper ten years old by putting potassium bromide in the
developer to reduce the fog, providing it hasn't been subjected to
dampness.

Teiser: Who was the third photographer whose photographs you said you —

Adams: Ben Wittick. And then Bill Webb lives down here near us who's doing
a second book on [Adam Clark] Vroman, the excellent photographer of
the Southwest. He's having an awful time printing, because the
negatives are not normal negatives, but he's got a fine technique —
he can manage them. But you can't do exactly what they did unless
you use a printing-out paper. And you can't buy any good printing-
out paper today.

[End Tape 2, Side 2]
[Begin Tape 3, Side 1]

Photographs as Commodities

Teiser: I don't know Ben Wittick. When was he?

Adams: Oh, in the seventies, eighties, nineties,
let's say.

Teiser: Where did he photograph?

Late nineteenth century,

Adams: Southwest generally, to the best of my knowledge.

You see, many of the Brady group, when the Civil War was over,
went west to photograph. [Timothy H.j O'Sullivan, [William Henry]
Jackson, I think [F.H.] Bell; several others did, went into profes
sional or survey work. Of course they were all relatively young men
then, and a lot of them didn't keep up photography.

You see, Brady didn't make photographs himself. He was a
promoter and a businessman. He would contract with the photographers
for their services. Beaumont Newhall and I went through about five
thousand Brady negatives in the [National] Archives (a big set had
just been presented them) , and every negative envelope had the name
of the photographer on it. But, you see, the photographer was
seldom, if ever, given credit for all his photographs. But Matthew
Brady, Incorporated, studios was given the credit. Now when [Roy E.]
Stryker took over the photographic group at the time of the dust
bowl — that's the Farm Resettlement project history — he got his group
of superb photographers together, but they always got the credit.
That was the difference; the photographers got the credit. F.S.A.
[Farm Security Administration],* Dorothea Lange photographed for it.
They always gave full credit.

Now, we don't think that Brady intended to omit such credits,
but photography was nothing but a business at that time. And if you
did a story, you wouldn't give credit to every item that went out.
If you go to a machine shop and have a device made, it would be made
by the Blank Machine Company, and they don't name Joe Doaks, etc.,
who perhaps did the actual work. So it's a psychological approach.
Photography didn't mean anything in terms of creative art. The men
even exchanged negatives. O'Sullivan would bemoan the fact that he
didn't have something of the Southern Colorado plateau, for example,
but Jackson had, so he'd trade him one for something else.

So, photography was a kind of commodity. They only became
conscious of it as a personal and expressive art at a much later
date. Excepting a few people (very few) — Stieglitz, Cameron, [Paul]
Strand — those people maintained the integrity of the artist. I think
Vroman was probably okay. He realized what he'd done. But then on
the other hand, it was a kind of exploitation to allow the Union
Pacific to use his photographs and hand-color them. God-awful
calendars and posters and timetables that were hand-colored re
productions ad nauseam! I don't know how far I'm going afield —

Teiser: No, no. It's all within the —

*Stryker headed the photographic unit of the historical section of the
Division of Information of the Resettlement Administration, which in
1937 became the Farm Security Administration.

Photography and Politics

Adams: So then we had the Photo League in New York, which formed before

the war [World War II] primarily as a cinema group. After the war it
was re-formed as a still group. It was taken over by the Commies and
was put on the "red list." Many of the best photographers were un
wittingly trapped in that. I was tipped off. I was down here, and
they called me up and said, "This board is now in control of the
Commies and you better do something about it." So I called my lawyer
and he said, "Write them a letter and ask them: Are you becoming
politically inclined or aren't you? I joined as simply a photographer."
And he said, "Send a copy to the F.B.I." I didn't get any answer, so
I sent them a resignation. I said, "I joined this for photographic
purposes, not for political or ideological reasons. I don't want to
be associated with Republican, Democrat, Commie or anything. I mean
it's bad business to get all wrapped up in the political thing." I
sent that to the F.B.I, too, and the letters got me clearance quite
fast when I needed it most, because I had disclaimed any political
association. But other young people paid no attention to it at all.
One of them had a job with the government overseas and got all the
way over to London before he was investigated and sent home.

That was mostly in the awful McCarthy period, so even if you had
only read a chapter of Marx, you were a subversive. Of course, as an
American that makes you very mad. But the thing I resented was not
any fear for myself from the thing, because I knew what I believed in,
but being automatically included in the propaganda business. My best
rejoinder is now if you want me to join things — if somebody calls up
very impassioned and says, "You must write a letter to the government,"
I say, "I'm just not a push-button liberal." A lot of people say,
"Oh, sure, I'll come right out with an idea that's in favor of any
thing a Democrat would say, and any Republican is bad," and so on.
(And vice versa, I can assure you.) But it's fairly hard sometimes
to be really logical, retain a logical opinion, and so I just have
that phrase to fall back upon, "I'm not interested in being a push
button liberal."

Group f/6A

Teiser: Back to an earlier organization that you were part of and then
disbanded —

Adams: Oh, the f/64 Group, yes?

Teiser: Do you remember how that started?

Adams: Yes. For several years after 1930, two years anyway, I had been

talking to my friends about getting a group together and profess —
watch that cat so it doesn't get out! — you know, make sort of a
manifesto on straight photography, because the camera club people were
pretty dismal; [William] Mortensen down south [in Southern California]
was a prime example. Oh, there was some terrible stuff.

So Willard Van Dyke and a few others said, "It's a good idea;
what '11 we call it?" It was Willard who came up with "f/64." That
means a small stop, a very small stop on the lens — which [makes for]
clarity and depth, the kind of image qualities typical of Edward
Weston's work and our work. We don't enjoy any fuzzy imagery anywhere.

We had this group formed, with Edward Weston, Sonia Noskowiak,
John Paul Edwards, Alma Lavenson, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham,
Henry Swift, and myself. We had several very interesting shows, and
supported a kind of manifesto (you know, like the Dadaists); we pro
tested against the conventional misuse of the medium. Here was this
beautiful medium of photography which was being bastardized by soft-
focus lenses and paper negatives and all of the things that they used
to make the lens image look unlike a photograph. And then after a
year or so, we decided that we'd done all we could, and we'd just
repeat ourselves; it would become a cult, and Weston didn't want to
be in a cult, so we decided we'd simply disband. However, it did
create a cult, and the cult is still with us! Everybody apparently
creates a cult. Edward Weston had a cult, and I guess I've got one;
people are imitating me. But Group f/64 did have a profound influence
on making people realize that the straight photographic image could be
beautiful, and not the pictorial doctored one.

Teiser: Maybe this is the place to correct a thing that's in print. The

Gernsheim A Concise History of Photography says that Willard Van Dyke
started the f/64 Group.

Adams: Well, I would say Willard Van Dyke was instrumental, certainly a
leader. I would say (this is not boasting) I had proposed such a
group for two years. Willard Van Dyke activated it — said, "Well,
let's do it," you see, and proposed the name. That's half right, at
least. I don't think it makes much difference so long as the other
people are mentioned.

Teiser: The others were all established by that time?

Adams: Some were amateurs and some were professionals. Imogen Cunningham
was a professional; Alma Lavenson was semi-professional; Noskowiak
was professional; I was a professional; Van Dyke was quasi-
professional — he was really interested in film but running a gas

Adams: station to make a living, and also doing black and white photographs.
And, of course, Edward Weston was a creative-professional. Then
there was Henry Swift, the businessman, but of rare creative ability,
and John Paul Edwards, who was a former pictorialist, a businessman.

Teiser: How did you happen to let him in?

Adams: He was good.

Teiser: He was within the scope?

Adams: He was within the pattern. He was very supportive of the thing and
was doing very good photographs.

Teiser: Did you discuss "painterly" photographs?

Adams: Painterly? Oh, well, I guess that was what we were fighting. We
were fighting the idea of photographs imitating the feeling or the
looks, the appearance of other media. The straight photograph was
sneered at. There was no possibility of it being art, so earlier
photographers were always trying to add something to simulate art.
That was done with paper negatives, and texture screens, and rough
papers, and bromoils and gum prints — everything imaginable! You
just look through Caf fin's history — I'll loan it to you. Have you
seen it yet, the one the Friends of Photography gave to the members?
Caf fin's Photography As an Art?* I'm going to give you that book,
because that will show you much. This was at this difficult turn of
the century, when Stieglitz was trying to get away from the domina
tion of the Manhattan Camera Club, and a lot of these people such
as Gertrude Kasebier as well — can't think of them all. Out here
Ann Brigman did nudes and junipers at Lake Tahoe — all soft focus.
But they were very definite attempts to be creative, much more so
than the ordinary pictorialists, who were just being literary or
descriptive or making a fetish of being not sharp.** I've had people
say to me, "Now, if you only would give that a little soft focus,
do something to improve it — it's so brutally hard now." And I made
all kinds of soft-focus pictures on rough Dassonville or Wellington
papers, and I did some bromoils. I've got a bromoil over there,
where the image is recreated in ink — beautiful permanent image,
carbon black. But not sharp I

[End Tape 3, Side 1]

*Charles H. Caf fin's book, originally published in 1901, was re-
published in 1971 by Morgan & Morgan for the Friends of Photography,
Carmel.
**For more recollections of Group f/64, see mentions as indexed.

[Interview III — 14 May 1972]
[Begin Tape 3, Side 2]

Teiser: Yesterday we were talking about the Caff in book —

Adams: Yes. The idea of the division of photography between the "artistic"
and the straight record, which was just discussed — semantics always
seems to intrude on common sense in photography — but a documentary
record would imply an image in which there was nothing conveyed but
merely a factual record. You'd have a competent image; you may be
getting as much as possible in it, but none of it might carry any
conviction. Most of the very early photographs (many of those of
today) were very dull pictures of things. A few outstanding people
did much better. But the straight, detailed photograph — a sharp,
simple print, of course, was not considered artistic. So, the so-
called "artistic minded" photographers just attempted to imitate
painting. And there's a very hazy line between the pictorialist ,
who is not intense, is more or less an imitator, and the person who
was trying to think of photography in the "feeling" of the time,
but being very sensitive to composition and arrangement, and seeing.
Although many of their prints do not look like our sharp prints
today, there is a very definite camera "seeing" ability, and it
takes quite a lot of study to really confirm that.

This Caffin book, for instance, has some of it, I think. Of
course, some of the work is very dull, and some of it is, in a
sense, manipulated, but it is a break from painting, although they
used a lot of fancy borders and toned prints and so on. The student
of photography can observe that they weren't "seeing" the world as
the painter might see it; they were beginning to see it as
photographers.

Stieglitz

Adams: In the next ten to twenty years, Stieglitz represents the transition
from almost imitative work, imitating the spirit and the appearance
of other media, into the spirit and reasonable impression of the
photographic image.

Teiser: There are two Stieglitz photographs in the Caffin book, on page 30
and page 36, that we wondered if you'd comment upon.

Adams: The greatest body of Stieglitz's work, I guess, was done in the

eighties and nineties. You said 30 and 36? Both these were strictly

Adams: photographs, pure photographs, in existing light. They're night

pictures. Their effect is from what we call "existing light." In
other words, the light in this room is existing. The light outside
is existing. Even if I turn on the lights in the house, that's
existing light. The instant I come in with a lamp and direct the
lamp on the subject, we say that's "imposed lighting," really
artificial lighting in the sense of supplying or contriving
illumination. Now there's a point between those two where you add
light to either simulate or enhance the existing light. And if you
were doing this picture, say, for television and you wanted to get
the spirit of this house, you wouldn't have enough light, so in some
way you would have to direct a diffuse built-up illumination so that
the feeling approached a simulation of reality. But the chances are
they'd just come in and put a big light over there, a big light over
here, and it would be absolutely false — to the character of the
place or its illumination.

Teiser: Stieglitz's icy night picture, the earlier one, if you looked at

it quickly I suppose you'd say it was soft focus, but perhaps it's
the atmosphere. The other seems sharp.

Adams: Well, no, Stieglitz might have used soft focus. I don't know what
he did; I mean, he did everything sooner or later. But there were
lenses that were "uncorrected." Well, let's see, Weston used a
portrait lens (the name will come to me). Whereas at the larger
openings, it was slightly soft focus, when you stop down around 16
and 22, it gets sharp. The Graf Variable Anastigmat it was called.
I want to correct that: I think that that was independent of the
stop, but the soft-focus effect came by separating the elements.
In other words, you didn't get a sharp image.

Now, this does — you're quite right — this looks like a slightly
diffused image. It might also be a way of printing it, maybe a
platinum print that was on a textured paper. I've seen it, and as
I remembered, it was much sharper than the reproduction. But you
mustn't mix up sharpness and acuteness. Acuteness is an impression
of sharpness, because we have what is called a "micro-density
relationship;" that is, value-edges from light to dark are very
abrupt. Now, if you have a diffusion effect, there's a curve or
slant between the light and dark values instead of an abrupt change.
So this photograph looks as if there was low acuteness in the snow-
covered branches, but as you look down other places, you find little
dark branches that look quite sharp. So you think somewhere there's
a flare, or diffusion of light or silver. When you look over here,
you think it's much sharper, and it is. But these are reproductions
of reproductions, so it's awfully hard to tell.

Teiser: Did Stieglitz ever work in the early, pictorial idiom?
Adams: Oh yes. He did lots of things in these modes.

Teiser: And then did he just suddenly decide that that was not the way to go
or —

Adams: Well, let me see now. I'm not enough of an historian to make a

correct statement here, but these early works were pretty factual.
He went around the Alps, made many photographs of the Alps, and in
all of that period, his work was quite sharp, as I remember. Then
he went back to America in the 1890s and 1900s and was trying to work
at the Manhattan Camera Club, and did some things that really weren't
very sharp, and whether he did it intentionally, whether that's what
he wanted to do — just keeping up with the Joneses — I don't know.
But, nevertheless, he did make quite a break with the Manhattan Club
and other groups , and said that photography was art and could not
imitate, and then selected works which he felt were not imitations
of general work of the time.

Teiser: By the time you knew him, he was established in this?

Adams: Oh, well, he had gone through the whole period of Camera Work,

publication, and a great deal of creative work that became sharper
and sharper as time went on. Some of his later prints are very
sharp. I have a print, "City at Night" — it's on a smooth surface.
It's a very beautiful, clear photograph. He didn't care for Weston.
Stieglitz had a vastly greater warmth of tone and warmth of feeling.
Weston 's work was more intellectual, straightforward, black and white.

Teiser: You knew of Stieglitz, of course — he was well-known here on the
Coast, I presume — before you went east in 1933.

Adams: No, very little. He was known by reputation here only. He only

went as far west as Chicago once. He was a distant relative of the
Sigmund Sterns [of San Francisco],

Teiser: Oh, he was? Well,

Adams: Well, it's a complicated thing. He married I believe into the

Lehmann family, and Mrs. Stern's sister married a Lehmannf?], Charles
Lehmann, so somewhere they were second or third cousins. Charles
Lehmann was a brewer — Lehmann breweries, tremendously wealthy and
lived in New York. Mrs. Stern knew Stieglitz, and she had bought
at least one O'Keeffe,* so she gave me a letter when I went east,
a letter of introduction. Weston had a bad time with him; they
didn't get along. Stieglitz could be very, very difficult. In
fact, kind of ferociously negative at times. But that I think is
a separate story, that whole Stieglitz episode. My meeting with him
and everything.

Teiser: Would you tell it?

Adams: Most of this material is in The Eloquent Light —

*Painting by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Teiser: Yes.

Adams: But I went there with this letter, and it was an awful day, a rainy
April morning in 1933. Stieglitz had just moved into the American
Place on Madison Avenue, and he wasn't feeling well and was looking
very grim. So he nodded and I gave him my letter, and he opened it.
He said, "All this woman has is a lot of money, and if things go on
the way they're going now she won't even have that. What do you
want?" I was rather mad, really, in a chivalrous sense. I said,
"I came up to meet you and show you some of my work." He said,
"Well, I can't possibly do it now, but come back this afternoon
about two-thirty," and turned his back on me. So I went out in the
streets and pounded up and down Madison Avenue in the rain and got
madder and madder and madder and wanted to get the first train home.
And then I figured, "No, I came all this way to see Stieglitz; I'd
better stick it out."

So I was up there at two-thirty, and Stieglitz was sitting on
this cot, with a sore tongue — he had some kind of a circulatory
trouble, and his tongue would get sore. And he was holding his
handkerchief and talking. Finally put the handkerchief away and
then, in a most uncomfortable position, looked through my portfolio.
There was this one hard cot, and the only thing for me to sit on
was the steam radiator. I was getting gradually corrugated and
grilled on the steam radiator [laughter], and he looked all through
the work — the folios. And every time I tried to say something, he
put his hand up for silence. So we went through this thing in dead
quiet.

Then he took the portfolio and he closed it all up and tied all
three strings, and then he looked at me. And then he opened the
portfolio up again, and he went over all the prints again. He really
looked at them — slantwise to the light, saw how they were done,
mounted, etc. Well, by that time, me and the radiator were not
getting along too well and I was pacing around. So finally he tied
it up again, and he said, "Well, that's about the finest photography
I've seen in a long time. I want to compliment you." It was quite
a happy shock, and from that time on we were very good friends. But
he sure made it difficult at first.

The first moments were pretty tough, and many other people had
a similar experience. It was sort of a testing. If he didn't like
you, he didn't like you, and he had nothing to do with you — period.
If he did like you, he was fine, but he was irascible.

Teiser: Then he gave you a show.
Adams: Then in 1936 he gave me a show.

Teiser;
Adams:

Teiser:
Adams:
Teiser:
Adams ?

Influences

Did he influence your work, would you say?

No. Well, what he did, you see, he affirmed a very high standard,
and opened up a very different point of view from any I'd ever known
of before. And that point of view was reinforced by his contact
with the contemporary arts. He was the one that brought many of the
greatest contemporaries to this country. Steichen would meet them
and see them in Europe, and then send examples of their work to him.
So he gave the first showing to Negro sculpture and Picasso and many
others for the first time in America — he was a very important
influence in contemporary art.

So the influence was not technical. I mean, I got my great
craft boost out of Paul Strand's negatives I saw in New Mexico
earlier. Paul Strand is, in a sense, a purer photographer than
Stieglitz. I mean, a straighter photographer if you want to use the
term. But the Stieglitz influence was a contact and an awareness of
a bigger world than I'd ever known, you see. And tying photography
in with that, of course, gave it a different stature. So, it was
a vital new experience. Both Stieglitz and Strand did have a
profound effect on my work. It would be hard to describe.

Now, I knew Weston very well; we were very close friends, and
had mutual affectionate regard. But his work never moved me, never
stirred me to do anything different. Just reaffirmed clarity. In
fact I was bothered by the emphasis on shape and form. I mean I
thought he was extracting sort of voluptuous effects — shapes — out
of things and gave them sexy undertones or overtones. He disclaimed
that most of the time. People read into it what they will. Peppers
looked like nudes, etc. And that bothered me because I thought it
was an imposition of something on the object. I didn't feel it
necessary to go that far. I think Strand felt the same way. And
I think Strand had the greatest influence on me —

You met him in New Mexico in 1930?

Yes.

What was he like, personally?

Strand? Oh, he's eighty-three now, and he's — he's a little aloof,
a little dour, moves and thinks rather slowly. I mean, he's very
deliberate, and he's a very fine artist, and — a very kind and
understanding person, indeed. [Interruption for telephone conversa
tion]

Teiser :

When you first met him was he well launched on his career?
well known?

Was he

Adams: Oh yes. He had his first show when he was sixteen or seventeen.
And he'd experimented with movies. He had very strong leftist
political orientations. In fact that's why he moved to France.
Couldn't get along with our particular system, although he'd
inherited quite a lot of money and seemed to take advantage of the
system, as so many people do. But he was at the Photo League and
stood up for them during this distressing political probe and was
very definitely on the "list." It was an awful thing.*

Teiser: But was he personally encouraging to you?

Adams: Yes, yes. He didn't see many of my things until much later. But he
was very reserved. Yet when my show of Manzanar Relocation Camp and
the people — the Japanese-Americans — was at the Museum of Modern Art,
he was quite visibly moved, wiping his eyes, though he wasn't saying
anything. Now whether that was because of the social implications,
the photography, or the combination, I don't know.

V. Adams: I'm going down to Point Lobos.

Adams: Look out for that road there; it's very dangerous. [To Teiser] Ex
cuse me.

Teiser: I think in Mrs. Newhall's The Eloquent Light she says you saw at
first just his negatives and admired them.

Adams: Yes. You see, if you're a photographer, your negatives sometimes
are more important to the student than prints. Now, I won't say
that for an individual picture. I mean, you might not visualize
the real print, but when you see a series of negatives and they all
have this clarity and this organization, you may become very moved.
And you realize how they could be ruined by bad printing. Anybody
who could make negatives like those was a superior photographer.
I wouldn't be able to tell just how he would print them. But I know
that the negative has the inherent great qualities. I think some
times with the negative you're more conscious of the design and
organization than you are with the print because you don't have the
subjects in positive form dominating you.

Teiser: I suppose when I ask you about influences, I'm asking for over
simplification. I mean, I'm sure you were going your own way.

*See p. 49.

Adams: I don't think influences are always very obvious. I think that you

never know what's going to influence you, and I've seen some students'
work that influenced me very much. I mean the student has seen the
thing in a new way, and I remember that whether I consciously use it
or not. But, I certainly was negatively affected by Mr. Mortensen,
by the pictorialists. I never was excited about Clarence White , but
lately I'm beginning to feel much better about him.

Teiser: Why?

Adams: Well, he had a very fine sense of composition but the prints were,
with a few exceptions, a bit soft and vague for my taste.

I think that's what bothered me. I was kind of a purist, and
I was feeling that a lot of these photographers saw things very well
and, like some workers in the Photo League, just made bad prints.
And you learn later that the fine print, per se, is something which
may not convey the idea. Maybe you want a hard, brutal grainy print,
like the work of Lisette Model; it's phenomenal in its way. The most
brutal black and white prints you've ever seen, and in absolute
resonance with her way of seeing her subjects. So I think it would
be very narrow to say she's not a great photographer because her
prints don't look like Weston's or mine. You know, it would be
silly — it would be impossible. I think if I were to take a Lisette
Model negative and make a rich-toned print and beautifully mounted,
it would be very apparent something was phony.

I think that in the professional sense [Anton] Bruehl strongly
influenced me, and Paul Outerbridge, Ira Martin, and the Morgans
(the Willard Morgan family), of course, for many years. But I really
can't describe, for a student to figure out, where the influences are
because, as I say, I'd go on trips with Edward and I'd see all his
work and prints, and we were the closest of friends and had great
admiration, but nothing really important happened to me with him.
I didn't change my opinion or approach at all.

Taste, Perspective, and Distortion

Teiser: In discussing photography with people whose photographs you don't
necessarily admire tremendously, do ideas come to you in an inter
change of opinion?

Adams: Oh sure. Ideas come. Sometimes I have occasions to be very

critical because of unnecessary sloppiness. The thing that bothers
me more than anything else is weakness. I don't mean what fascists
would say was weak, but just no body, namby-pamby. You know, many

Adams: musicians just play, and so what? Well, many of the photographs
you see are just so what? The way the photographers see, the way
they print, the way they present the prints, the way they handle
them. When I see a kid come up with a portfolio and he has a nice
print protected by a slipsheet, the chances are that the work is
good. It may not be; it may be a great shock; you might find some
awful, tasteless things. I always say, there's nothing worse than a
clear, sharp image of a fuzzy concept. [Laughter] You get a terrible
concept — it might be physically sharp, but it's just empty or in bad
taste.

Then of course you say that and somebody asks back, "Well, how
can we define taste? Can you really say that you can define what is
good taste?"

Teiser: [Laughs] Can you?

Adams: Well, you can. Now, if you say, "I refer you to art standards,"

you're saying you relate tastes in photography to tastes in painting,
and you've been saying that there shouldn't be that influence.

Teiser: It's too bad that photography wasn't invented first.

Adams: Well, of course the camera obscura was used for a long time, and we
don't know how many (I suppose it is known somewhere) old paintings
were influenced by this optical image. One of the important things
to me is that one of the first daguerreotypes in 1839, that one of
the boulevards in Paris, shows that the lens is a beautiful
instrument. It has no distortion and shows perfect definition over
the entire field. Now, why would they need a lens like that before
there was photography? And Beaumont Newhall said, "They used to
draw and project architecture on the screen. The camera obscura
would reveal the image, and then they would draw lines upon it."
They did have accurate lenses.

Teiser: Didn't landscape painters have a little gadget they carried?

Adams: The Claude Lorrain glass, a reflective device that enhanced color
relationships. I really don't know what it did. We use a viewing
filter today which changes the colors, or rather neutralizes colors —
makes what you see look more like what the panchromatic plate sees
without a filter. But the Claude Lorrain glass was both a trans
mission and a reflecting glass, I think. It would reflect and see
simplicities; a lot of detail would be gone. They'd just see mass
and body, and they'd get their composition quicker. But that was
for a certain type of painter. You see, Giotto did not have
perspective. Everything was flat, you remember, and perspective was
sometimes implied by a change of scale, but the idea of drawing
converging lines was a later development.

Teiser: But in photography you can't escape it.

Adams: You can't, no. Perspective is a function of distance of lens, and if
I have a 20- inch lens on a camera right here, that door is going to
be very big and the angle is very small. If I put on a 5-inch lens,
the angle is going to be larger, but the perspective will be the same.
Of course, in the large-image picture I don't get the impression of a
deep perspective because I don't see many converging lines. I only
see the lines that converge towards the center of the subject. So
long-distance pictures, made with long lenses, always look fairly
flat. Telephoto images are fairly two-dimensional.

We only see about a degree when we look at something. We have
peripheral vision of about — what is it? Forty degrees? Depends on
the individual. But when I'm looking at that door, I can see you and
I can see this window. I'm only seeing the door sharp, and I'm
seeing recognizable objects as far over as the lamp there, because
what I'm doing is moving my eyes and head. So I have the illusion
of always observing a sharp image.

In one way the eye is a very poor instrument optically, because
it has a very small field of sharp definition. But it is also an
extremely sensitive psychological instrument. It will pick up
something here and interpret it, though you might not see it "clearly."
I can't recognize you when I look in there. I know there's two
people there, but you can make the slightest motion and it will be
recorded, and I would look at you. And then I would establish by
that the reality of you and the door. And I would put the lens here,
and I'd get you and the door, and a strange thing happens: the
element of scale comes in, because I have a direct comparison between
your head and the door. Now, when I'm looking at you I only have
your head, and when I look at the door I have the door or part of it.
And I adjust immediately.

When you take the photograph, that's where your scale comes in,
and the longer focal length lens the more accurate the relative scale
becomes. In other words, you take a very distant picture of a peak,
and there's a pine tree. Well, the pine tree and the peak — you can
compare them. If you knew how big the pine tree was, you'd know how
big the peak would be. When you come up nearer with a short focal
length lens, you have near-far, the domination of the near subject,
so it's entirely out of scale. That's one of the magical things that
can happen in photography, where you get exaggeration of the scale
and feeling of depth.

We were just looking through the things I did in the Boston
Museum of Egyptian sculpture. This huge seated figure in the room,
and back of it, down the hall are little busts. Well, due to the
camera we were using and the film, I couldn't stop the lens down, so

Adams: the head's not diamond sharp, but still the figure was absolutely

enormous because of the reference to the optical size of the busts in
the distance. Now, if I can move down through the museum and out
across the street and photograph the same scene with a 30-inch or a
40- inch lens in the same camera, then the scale would be almost
relative, and the busts would assume their true relative size.

Teiser: TO continue that comparison with painting — this means that the
photographer is trapped by his lenses?

Adams: He's trapped by optical considerations. If he uses the single

negative and doesn't make combination pictures, he is trapped by his
lens and the camera. The key is his focal length of lenses; he has
different lenses, and he has adjustments on the camera to compensate
for focus and correcting for convergence within a small range. The
basic thing in photography — when you take your ideal position, you
first set your camera level. Of course, all this is intuitive.
You're out with a tripod and you just do that automatically before
you do anything else. And then you start moving around. But if you
just put it down carelessly and then you get a picture of, say, the
ocean with a tilting horizon — it simply shows that you have not
thought of your image .

You have the geometrical accuracy to contend with, especially
with photography of architecture. If a building is plumb vertical,
then the camera back must be parallel to it, and if not you get a
convergence, one way or the other. The same takes place in the eye,
but of course, here again we have the psychological controls — the
eye "corrects." If I were doing a picture of some architecture, say
of this room, and I was using my four by five view camera, I would
first get my camera back absolutely level if I wanted to have all of
these vertical and horizontal lines true and level. Then the lens
image normally would be cut off at the top, so I'd use the rising
front, lifting up the lens (hope the lens has coverage) to include
more of the room height. If this is not sufficient, I must tilt the
camera up, and then bring the back to parallel position. Then I
would tilt the lens to correct the focus, and if I focus on something
very close, I might have to tilt the lens further forward. I can
tilt the lens without changing the "geometry" of the image. But the
instant I tilt the back I'm changing the geometry, although I can
use the back with nonlinear subjects to correct the near-far focus.
If there aren't any straight lines, you are not aware of convergence.

Teiser: It makes painting seem easy by comparison.

Adams: Well, I don't think it is. Of course in painting you can place

elements as you want. The thing is you're free, and you get myriads
of impressions over time, and then you organize them in a creative
fashion. But painting is a synthetic medium in that sense, and
photography is analytic. Some people use multiple negatives, double

Adams: printing, and a lot of contemporary work employs solarization and
other special techniques. But you still have the optical image as
the base. There's nothing that you can do about that.

Of course, you can distort if you want. Some people will
distort in the enlarger. But the word "distort" is a negative term.
I mean sometimes we use tilts in the enlarger to correct for distor
tion in the negative that we couldn't correct in the camera. If we
have a slight convergence we can tilt our base board in the enlarger
and correct that convergence. But if we over-retouch or manipulate
the negative, the dividing line between good taste and bad may be
quite apparent. But again, who can really define good taste?

Teiser: Well, when you look at the photographs of a man like Weegee* —

Adams: Well, Weegee was a great clown. Weegee was an extraordinary person.
He really was a clown, and his aesthetic sense as we think of
aesthetics was practically zero. He had an uncanny news sense. He
had second-sight, premonition. He'd actually be at a place waiting
for an accident to happen, and it would I Fantastic. And then later
on he started using these distorting devices, and it all ended up
being I don't think of any importance whatsoever. His really great
pictures are the news pictures he had of tragic events. The fire
in Harlem is one, and the one of the two dowagers leaving or going
to the opera is one of the great satirical photographs.

Teiser: That's distortion of one kind.

The Photogram

Teiser: Did Moholy-Nagy use distortion, or did he — ?

Adams: I .don't know. He might have used devices, but to my knowledge he
didn't. In addition to his camera he worked with what is known as
a "photogram," which doesn't use a lens; it's a shadowgram. In
other words, he takes sensitive paper or film and he puts things on
it or over it. Some things may be solid, others translucent; some
things intensify light, and some things just cast shadow. You
perhaps expose for a short moment, and then you rearrange these
objects and make another exposure. What he's doing is getting a
quasi-abstract image without reference, you see, to the optical
image. Now, it would be possible to combine them, so you can't be
rigid about it. Pirkle Jones did some perfectly beautiful things.

*Weegee was the professional name of Arthur Fellig.

Adams: I think he used honey and objects on it. Honey would float over the
paper or flow between paper and glass and leave these beautiful
patterns. And they were of very fine tonal quality. Moholy-Nagy's
were usually very careless in this respect, very unspotted and blown
up big, and then he would claim that they were "constructions." But
I don't think they were. I always used to say, "Well, if you want
to do that, why don't you draw? Why don't you do what Kepes did or
Herbert Bayer or a lot of people did, really? Draw your quasi-
abstractions." But then he'll show you something where you get a
translucent glow or reflections, say, through a glass sphere — you
can't draw that, you see. So, I think the photogram isn't really
photography, it just uses photo-sensitive material, but with
beautiful results.

There was a woman here that died, Margaret Valeceritos, who
would make a negative, and then she'd put it under hot water, and the
gelatin would melt and flow, and she'd get very weird and lovely
things . Then they came out with the new synthetic emulsions and
they won't melt, so she was frantic; she couldn't follow her career
in that direction! [Laughter] I guess that's life, you know.

Nuclear Bombs and Photographic Materials

Adams: If nuclear explosives were fired in the atmosphere, photography

would be in a spot. That would be the end of it. I mean one little
nuclear device in Lake Ontario and Kodak would be out of the picture,
because you couldn't avoid the radiation specks in the sensitive
materials. And to get a clear sky would be practically impossible.
So we're keeping our fingers crossed. Peace at any price!

Teiser: Have there been any effects on photography of the Nevada blasts?

Adams: Oh yes. The big one that got away from them sent a hot cloud east
over Utah, and everybody had to go indoors at St. George. It hit a
Union Pacific freight train on its way to Los Angeles. There was a
whole car of Eastman film with a lot of x-ray film. Our doctor in
Yosemite called me up one morning and said, "I'm stuck; I'm having
a terrible time. Can you come and look and see if you can figure out
what's happening?" I came to the hospital and, gee, there were these
awful-looking spots on the film. So I said, "Let's take one out of
the box and develop it." It had the same defects. Then I looked at
it, and then I knew what it was because I'd read about it. The ray
striking the film is so powerful it desensitizes it, so there's just
a little transparent hole burnt in the emulsion — a bullet hole like
my Black Sun picture. And then the energy is dispersed sideways so
there's a halo. It looks like a doughnut, with a kind of hazy outer

Adams: edge. And the more powerful it is, the bigger the doughnut, and
those were all over the film. The ray went right through the
packing, and — probably penetrated that without restraint, until it
hit the foil, then it was scattered and activated, and turned from
one level of energy to another, which then affected the film.

Then that same cloud affected cornfields in the Midwest, where
there's some factories that make cartons out of cornhusks. A lot of
the crude paper that you see has everything, including cornhusks, in
it. The Kodak yellow boxes for film — a lot of them are made of that,
and some of that stuff was radioactive. DuPont had to close their
plant for a week, cut off all their air conditioning. Kodak had self-
internal cycling, and they could go ahead. Of course, long before
the time the cloud got to Rochester it was so weak there was no
danger to humans, but nevertheless, there could be some ruined film
and paper, and it got a little hairy for a while. So if you had one
big nuclear explosion, you'd have very serious trouble — although it
might not be affecting you physically at all. We apparently can
take a lot of radiation; we have background radiation to contend with
constantly. I've seen the white flashes, the cosmic ray flashes the
astronauts write about. I've seen that a lot. People always say,
"Well, that's just a capillary bursting in the retina or in the brain.
That happens to everybody." Now it's figured out that it's cosmic
ray impact on the optic nerve or back in those receptors. Just a
flash. You close your eyes and you see it when at high altitudes.

Nature Photographs; Points of View

Teiser: We were talking about the use of photography in conservation in

general, in maintaining a decent world. I guess it had better be
used in its own self-defense too, hadn't it?

Adams: Oh yes. That's important. Well, the full use of photography, I

believe, has to have some kind of a project, whether it's a business
one or a social one or just a personal series of photographs to
express what you think — I mean, a reason for doing it. Not just go
out and go "bang, bang, bang" and hope you find something you can
use.

In the conservation world, [This isl the American Earth was a rathe
heroic thing, one of the first books on the conservation theme. And
there we brought in the human theme as well as the natural. The
implication of the beauty of nature that's needed in a world so that
you want to continue to live in it. But now you find people who are
doing just countless pictures of natural details and birds and bugs
and sunsets without the human connection. And what it does is to

Adams: give a lot of people who know about it a certain happy confirmation —
"that's what I like too" feeling, you know. And the ghetto people
and the unfortunate classes and groups, they can't possibly understand
it. And there's a big resentment coming now among the poor of the
country and the racist groups — a resentment against spending all this
money on wilderness, which to them is just pampering thousands of
acres of nothing, when that same money should be going into housing
and better education. They have something very important there,
from the human point of view. They feel that politically or
tactically, I guess, the approaches aren't making for a balance. So
for every ten million that is put into a national park or wilderness
area, there should be an equivalent amount that's put into education
and human welfare. But then the whole thing becomes totally
ridiculous when you think they're spending enough money every day
of the [Vietnam] war to establish a national park, or clean out a
ghetto. Then you have this conflict all the time between the people
who had an early experience and were conditioned to certain things
relating to nature, and the people who were raised in cities.

We had a group of underprivileged children up at Yosemite, and
the kids became terrified and had to go home a couple of days before
they'd planned. They were away from other people, and all these big
things just scared them. So that's another subject, and a very
profound one, in a way.

[End Tape 3, Side 2]
[Begin Tape A, Side 1]
Adams: Where were we now?

Teiser: I was about to say that I was interested in the fact that you used
one of your earliest sets of photographs of the Kings River Canyon
in the interests of conservation and took them into Washington —

Adams: Oh yes, I used —

Teiser: Could you tell about that episode?

Adams: Well, I'd had a tremendous collection of pictures of the Sierra

Nevada that appeared in various Sierra Club things — in the John Muir
Trail book* — and I made some enlargements for display for congressmen.
So the work was chosen because — well, put it this way: there were
thousands, maybe millions, of pictures made, but I came along with a
creative interpretation which got over. And Cedric Wright's work
does the same thing. Quite a number of young photographers now do

*Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail. Berkeley: The Archtype Press,
1938.

Adams: very beautiful work in the wilderness — in the mountains — which is

much more than factual. And you could take, say, all of Joe Le Conte's
pictures of the High Sierra, which are very valuable historically, and
they'd have little impact; they'd just be pictures of places and
nobody would be moved. Well, he didn't intend that they should be
"moved." It's no criticism of him; he was a mechanical engineer and
a scientist. So, his photographs were nil as interpretations; they
were invaluable records of places that he had explored and mapped.
The Sierra Nevada meant tremendous things to him. But the element of
art interpretation just simply didn't interest him.

Teiser: I was looking at Helen Le Conte's copies of the Sierra Club Bulletin.
at your earliest photographs and those of a variety of other people,
and the distinction between why you were taking them and why they
were taking them is apparent.

Adams: Well, it's a different point of view. But you see, that's the

meaning of "photography is a language." Take the English language,
and you can use it for classified ads and scientific papers and news
reporting and poems and essays, all forms using the same language.
So when you say Joe Le Conte's pictures aren't any good because they're
not creative, you are wrong. What you mean is that they don't stir you
emotionally and aesthetically, but that wasn't their function. Their
great importance is as records.

One of the great problems we have in our Friends of Photography:
our charter reads that we are to further creative photography. Well
now somebody comes in who's been over to Africa, and they've got a
lot of pictures of wildlife, and he thinks they're just something
wonderful, and he's a member, and he wants to show his pictures.
Sometimes you can tell him why you can't show them — but other times
you can't. Some people just simply can't understand. They never go
beyond the subject. Here they have an elephant, and it's a fairly
good shot of an elephant. But you know, you say, "Well, that's an
elephant" [laughs], but period! And a lot of people just have no
idea what you're talking about when you try to explain that you see
it at a very low level of imagination and a high level of factual
information.

Well, let's see — we have skipped around.

Teiser: Everything you've discussed brings up more —
Adams: Well, that's fine —
Teiser: — questions and thoughts.

Quality Levels and Portraits

Teiser: Maybe this is the stupidest question in the world, but I'll ask it

anyway if I may: when you first started taking photographs seriously,
who did you think was going to look at them?

Adams: That's a very good question. I don't know. I must have had an ego,
because I made a holy pest out of myself, wanting to show everybody
the pictures. So it might have been an ego motive there. I figure
that a lot of artists may have that; maybe I still have it. I think
it was largely to show where I'd been. And then there's always the
competition among photographers: you like to show them what you're
doing, and they like to show you what they're doing.

Imogen Cunningham — she's quite an extraordinary person, very
comprehensive; her world is a very rich one, and a very uneven one.
In other words, her technique would fluctuate — good and bad prints,
variable, creative. Intensity will do that. But when you stop to
think of other people, practically all do that. Stieglitz was highly
selective, and he threw away many things, so that he probably had
what appeared to be a rather low volume of work. But you don't know
how many bumps and holes there are in any career. And Strand was the
same way; he was very selective. Weston wasn't. It's difficult to
not edit Weston. [Richard, known as Dick] McGraw over here has about
eight hundred prints (made under Weston' s supervision by his sons
Brett and Cole) which he's giving to [the University of California at]
Santa Cruz. And he admits himself that there's two hundred in there
that are poor photographs, but he feels he should show the whole work.
Well, I have 27,000 negatives at least in that vault right over there,
and some are pure junk. I don't know why I'm keeping them. Some have
great historic value because they were taken in Yosemite — and no other
value at all. Others have narrative value, such as could be used as
illustrations or even advertisements. And then a certain small
percentage have aesthetic or creative value, which means it's the
work you really should present to the world.

So it's "operation wheelchair" as I call it. It means getting in
and printing and trying to make the segregation, because otherwise it's
going to be an awful job for my estate. Because things aren't really
defined very well. The dating is hopeless — and even the titling.
I have portraits of Thomas Moran, Ina Coolbrith, a fair one of
Robinson Jeffers, Albert Bender, Edward Weston, Fujita, Phyllis
Bottome, Bennie Bufano. And some of them are very good photographs.
A few others are no good at all. The one of Moran is one of the old
glass plates, completely fouled up by over-exposure and over -developed.
His white beard is just a glob, and there's nothing in the shadow
areas of the negative. But that and the Ina Coolbrith picture have a
certain aesthetic quality. So if you take those two and put them
together — early 1920s, you see — they suddenly spring into something

Adams:

Teiser ;

Adams:
Teiser;

Adams:

Teiser:

Adams:

Teiser;
Adams :

Teiser;
Adams:

out of logical life. And if you suddenly find those in a contemporary
collection, you don't know what's happening. It's like finding a
baby nipple along with a martini shaker. [Laughter] It'd be quite a
shock.

I suppose everything has to be taken in context. Those portraits
that you were listing then, and some others I remember, I have them
in my mind. I was looking recently again at the one that you made of
Carolyn Anspacher years ago — that seems to me a portrait that stops
one person in time. Although I've seen her since, that's my idea of
her.

Yes, that's one of my best things. A very noble one of [Gottardo]
Piazzoni — the painter on his scaffold. That's one of my finest.

You don't think of yourself, I suppose, as a portrait photographer.
But as I think of them — the one of Albert Bender —

With the flower?
Yes!

Well, I'm not a portraitist in the sense that I don't have a portrait
studio and haven't done portraits professionally —

Did you do those mainly because they were friends?

Part of it, yes. I just wanted to photograph them. Let's see —
Colonel [Charles Erskine Scott] Wood, Sara Bard Field, Ernst Bacon.
Sometimes people have asked for pictures. I did a recent one of
Sandor Salgo — the conductor here — a Hungarian. They wanted me to
make a donation to the [Cannel] Bach Festival, and so I donated the
portrait. And it came out quite beautifully. And that's the way
these things emerge. But I mean I never had a portrait studio as
such, because I couldn't imagine anything more difficult or uncertain
than trying to do portraits of random people. You don't have a
chance to know them. I don't want to be the Bachrach of the Monterey
Peninsula. [Laughter]

Edward [Weston] made his living largely with portraits,
were very effective. But I don't think it was his best work.
his picture of Albert Bender is superb.

I don't remember that.

Well, that's a good human image, but not a great photograph.

Some
But

Albert Bender

Teiser: You were going to speak about Albert Bender.

Adams: That's very complicated. I met him first at Cedric Wright's home
in Berkeley. Let's see, it was a musical evening, but Cedric said,
"Show Albert Bender some of your mountain pictures." Albert was very
much impressed and said, "Come and see me tomorrow morning, and bring
some prints." Well, I showed him some work and he said, "We have to
do a portfolio of these." It was the furthest from my thoughts. I
was still trying to be a pianist. So I said, "Let me think about it."

In two or three days I went down there again in the morning with
a big bunch. He selected a number and he said, "Grabhorn will print
it. And Jean Chambers Moore says she'll publish it, and now we've
got to sell some copies. So — how much is it going to cost?" So we
had to figure that out, and it cost quite a little, as all such
things do. I never counted my work in it; that's the way you do
these things. So he started off with five copies. Now, they were
one hundred dollars apiece, I think, which was high for those days.

Then he calls up Mrs. [Sigmund] Stern. "Top of the morning,
Rosie. How are you? Well, I've got a man in my office, and he's
got some pictures and we're going to do a portfolio, and starting it
off," he says, "I'm taking five hundred dollars."

She says, "Well, Albert, put me down for $750." "Thanks, Rosie,
that's fine." Then he calls Cora [Mrs. Marcus] Koshland. "Top of
the morning to you, Cora." Describes what he's going to do with the
portfolio — "I've put in five hundred dollars and Rosie put in $750" —
Rosalie — and she says, "Put me down for five hundred dollars, Albert.
I'd like to have the work." And in just about two hours' time on the
telephone, he'd sold much more than the cost of the portfolio.*
[Laughter]

He wasn't a rich man; he was well-to-do. He had a good
insurance business. And of course he was a bachelor. And he just
gave away a tremendous amount of things and money. But mostly in
small parcels. He never gave really large amounts — he didn't have it.
But some artist would come and show him some pictures, and Albert
would buy one, give him a hundred-dollar check and spend an hour or
so on the telephone getting contacts for him. It was that kind of
true philanthropy. I mean, he just didn't write checks, he really
helped people. He was the most generous man, by fifty times, of
anybody else I've ever known.

*Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. San Francisco: Jean
Chambers Moore, 1927. See also other references as indexed.

Adams: So it was this kind of patronage that really got me started. And

even during the Depression times, there was always something to do.
I did a catalogue for the de Young Memorial Museum. Bender had a
group of very handsome Chinese carvings, and we made a portfolio of
that for Mills College. I don't remember the circumstances, but I
think there were ten or twenty images in each set and they sold for
several hundred dollars apiece, and the proceeds then enabled him to
buy these marbles for the college. So, many things were done on that
basis: I'd get a fee for the job, then he would sell four or five
copies, and the difference would allow things to happen.

Commissions

Teiser: Those were the first photographs on specific commissions?

Adams: Some, yes. Now, I did the Maurice Sterne paintings for the Department
of Justice Building. He painted them in San Francisco, and I did
them at his studio at the California School of Fine Arts. It was
terribly hard getting even light on them because they were very big.
And I have a beautiful portfolio of that. I did Coloramas for Kodak
[i.e., Eastman] — big things to be shown in Grand Central Station.
And I did — let's see, Fortune magazine, general advertising commissions,
and then worked for the Yosemite people. Later on, projects would come
up like Timber Cove. And I did a whole series of pictures of Laguna
Niguel. They said they wanted to have these pictures to guide the
development. They absolutely ruined the place; it didn't guide the
development at all I

Then I did an enormous series of pictures for the University of
California of the Santa Cruz campus before there was anything
developed there. And that was very valuable because the architects
could see what certain areas on the map looked like.

Teiser: I wonder if those photographs didn't have something to do with setting
the tone of that whole campus as it is now?

Adams: Well, put it this way: it's only half what we wanted. The architec
ture is, I think, sad. Better if it had been something like Foothill
College. They should have really gone to the Maybeck feeling, where
you'd have a blending of the buildings and of the out-of-doors. But
Crown College is like a suburban housing project. Stevenson College
looks like pictures I've seen of "British Bauhaus." Very tight
little buildings. I don't know any one that really is appropriate.
And College Five is done by Hugh Stubbins who lives in New York.
It's just hideous. I mean it's an imposition right on the landscape.
Here's one of the grandest groves of redwoods standing alone anywhere,
and there's absolutely no consideration for it. They crowded it with
a wall. It's really "brutalesque."

Teiser :
Adams :

Teiser;
Adams:

I think I was speaking not alone of the physical development of the
buildings but of the whole spirit of the campus.

Teiser;
Adams :

Yes, that was the idea,
in the main.

We tried to keep the meadows, and succeeded

The students have seen those photographs, haven't they?

Oh yes. I have students calling me up and wanting me to protest
against something that's going in.

Tommy [Thomas D.] Church and I did the definitive paper on
style — the photographs were part of that — what the University could
represent in terms of style in relation to the natural environment.
And I just got a letter the other day saying that was still the
guiding light — although sometimes it was very difficult. This
present hideous [state] administration is really very negative to
that college idea. They want a college right in the middle of the
city in one unit. They think Santa Cruz is very "extravagant."
Well, I don't think it has cost any more, and it certainly has a
tremendous effect on students. But the plans — you can't afford to
have the expensive plans. So they're allowed so much square foot
cost, and the architects have an awful job getting these things to
work.

Now, these bedrooms in Stevenson College are the worst planned
things you've ever seen. I mean, you can hardly get into the closet
door, around the bed, because it's so small. One foot more, but —
They planned a little lintel over the entrance doorway; it had to
come out. They had some decoration, molding; that had to come out.
The Finance Committee of the Legislature, or State Senate, just
slashes the "amenities" out. They have no architectural advisors
on what can stay or go. So instead of having that little extra
something for style, it's up to the architect to do what they did
at the Bodega Marine Laboratory; the building is of prestressed
concrete, molded into beautiful designs. The building is a very
attractive thing although it's nothing but big columns of concrete.
But of course, they could afford to mold them into agreeable shapes,
if no ornament was added.

I did a book on the University of Rochester.
What was that?

A book on the university called Creative Change; it's a brochure.
And then I did a book for the Bishop National Bank of Hawaii, The
Islands of Hawaii; did that one after the one for the American
Trust Company. You remember that book — The Pageant of History in
Northern California. "Well, then the Bishop Bank wanted me to do
the Hawaiian one.

Adams: Then I did some work for IBM —
Teiser: What sort of work for IBM?

Adams: Oh, I just made a series to interpret the activities at the

Poughkeepsie plant. It's a very ugly, modern, beautifully functional
plant, and some of the things in it are very exciting. That picture
on the wall, of the transistor, is one; it's all out-dated now. It's
a computer world. So I got by fine there.

Then of course the big centennial project for the University of
California with Nancy Newhall [Fiat Lux] , and I'm sure I can think up
other things as I go along.

Albert Bender and His Friends

Teiser: Let's go back to Albert Bender. We were interested in Mrs. Newhall 's
description in The Eloquent Light of your first trip to New Mexico
with him. And who was Bertha Damon?

Adams: Well, Bertha Clark, who married Arthur Pope. She was quite a

literary person, a very fine writer, and a great friend of Witter
Bynner and Arthur Davidson Ficke. So we all went down there, you
see, and met Ella Young. Of course, she and Bender always hit it
off in fine form, because I think they had worked together in the
University of California at Berkeley before World War I. Let's see,
she's about eighty now.

Teiser: This trip was in 1927, wasn't it?

Adams: Yes. We met Ella Young and Marie Welch. And then Bertha and

Arthur Pope separated, and he married Phyllis Ackerman — the authority
on textiles — and she married Professor Damon of Brown University and
lived in the East, and apparently did very well in real estate,
developed areas with style. She did that earlier at Point Richmond
out here. Beautiful houses. She's still living, and she's a good
friend of Ernst Bacon who's here now, staying with us. (He lives in
Orinda.)

So then we met Mary Austin, too, down there.

Teiser: Oh yes. That brings up another subject, but let's stick with
Albert Bender.

Adams: I would take Albert — he didn't drive — on innumerable trips. We'd
come down here to Monterey and Carmel every so often, and see all

Adams: the friends — Robinson Jeffers and Johnny O'Shea and Kriley — a kind
of a circuit. Albert liked nature, as a Christmas tree with human
ornaments on it. He didn't care much for the natural scene; he just
liked fresh air and people, which is wonderful.

Then we'd go over often to Mills College with the back of the
car laden with books and things, maybe some Chinese things he'd
gotten. We went to Yosemite, and I can't tell you how many trips
in all. He'd call me up and say, "Well, Dr. Adams, are you free
today?" Sometimes I wasn't, but I would certainly make an effort
to be. And we'd get in the old car and go out. Knew somebody at
Napa — writers — and knew somebody at College of the Pacific over in
Stockton. We'd drive over and see these people and go and see
printers. And then people would come. He'd entertain. He was a
great friend of Ruth St. Denis. And I remember we drove to Los
Angeles to hear the San Francisco Symphony, and Ruth St. Denis's
group danced with it, and we took her down — she and Ted Shawn. We
drove down to Los Angeles.

I'll never forget that day. We went to an apartment for
dinner — Mrs. Guggenheim of the Guggenheim family. And this was a
whole floor in one of these Hollywood buildings, and it was very
elaborate — wow! She had gorgeous things in it. She said, "Of
course, you'll leave your car here and we'll go over in mine
because it's so difficult parking — and my people can handle it much
easier." So that was fine.

So after this very elaborate dinner we go downstairs and here's
a great big Rolls Royce, really custom-made; everything you can
think of — a huge thing. And a chauffeur and a footman. So we get
into this thing. Oh, it was beautiful, and these little cabinets!
I said, "Do you drive this car from New York every year?" (Because
she spent winters in New York.) "Oh no," she said, "I have the
exact duplicate of it back there." [Laughter] Albert Bender was
horrified, shaking his head. He always thought such great affluence
was rather silly. Mrs. Stern entertained beautifully and was always
doing something for people, but very seldom if ever would have just
a stupid social party. It would be a dinner for somebody like Diego
Rivera. And when she put on a dinner, there was probably none
better. Just great style.

And Albert Bender would have entertainment, but he didn't
drink. He was an Irish Jew. His father was a rabbi and his mother
was an Irish woman. And he came over as a boy and worked in his
cousin's insurance business. But he never drank — I don't know
whether he didn't like it or why. But he always had liquor in his
home.

Adams: He had an old lady housekeeper who didn't know anything about it
all. She'd cook him this disgusting-looking plate of scrambled
eggs for dinner. He'd come home after a big day and there 'd be
two pieces of toast and scrambled eggs. When he had a dinner, he'd
get somebody in. But he would have parties, and she would have
scotch and ginger ale and no ice. She'd always forget the ice.
[Laughter] So his friends gradually learned and they'd bring some
ice,, you know, and put it in a bowl. But she knew so little, she
thought ginger ale and soda were the same! Of all the horrible
concoctions in the world, it was that. So there were these funny
little lapses.

That Tibetan scroll was his — he eventually left that to us.
Teiser: Oh, hanging there.
Adams: Yes, that's handsome.

Teiser: Very. He served a function apparently in bringing artists of all
ages and kinds together.

Adams: Yes. And he was very important in the creative printing world.

Teiser: You said he got the Grabhorns to print the text of your first
portfolio.

Adams: Yes. But when it came to the Taos book [Taos Pueblo] , he asked

Nash to do it, and I had a preliminary talk with Nash.* He was going
to cover the inside with Spanish parchment sheets. He had a whole
lot of Spanish parchment sheets — music sheets. And I said, "Dr.
Nash, this book has nothing to do with Gregorian music; this is
Indian — Pueblos — Southwest." And he said, "Pueblo — Pueblo's
Spanish, isn't it?" [Laughter] I went back to Albert and I said,
"It's impossible. He wants to do something that's just impossible!"
He was an ass, I must admit — really stupid. I said, "Can't we get
Grabhorn to do it?" So Grabhorn completed it, with the paper all
made to order. Half of it was coated by Dassonville, on which I
made the prints, and the rest of it went into the text which
Grabhorn printed. But Grabhorn didn't have that big a press, so
he printed the four-page sheets (two to a side) one page at a time.
Hazel Dreis was doing the binding, but the columns did not line up,
and they couldn't be bound. I mean if she kept on folding, the
columns would tilt further and further apart. There was no way of
making the fold parallel. A very complicated thing. So that was a
terrible blow. We just had enough paper left to print it properly.

*John Henry Nash.

Adams: But Grabhorn* would say, "You're crazy; it's printed perfectly."
And they were beautiful pages to look at!

Albert Bender had come to Grabhorn 's studio. And Hazel laid
them out and got a ruler and a T-square. She said, "All right, now,
Grabhorn, is that straight or isn't it?" "Well, it is off, I guess.
Yes. We'll have to do it over." Well, what are you going to do
when you've got a special run of paper? There was just enough paper
to do it. I don't think there were six signatures left over.**

Then she wanted a special grain leather and she just ordered
it and never asked the price. It arrives, through customs from
Algeria or somewhere, and there's $480 due on it. I didn't have
eighty dollars. Who pays it? Albert Bender. So I tried to pay
Albert back. I went and worked and things, but he was never — he
always said, "Well, you just do your work. That's all the payment
I want." He didn't consider me a business investment. [Laughter]
And he was very, very kind. So he did give me the entree to a
whole stratum of society and cultural level in San Francisco I
never would have had otherwise.

Cedric Wright

Harroun: You said when you met him at Cedric Wright's that you were still in
the field of music?

Adams: Yes, I was still an active pianist.
Harroun: Was this a turning point then?

Adams: Well, yes. This was almost — it really was the turning point, but
I didn't know it. I tried to practice and keep up everything else
too until 1930. Well, there's a very hazy point there, because
even in 1932 I was doing accompaniments, and photography. And then
it just came to the point that I couldn't do both.

*By correspondence:

Teiser: When you talk about Grabhorn, you mean Ed, don't you?

You didn't deal with Bob [Robert], did you?

Adams: Dealings were usually with Ed, but I knew Bob quite
well.

**See also other references to Taos Pueblo as indexed.

Adams: Cedric Wright, a violinist, was an old friend. He was the son of
my father's lawyer. My father's lawyer was not very ethical,
unfortunately, but Cedric was one of my dearest friends. I met
him first in 1923 on a Sierra Club outing, and then we'd see him
often, and he liked the way I played and I liked the way he played.
He made some photographs too, and pretty soon he switched over,
because he had a fairly large personal income. He never had to do
anything, which seems always a curse. I will say he was very
diligent. But at an ego level — I mean he just had to do these
mountain pictures. He was very anxious always to get them out and
to get applause. He wasn't a very good violinist. His first wife
was a much better one, and I guess that's one of the reasons why
they split, because she was obviously a very superior musician.
He could have been a grand pianist — he had great big "piano" hands.
But, he tried to get quality out of his fiddle, and the intonation
wouldn't be ideal. But he had a very fine musical spirit. I mean,
he could really bring things to life, like Ernst Bacon.

So that was my friendship there, and then he got into doing
more and more portraits; finally did chiefly portrait work, except
for his summer work in the mountains, and he did very well. And
then he got older and more difficult and married a lady who really
didn't help too much and had two kids who were difficult — one was
very difficult, the other was all right. So he developed high
blood pressure and had a terrible doctor, and they didn't take care
of it, and he went a little off his bat. He had this kind of
paranoia about education and public schools. He'd write reams of
expository texts. When he finished this book, it was a foot thick.
I said, "Well, you've got to have it edited. You can't print this."
I said, "Get Nancy Newhall to do it." She boiled it down to some
really very good writing. But he wouldn't accept that at all. He
thought she was missing all the important points. I don't know
what's happened to the text of the thing. It had some very fine
passages in it — kind of Thoreau-esque. But otherwise just as
screwy as you can get.

And then he finally had a stroke and never really recovered.

Teiser: Helen Le Conte was speaking of him, saying he was a genius without
a field to express it.

Adams: Yes, that's good. He had the genius tendency, but he never

realized it. I think music was right; he was very happy in it.
But he picked the one instrument that his physique wasn't favorable
to.

Musicians and Artists

Adams: Now, in a sense I've got a lovely violin hand. My fingers are very
strong and light — very small. But I'm a pianist, see. I could
never get the power, the richness somebody like Ernst Bacon can get,
or my late friend Victor Babin. I suppose I'd have been an ideal
harpsichordist. It's a very important thing — we don't think of
those things often — but I didn't have the ear for the strings. I
have beautiful relative pitch but absolutely n£ absolute pitch.

Teiser: I suppose it was hard to break away from the piano. People had
encouraged you in it.

Adams: I could — I still can, if you'll pardon the conceit — produce a very
beautiful tone. I was trained in tone control and voicing. I
still amaze myself at times by the sculptural effect, which was my
basic training. It was largely impact control, and of course the
arthritis has knocked that. But it's interesting that there is a
legato and there is an impact. You can especially hear it in
fugues; I can really make the voices completely stand out, which is
much more difficult with "weight" playing, to give the full color.
The impact, touch — I had that, and it's really stayed with me all
these years. I mean I play terribly now — inaccurately — but it's
just interesting how lasting the training you sometimes get can be.
And so, up to that point, I could have gone on and I could have been
very fine in a very limited field, but when it came to doing the
greater Beethoven and Brahms and the heroic Scriabin things, why —
my fingers couldn't manage them.

Teiser: Did you realize that? Was that part of your decision?

Adams: I began to realize just part of it. But people encouraged me and
said, "No, don't worry about that. Think of Laurie [Lawrence]
Strauss." You remember him. Tenor. He sang French and German
lieder and had a very meager voice, but such style you wouldn't
believe. You still remember him. And the question is, what is
music? This man could create — he was simply wonderful. It was
something like [Vladimir] de Pachmann. I don't think de Pachmann
ever played anything very massive beyond Chopin. Farthest I got
with Scriabin that I could play was the C-sharp minor etude and
that really taxed me. I really didn't have it in my hands to do
that.

V. Adams: [Entering] How're you doing?
Adams: Pretty good I

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams :
Teiser;

Adams :

Teiser;
Adams:
Teiser:
Adams:

Teiser;
Adams :

Teiser:
Adams:

Then of course I was very close to Sara Bard Field and Colonel
Wood — Charles Erskine Scott Wood.

How did you meet them?

With Albert — early, 1927 or '28. And of course I met Bennie Bufano.

Did all of these people in the other arts add to your creative
vision or whatever?

Oh yes, very much. Very definitely. Not that I imitated. You
couldn't do that with them. But you just had a support of your
convictions. I mean, here are people creating beauty in other
ways — Maynard Dixon, Dorothea Lange, Robert Howard, the Puccinellis-
oh gosh, I can't remember all the people.

That's Raymond Puccinelli?

Yes. I know very few of the contemporary artists.

Of these artists, I don't suppose you admired all of their work?

No — no. Some more than others. Bufano' s drawings were simply
magnificent; some of his sculpture was pretty corny. Sara Bard
Field's poetry was better than the Colonel's. [Ralph] Stackpole,
I think, is a fine sculptor; beautiful massive work. Ray Boynton
did an encaustic for the Woods, which was absolutely beautiful,
more so than his paintings.

For the Woods at their home?

Their home. An outdoor mantel. But they had not sealed the stone
and the water came through and it flaked.

And Maynard Dixon was a great man, a character. (I don't
know. You can't really remember all these things.) Piazzoni was
a great stylist; very quiet. I think I like his paintings better
even now than I did then. They looked flat to me.

Did you like some of Maynard Dixon 's work?

I liked his drawings much better than his paintings,
drawings.

Beautiful

Oh, and then another contact which was very valuable to me
was William Zorach, the painter, and his wife, Marguerite. We have
two Zorachs downstairs, one by him, one by his wife, watercolors in
Yosemite. He was there one whole summer and went on trips. He was
really marvelous — a creative thinker.

Adams: And then of course Diego Rivera and [Jose C.] Orozco. And many of
the printers. [Interruption to discuss a photograph with Adams's
assistant. ]

Arnold Blanch, the painter; Maurice Sterne.
Teiser: Did you talk about aesthetics with these people?

Adams: No. When you're in the art world you don't talk about aesthetics;

you just talk. The aesthetics are a by-product. They'll talk about
their experiences, they'll talk about their style. They'll see
something in your photograph that they like. You don't think about
it in terms of aesthetics as such, you see. And it's interesting,
when photographers get together they talk about papers, lenses,
chemicals, cameras — very seldom about the pictures. When painters
get together, they talk about painting — and very seldom about paints
or paint brushes. When musicians get together, they talk about
other musicians. [Laughter] They'll say, "Oh my, Rosenthal, you
know, he did that Beethoven all right. But Horowitz — somebody else —
Backhaus — " and before you know it, they're talking about "when I
was concertmaster at such and such."

You know the famous story about Mischa Elman, who was talking
to this young girl at a dinner, a beautiful young lady, and he was
describing all of his career — coming to this country, and his tours.
He could see she was getting a little bit restless, so he said, "Oh,
my dear, I'm so sorry, I'm boring you. I'm talking about nothing
but myself, and that is too much. Now let us talk about you. How
did you like my last concert?" [Laughter]

[End Tape 4, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 4, Side 2]

Adams: Through Cedric I knew Richard Buhlig. He was quite a pianist, but
he had the most colossal conceit I've ever seen. He said, "After
all, you can count the great pi-ah-nists of the world on one finguh."
[Laughter]

I met him one time in San Francisco, and it was a very gray,
foggy day, and he was exhausted, and I was going to take him on the
streetcar out to my house for supper. He sat there in the streetcar
in a very dejected way, so I kept talking. I figured I just can't
sit there like a dummy too. So I talked and talked about the
symphony and other things.

So we came home to the house, and he sat down — in this chair —
and took off his necktie and said, "Let us have silence, blessed
silence. You talk a very great deal and say ab-so-lutely nothing."
[Laughter] So that was a helpful influence. I've been thinking

Adams: about that; always have, you know. I just pattered along, trying
to keep him going — a gesture.

Ernst Bacon came on the scene early. And Ernst was a very
fine pianist — very well trained; great ladies' man, marvelous
person. (I hope he can hear me.) And he would play — well, he was
typical of a certain type, a kind of spectacular, ruthless playing,
you see, which overshadowed anybody else around. I couldn't play
when he was around because I played a totally different way. We
had a period there, a kind of first jealousy, I think. I was more
jealous of him, because whenever Ernst appeared, he was the magnet,
you see. Well, the thing that saved that situation was that he was
such an extremely fine musician. And he can still play a Bach-
Busoni chaconne like you never heard. So after the first couple of
years and adjustment, why, we became extremely close friends.
Mutual admiration society, but at the same time it was the first
time I'd come across this very gentlemanly but very aggressive
personality. That was another kind of competition.

My competition was always — if I felt it, well, I do the best
I can and that's that. But sometimes — wow! — it's like having a
show in a museum and in the next gallery there's somebody who has
nothing but three by four-foot prints. They might be lousy, but
they still would be impressive. [Laughter] Perhaps superficial.

But Ernst is one of the best we've got, and a great composer.
He's never been recognized. He never makes any real bid for fame,
but I think his set of songs to Emily Dickinson poems is probably
one of the greatest American works — just incredibly beautiful. He
still belongs to a generation that had "something to say." The
contemporary music to me seems to be almost mathematical efforts to
experiment with new symbols and sequences and combinations. You
get through with it and you think, "Clever, isn't it?"

I remember hearing one — I think it was in Boston. I was at a
friend's house, listening to the radio, and they couldn't wait to
hear this thing, and there was percussion and strings and two
trumpets and jew's-harp — some combination. And you know in the
cartoon "Peanuts" the bird that's talking to the dog? It's just a
genius flight of imagination to get this conversation of the little
bird; it's nothing but a series of little dots, you know. That's
what that music sounded like — rumble, rumble, rumble, squeak. Then
a pause. Then somebody taps seven times with a bow. Then there's
a tremendous, cacophonous, dissonant chord — with more rumbles, then
more squeaks. They then showed me the score of this, which wasn't
written like any music I'd seen before. There were no bars, and
all these strange symbols. We got all through it, and I said, "Well,
what happens to you when you hear that?" "Perfectly wonderful."
"Well," I said, "what happens? It is clever, but I didn't—" Well,

Adams: they really couldn't describe an emotional experience; it was an

intellectual experience, and therefore it was aesthetic. But you've
got to make definitions between intellectual, aesthetic, and
emotional. And great art has all of it together, and a lot of the
contemporary stuff....

Cults, Controls and Creativity

Adams: And in painting, huge paintings may be just intellectual exercises,
and I think people respond because such response is indicated in
the social structure. To be in — (quote) "i-n" — you create certain
things, like certain things. It's a multi-cult.

That same thing happens in business methods. The thing in
business now, and in industry — well, Dr. Land worked very hard to
establish what he called "peer consciousness." Everybody in the
[Polaroid] company that would be, say, at the level of the
engineers, there wouldn't be a top engineer or a bottom engineer;
there would be sort of a group of peers, which means you're equals
in that field. He didn't like the idea of them electing a chairman.
They'd have a secretary who'd just call the meetings, and they'd
appoint a chairman for the evening. They'd discuss it. And they
got by like that for a while. But it worked better with the
custodians and machine operators than it did with the intellectuals.
After about a year they had a chairman and a vice-chairman — all
that rigamarole. Became a society.

Teiser: We sometimes think of societies as something that people who have
little create for themselves.

Adams: Well, I went to this big conference the other day — the Society of

Photographic Scientists and Engineers. There's about three thousand
members, and they're all the top people in the optical and physical
and chemical laboratories. And there were about six hundred at th.is
conference. They were a little disappointed in the turnout, but
they're expensive. And they said they never had better papers, but
the papers were, to me, incomprehensible. But I felt very much "in",
you see, that's the interesting thing. I had a lot of friends. That
was pleasant. I was just in contact with a world which I know is
important and which is really back of my profession and the materials
1 use. But I don't really understand that world at all.

Teiser: Did you speak to them?

Adams: No, not this time. I did before once.

Teiser: When you speak to them, what do you speak about?

Adams: Well, I was asked to inject the creative point of view, refer it to

the materials, how research has helped or hindered certain materials.
My talk was on the obvious development of the films and the papers
and chemicals; their consistency is perfectly wonderful. And then
the tendency toward automatism in the cameras, which has just the
opposite effect. I mean it discourages creativity, you see.

That trouble is coming up in films now; they're making things
that are foolproof. In other words, they say they're foolproof and
a person can't make a mistake, but it means that you can't control.
Control is the whole essence of art. They are control-proof! So
it's conceivable to think that you can have — I know there are films
made that have an exposure range of one to fifteen, and the film
will automatically carry it. It'll almost always come out in one
limited scale. And that would be disastrous. It's just like if a
paint company said, "I'll put out twelve colors, period." [Laughter]

O'Keeffe feels that. She grinds her own pigment. A lot of the
paintings in New Mexico are done from the stones she's just picked
up in the desert. She gets the kind of thing she wants — directly
and perceptively I

Teiser: You can't do that with photographic materials.

Adams: No. No, you can't. But you still can control. I can under-expose,
use less exposure and more developer, and increase my scale and
texture. But the modern films only allow one-zone expansion. I
keep thinking in my mind I'll go on to another paper. There are
only two films made by Kodak that have the old thick emulsion, and
that will "expand" in prolonged development two or three times.
Now some printing papers are given new synthetic emulsions, and
they "dry down" distressingly. In other words, the print will look
perfectly beautiful in the wash water, but you can't use it when
it's dry. So there's always this problem of having to print light,
to print unpleasantly light, and then it'll dry down. Then finally
you learn just about how deep to print. But in the old days, you
could put the print up on a white thing, and it would look that way
when it was dry.

Now there's one paper called Varilour, that is just impossible.
It isn't just a matter of tone. A white surface goes gray. The
first time I had that happen to me was with a print in a portfolio,
of the little Hornitos church. It's got very subtle clapboards
showing. It's a white church but you barely see the little
clapboards. And I made the print so you just saw them, and I
thought, "Gee, that's beautiful!" I knew it was going to dry down —
hopefully just a little — so I went ahead and made the whole hundred

Adams: prints. Had to throw them all away. The white went down — gray, you
see. So then I had to start the next day and make a whole series of
exposures and develop them and put the exposure time, etc., control
on the back. And the one that I chose, which showed the clapboard
beautifully in the dried print, absolutely did not show it in the
wet print.

The point is, as the emulsion swells, the silver grains
separate like an expanding universe. And then the light penetrates —
does not have opposition. And then as the emulsion dries, it brings
the silver together and you see it.

Teiser: European papers have stayed pretty much the same, have they?

Adams: No. They're changing too. Agfa Brovira is probably the most

brilliant, Ilford is fine — I don't always like the surfaces. None
of them are as consistent as Kodak.

Prints; Tangible and Intangible Aspects

Adams: It's an interesting thing — the thing we have to think about is: what
do you experience when you see a print? That is, what is a print?
There's a whole series of grays, from black to white and grays in
between. Well, if you strip the emulsion off a print, which you could
do, it's a very soft image (if you look at it as a transparency).
And you wonder, "Well, how in the world could I get a good print out
of that? Isn't there some silver left on the paper?" No. The idea
is that the paper reflects 90 percent of the light falling upon it,
and you may have a 50 percent layer of silver in one part of the
image. Now, say a hundred units of light strikes the surface of the
print. Fifty percent gets through the silver and reaches the paper
(the background), and 50 percent is reflected by the paper (which
only reflects 90 percent). So 45 percent of that light is reflected
back through the 50 percent silver, which reduces it to 22 1/2
percent. So then you have that value which would be known as a
22 1/2 percent reflection density, 0.75. And that is why, you see,
printing is a very subtle thing, because the heavier the silver
deposit, the deeper and deeper the tone. And finally, with toning
I can get with selenium down to the reflection density of 2.3, which
is 1 to 200, speaking roughly. But visually it would be awfully
hard to tell the difference between a density of 2.0 or 2.2 or 2.3;
you'd have to have a bright light and put them right together.

The Polaroid is a different process and has what is called the
"linear scale." Your ordinary paper scales have the sine-curve
shape, the "S-curve," the positive curve. Now the part of that
scale which is most accurate or at least in proportion, is what they

Adams: call the straight-line section. But the whites and the blacks belong
in the toe and the shoulder, and they are disproportionate. They can
cause you all kinds of aesthetic upsets, even though you can't
describe it; you can't be fully aware of it, but it's there. The
Polaroid has a long straight-line scale, so the mind unconsciously
sees in the Polaroid print a progression of values which seems much
more agreeable.

Look at that picture over there, the marble head and the leaf —
see it on the wall? — I can't make a print like that with a conven
tional paper. I've got a good negative of it, as well as a Polaroid
print. I can't make as good a print. I can't get that luminosity,
because in the areas that are most subtle I can't get the
proportionate scale. In that and the auto-masking process, which
is equivalent to the old printing in sunlight, you do have a
continuous line. It's not an obvious sine-curve shape.

There's an article out now trying to rationalize and put it
almost on a computer basis. What is the character of Mozart, or
Beethoven, or Schubert? What do you get looking at certain painters?
And they've made these tests — certain responses on a pressure basis.
Very complicated thing, and it just draws a curve. They give me a
test, perhaps, and I would respond to certain things, and they'd put
that curve on file, and take your test. And the strange thing is
that they've found that it doesn't make any difference who you are;
your curve in response to Mozart is typical, and it's quite different
from your curve in response to Beethoven. The response is not
basically individual; there's something in the aesthetics, something
in the music pattern that controls it. And the same with the
photograph. Why do you look at one print by a sensitive printer and
the same subject printed by a good but unimaginative darkroom man,
a technician, and respond differently? The difference might be such
you'd think it was not the same picture. And yet if you put it in
the reflection densitometer, you might get almost the same scale.
It's a very subtle thing. So that's part of my approach in teaching,
and it is going to be more so in writing now. It's a kind of a
summation of experience. But to make it highly valid, I really
should work through a scientist. If I'm going to talk about values
in any way, I ought to double check, you see, so I'm just not
transcribing my own symbols. It would have to be something that's
understood.

Teiser: Well, you mean you have to translate subjective judgments into
objective?

Adams: Have to do it some way, because if I talk about a print — like this
print of Half Dome ["Moon and Half Dome"], this big one — I must say
that I can make it in varying ways. If I go light to a certain
point, it becomes weak, so I tear it up. If I go dark to a certain

Adams: point, it becomes hard and heavy, so I tear it up. But in between
is quite a range of difference, and some levels are acceptable.
Now, what is that range? It's the intangible thing that makes it
art instead of record.

Teiser: When we were speaking with Mr. and Mrs. Spencer* last week, 1 asked,
"Do you think Mr. Adams's work has changed over the years you've
known him?" Mr. Spencer said, yes, he thought a little, in that the
line had become sharper. And he was showing us a print of Half Dome
with the moon — that same photograph — as an example of what he
thought your work had come to. He admired it greatly. And he
seemed to think that you would not have made that photograph in that
way earlier.

Adams: He's right. He's an extremely perceptive man — both of them can

really talk intelligently about aesthetics. It's a very rare thing—
and they are rare people. They can -talk and analyze things in the
most extraordinary way, rather impersonal and very delicate. Of
course, she's a great expert in stained glass — antique glass — one of
the top people. And to have her talk about these significant slight
differences. And it isn't just a matter of different glass, it's
just that intangible multiple quality of color and value. They're
always amazed that I like Rouault, because most of Rouault's work is
related to the stained glass appearance, you know, with the black
separating lines. I never thought of it that way, you see. I just
liked these beautiful blocks of color. And, Mrs. Spencer said,
"Well, do you know that Rouault's paintings superficially look like
stained glass." And it suddenly occurred to me, "My gosh, they do,
don't they?" They do and they don't, but they do enough so you can
think of it.

And then, what is the function of glass? Why all these little
shapes? Then you take a flow of glass, of shape, and you see that
each one of these shapes has a dynamic relationship to the next one,
and that will lift your eyes — move your eyes. It's a very subtle
thing. You just don't put about random globs of glass. The shapes
are all felt — like mosaics. Gerry Sharpe, who was quite a fine
photographer — she unfortunately died early — she worked for us for
quite a while and she did that mosaic table, which is an extremely
sensitive thing. I forget who she worked with — Louisa Jenkins or
somebody. That's the first and only one she did. But there are
very subtle juxtapositions of shapes and values therein. They flow.
It's very hard to describe.

In photography, if I can say it, I think my work has that flow,
and I think that's what makes it have a certain appeal. It's what
all creative photographers must have, because people do respond to
more than fact. And I guess I really sell more prints than anyone,
and sell them to a quite varied audience. So I know there's a
response somewhere. Weston didn't sell too much while alive; he

*Eldridge T. and Jeanette Dyer Spencer.

Adams: surely sells now. People are paying fantastic prices for remaining
prints that appear every once in a while. But he sold to a rather
limited audience, and didn't sell very many. Some people with means
would buy a hundred prints for a collection of an art gallery or a
museum. And that was fine; it would keep him going. But the
individual prints were not acquired as they should have been.

Now, of course, I think all the time, probably a lot of my
pictures are sold because of the subject. But it's the subject plus.
A literal picture of the moon and Half Dome would almost have to be
very unpleasant. "Gee, there's the moon, Bud, look!" [Laughs] That's
about the end of it.

Teiser: Do you know we've kept you talking for two hours?

Adams: Yes. I've got to go to a party, then out to dinner. I am a little
bit thought out.

[End Tape 4, Side 2]

[Interview IV — 19 May 1972]
[Begin Tape 5, Side 1]

The Group f/64 Exhibit

Adams: This time you wanted more f/64.

Teiser: Well, yes. We'll probably keep coming back to things you've mentioned
and ask you more about them. The f/64 group — I'm sure you're sick to
death of being asked about it.

Adams: No, no.

Teiser: We ran down two articles; one of them is just a notice. Shall I
read them to you?

Adams : Yes .

Teiser: From the San Francisco Chronicle, an unsigned article of November 27,
1932 — the end of a review of an exhibit of paintings.

"Another new exhibit at the de Young Museum
comprises photographs by members and guests of the
Group f/64. There is a beautiful work on view"
(that is a typo, I guess) "although the promise
of novelty suggested in the name of the organiza
tion that sponsors the exhibition is not carried
out."

Adams: I don't understand what they mean by that.

Teiser: [Continuing] "These photographers, like other talented
brethren of the lens, are admirable portrait
artists, imaginative creators of abstract patterns,
romanticists who look for charm in boats, in
scenery, in grand landscape, and in every small
growing thing that is nourished at the bottom of
Mother Earth.

"Exhibitors include--"

Adams: Well, that's more favorable than a lot we had. [Laughter] It's
funny. I don't remember that at all.

They didn't know how to write about photography then, you know.
Just didn't know what to say. They thought some photography was

Adams: imitating abstract art. I don't call it "abstract;" I call it

"extract." A photograph is an extract, unless you go to a photogram.
But using a lens, you can't really abstract — you can fuse and
duplicate and double print, but you really can't abstract like a
painter can, you see. So I think the word "extract" makes a little
more sense. It's very personal; I think it'll never get in the
dictionary. [Laughter] But an extract is to get the essence of
something — it is of something. And the image of the lens is of
something. It's not just production up here [in the head],

Teiser: I suppose the distinction that most people make is that if they
look at it and can't immediately tell what it is, it's abstract.
Is that it?

Adams: Well, then you have abstract expressionism —
Teiser: No, I mean in a photographic sense only.

Adams: Photographs. Well, in a lot of things that Weston did, he had a
great sense of form. But people kept reading into this, you see,
the constructivist idea of the painter. When they see the photograph,
they think of it as something the photographer really did — in produc
ing these curves and shapes. But all a photographer could do would
be to select and enhance what he was selecting by the photographic
technique, by his own approach. It's pretty tricky. It gets into
semantics.

Teiser: We were looking at a photograph of yours — I can't remember in what
volume now — and on the opposite page was a photograph of Edward
Weston' s. The subject was the same — rocks, close up. Your photograph
was, to me at least, immediately recognizable and his — if I hadn't
seen others, I would have had to puzzle over it, and maybe I would
never have discovered it. Would one really know that it was rocks
along the sea?

Adams: Well, it's awfully hard to qualify those things because the emphasis
in Edward Weston 's mind was not as much on nature as mine was. I
mean, Weston was a universal person. He'd take an egg beater — of
course I did too — but he'd take a portrait or he'd take anything that
he saw that would comprise a statement — through which he could say
something. Now, these words "say something" are very tricky, because
you're not really saying, you're observing and transmitting and
clarifying. I don't know; the words are almost hopeless. We use the
word "visualization" when we see the print in our mind's eye. Well,
we really don't. We see the image. We think of the edges, we think
of the textures, we think of all that is appropriate. And then we
have to look in the ground glass and see if we've really arranged the
thing as we wish, and if we're watching our edges and if we're
watching our confusions and mergers and all the little things.

Adams: It's awfully hard to say. In other words, I'm looking at
you here — I see a picture. If I were a painter, I wouldn't
have any problem at all because I could synthesize everything I
see around here. But through the lens from this point of view,
the sofa's cutting your neck right off under the ear, and the
scene outside [through the window behind] is hopelessly confusing.
You know, there are so many things, it would not make a good photo
graph. Now, I could go "click," you see, and I could get what a
lot of people call just a spontaneous image. But that's not a
communicative image. Not necessarily. Cartier-Bresson might be
able to do it, but he wouldn't just sit here. He would move to a
place where he would get you at the optimum advantage. The difference
between a man like Cartier-Bresson and a snap shooter or a person
who's, well, it's about the same family as the cinema verite — just
walk right into a group and you're part of it. People forget that
there's nothing duller than a sequence in motion. It's the editing
that makes the movies the great thing. Well, it has to be there to
begin with.

Teiser: Have you seen a Warhol movie?

Adams: I haven't. [Laughter] I hear it's pretty wild.

Teiser: It must seem to go on for several days at a time.

Adams: Well, it's like pop art. For the lack of anything else to occupy
their spirits, they get a can of Campbell's soup. Then they do a
very bad picture, which some ordinary signboard artist would be
ashamed of. And that gets six thousand dollars for a museum wall.
[Laughter] I saw a pop art show in the East and I was aghast. It
was the crudest, most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. I tried to
figure it out. Really a can of Campbell's soup and not very well
rendered I And huge, you know. Of course now they're painting
pictures so big that galleries are being taxed to show them, let
alone get them in the museum. Like five bands of varying shades of
black. The other kind is when they start at the top with wet paint
and let it dribble down, and let it come down out of the frame and
out on the floor. I saw one painting that was done right in the
museum, and that floor was part of the composition. As the paint
dripped on the floor, it was all part of it. They call it the
"mustique." [Laughter]

Teiser: Back to Group f/64 — this one is a real review, I guess, as reviews

went. This is by a man named Julius Craven, writing in The Argonaut,
December 2, 1932. Did you know him?

Adams: Oh yes, yes. He was pretty good.

Teiser: [Reading] "For the benefit of those who may be as
ignorant of cameras and camera craft as we are,
if there are any such, we may as well begin by
explaining that 'Group f.64,' [sic] a group of

Teiser: photographers which is now exhibiting. . .takes its name
from the smallest stop on a camera lens. When the f.64
stop is used in making an exposure, it's called 'stopping
down' or 'sharp focusing.' And sharp focusing happens
to be the vogue just now in 'artistic' photography...."

Adams: I think this is a point, if I may say it: The lens is sharp, if it's
wide open, on the focal plane, but "stopping down" gives depth so you
have "sharpness" on many planes. And the f/64 is the smallest stop
on the conventional big twelve- inch lens. F/16 might be the smallest
on a miniature lens and a process lens may be over f/200. So f/64 is
a symbol — it means depth more than sharpness. (Pardon me for inter
jecting this, but these are relevant ideas.)

Teiser: But by 1932 was it a "vogue" in artistic photography, as he says?

Adams : No , I think what he was saying there was that we were daring to enter
the domain of the arts.

Teiser: [Reading] "The membership of the group is comprised of..." (and lists
them all). "You might say that these are the master-
photographers of California. However, their current
exhibition includes prints by an additional (invited)
group of four, namely, Preston Holder, Consuela [Consuelo]
Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, and Brett Weston. And this group
might also be called master-photographers. Anyway, be
that as it may, together they are offering an excellent
exhibition of photographs.

"Photography is one of the few crafts that has
advanced during the machine age. This may be partly
due to some of the inventions pertaining to it. But
it is probably largely because photography has come
to be recognized as being closely akin to, if not
actually to overlap conventional creative art. The
pictorial photographer of today must be a capable
artist (culturally, instinctively, mentally), as well
as a highly trained technician. He is not only the man
behind the camera, but the brains inside it, as well."

Adams: "Pictorial" equals amateur, weak P.S.A. stuff!

Teiser: [Reading] "There are many outstandingly beautiful prints in the show."
Shall I read you some of the ones he mentions?

Adams: Yes, fine. I think that's pretty good what he said, for the times.
With no knowledge of photography, no exposure to photography, that's
very good comment.

Teiser: [Reading] "There are many outstandingly beautiful prints in the show.

Teiser: Imogen Cunningham's studies of plant forms; Ansel Adams's
fine studies of Piazzoni at work on his murals for the
Public Library; Cunsuelo Kanaga's four exceptionally
fine portrait studies of negros [sic] ; one of which we
think we recognize as being Kenneth Spencer;..." Was it?

Adams: Could have been, could have been. Yes, I think it was.

Teiser: [Reading] "...Willard Van Dyke's 'Plant Form'; Sonia Noskowiak's
'Palm Blossom'; Edward and Brett Weston's many fine
studies of form and design. Such a collection of prints
makes us feel that, had we time or money, or both, we would
add photography to our list of favorite hobbies. But we
also know enough about it to realize that photography is hard
labor in one of its most drastic forms, and not a mere
pastime to play at." [Laughter]

Adams: Yes. Being a hobbyist. Unfortunately, there are many people who can
afford to be. That's why so many bad things are done.

Teiser: By the wealthy hobbyists?

Adams: The wealthy hobbyists. They might as well play golf or have a polo
horse or a motorboat. But there's something entrancing about the
whole photographic setup, the cameras, the lenses, the equipment.
It's just unbelievable now, and the precision and quality's unbeliev
able. It's one thing that's gone up. Cars might go down, but I
don't think there's ever been a reason for Ralph Nader to investigate
photographic equipment performance. [Laughs] And sometimes it's
miraculous what they do in the price range, although prices are up.

Meters, Lenses and Film Speeds

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :

We have exposure meters — we make demands. Well, a really dependable
meter would cost a thousand dollars, and they cost a little over a
hundred, because they make them in quantity. They're still not really
accurate. I have an English photometer that costs a little over two
hundred dollars now, and it's still the most accurate photometer that
the average person can get. I can think of other photometers that
run up into thousands of dollars; they're really accurate through the
full scale, consistent calibration.

Are they portable?

No. They would be in a suitcase. [Laughs]
be in a small suitcase.

The Leukeish meter would

Adams: You always have that problem with the cameras. Now these precision
cameras are really made to tolerances that are unbelievable — one
hundredth of a millimeter, thousandth of a millimeter. I mean they've
really done beautifully, and I don't imagine we ever can significantly
improve on the lenses which we now have.

Teiser: Did the first lenses you used have qualities however that, say,
coated lenses now don't have?

Adams: Well, there were very fine lenses made then, but they weren't

consistent; they weren't very spectacular in their performance and
their coverage. For instance, I doubt if you could get something
like a Super-Angulon wide-angle lens today without benefit of a
computer. I mean, the design is so complex. The perfect flat
field; a five-inch lens that will cover an eight by ten plate, on
axis they call it. And it's beautiful. To figure that just by
arithmetic would be highly improbable. We used lenses like the
Dagor and the Cooke and the Zeiss Protar, which were very fine
lenses. Some were convertible; you could use different elements
separately or together. They gave beautiful images and why nobody
exactly knows. There was some aberration, but it didn't destroy the
visual resolution, which was quite high.

The theory of the coated lens is very intricate, and people
don't understand what happens. But every air-glass surface — that is,
surface of glass to air — reflects about 4 percent of the light
falling on it. If you have a four air-glass element lens, like a
Dagor, you get about 80-plus percent transmission of light; the rest
of it's scattered. But some of that scatter produces a flare over
the image — a very low- impact flare of light. The bad lenses are the
ones that give you a flare in the middle, which is a real flare. But
the average uncoated lens like a Protar would just give you a soft
shadow. It would add a couple of units of exposure, and that would
give you a very smooth image, and the Cooke lenses, which were eight
air-glass, would give you a very soft image for that reason. You
would get almost what we would call today pre-exposure. In black and
white, that's an advantage. Every black and white photographer should
have at least one uncoated lens, a six or eight air-glass, because it
would solve a lot of contrast problems.

When you get into color, you have a different thing, because
flare then takes on the dominant color of the subject, so that if
you're photographing a landscape with much blue sky, you would get
a blue cast. If you're photographing trees, you would get a green
cast. The flare would convey the dominant hue or color of the scene.
So that's why coated lenses are very important now with color.

And then, if you look at a lens which is coated, you'll see a
purple or yellowish cast. If you see a yellow coating, that means

Adams: it's transmitting more blue; if you see a purplish-blue cast, that
means it's transmitting more yellow. You used to get lenses that
would be coated different ways; so a 35 mm. camera might not give
you the same color balance with different lenses. All the lenses
of one make are all coated the same — so much blue, so much yellow, or
purple. They have new systems called "super coats ," and they're
getting down to an absolute minimum of flare. So your color purity
is superior now to what it's ever been — better than you ever could
get it before. I know in the old days people always said, "We'll
have to use a lens composed of as few elements as possible."
[Interruption for phone call]

As for the f/64 group, I don't think any of us had a coated lens
at that time. I think I tried one a few years later. And it's
interesting for a photographer to study the quality of his earlier
work. Because in earlier black and white, there's always a longer,
richer scale than there is in many contemporary pictures. Because
we've lost two to four exposing units at the bottom of our curve,
because we have done away with "flare." We get the true luminous
range, and that makes for deep shadow values. You see many pictures,
especially with miniature cameras, where the shadows look very empty —
lifeless, dead, no density. But part of that is due to the fact that
there's absolutely no support of the shadows, which you would get if
you had some flare.

Whereas in color without flare you'd be unhappy. I took a color
picture of Edward Weston sitting by his brick chimney, and everything
went red because the brick was in sun, and this caused a red flare.
In the modern lens you might get only a whisper of red, but you
wouldn't get that all-over reddish cast.

But I don't think any of the f/64 people had anything like that.
The Leitz people, and Zeiss, I think, put out an f/1.5 lens with lens
coating, but it was greenish and it was terrible for color. Then the
Polarizer came in. Before Land invented Polaroid there were several
very crude ways of making polarizing filters. And one was a deposition
of sheep urine crystals on glass or plastic. Now, of all the animals
in the world, the sheep urine condenses into long crystals like a
picket fence, and these could be aligned. So the light that is
vibrating this way (vertical) goes through the fence; the light that
goes that way (horizontal) doesn't!

It also had a color effect. And then Land invented a way to
manufacture a plastic film with polarizing crystals, which is color
less, or practically so. It is one of the great technical achieve
ments of our time. When you look at what that man has accomplished
in various fields, it almost scares you.

We take Polaroid glasses now for granted. You buy 3-D viewers
for five cents and all such stuff. It's all a matter of making a

Adams: plastic — hundreds of miles of it, in big sheets — in which the Polaroid
crystals are all aligned. Theoretically, it's extremely complex. Now
you just push a button and this machine does it. [Laughs] So, at any
rate, we didn't have that aid until quite a bit later.

Then the polarizers came in, and were gratefully received. I
can't remember the dates of introduction of these things, but I would
say that most of the f/64 people were using pretty basic equipment —
uncoated lenses, films of the type of Isopan, or Kodak Superanchro-
matic. The speeds were around ASA 64, plus or minus. Many went down
to 24 and lower than that.

Teiser: Were you using ASA speeds then?

Adams: No, we used Weston speeds, and there were the Scheiner and DIN speeds,
all of which are logical arithmetical systems.

The first Weston light meter was designed to help out the
photographer and avoid his making under-exposures, so they added what
they called a "K" factor — and they used first the number 50, which
should have been 64. It mathematically worked out as ASA 64. But
they took one more number just for safety. Finally they found that
people were over-exposing, so they used ASA 64. Fifty is the first
step below. You see, all these numbers — you go from 32 to 40 to 50
to 64, etc. Everything goes up on the log to base 10 number, which
is 0, .1, .2, .3, (which is two times), .4, .5, .6 (which is four
times), .7, .8, .9 (which is eight times), and so on. So all the
lens stops and ASA numbers progress "three." Every time they double,
like 64 to 125, you have two log 10 steps. It's up to the manufac
turer to decide the calibration he wants. Most of the built-in
meters in the cameras are not accurate, very strangely calibrated —
the ones I've come across. But they may be beautiful pieces of
electronic gadgetry. You have to make personal adjustments to a
complex world'.

Brigman, Van Dyke, Edwards, and Cunningham

Adams: But that's getting off the f/64. You want more of that.

Teiser: All of the people in that group really are of interest. Let me read
down a list of those who exhibited.

The first one was not a member of the group, but I think she

was a photographer, and I think Imogen Cunningham said that the

group first met in her studio although she herself — Ann Brigman —
wasn't there.

Adams: Ann Brigman, yes. She was the only photographer from the West that
Stieglitz liked. He felt that she had a perception that was very
unusual. Her work was primarily soft focus, and a great deal of it
was entwining nudes with Sierra junipers. Some very effective,
almost art nouveau feeling. But it was very thoughtful and very well
done. I don't remember many more things than her fantasies of the
juniper — the tree shapes, and then the nudes relating thereto, in
sunlight.

Teiser: Was she a professional photographer?

Adams :

Teiser;

Adams :

Yes. I think she did portraits. I don't know too much about her. I
only met her once. But she was quite a considerable person and went
right along with the Stieglitz tradition of trying to see things
photographically , although the definition was goofy most of the time.

You see, they were still afraid of sharp things, and our f/64,
really a visual manifesto, was to come back to the sharpness — the
microscopic revelation of the lens — and as it's perfectly gorgeous,
why hide it?

You've spoken of Willard Van Dyke,
further?

Can you discuss him a little

Well, he was a very vital young man; he had a great imagination and
was a great friend of Edward Weston. He did some very fine stills.
(In fact, he had a fine show of his still photography a little while
ago — very unexpected!) After the f/64 experiences he decided he had
reached the limit of what he could do in still black and white, and
he thought, "It's the movies for me now. I'm going to go into
cinema productions," and he went to New York and became a very
successful and important documentary photographer in the film world.

He went east, and I'm not sure of this, but I think at first he
made a small living by doing stills. He had a remarkable darkroom in
a closet. You know New York and the limit of space. He put shelves
in it, so he'd stand on a stepladder and have developer on the top
shelf, the short stop on the second shelf and the fixing bath on the
third shelf, and then down to the water tub — and then he'd take the
negative or print out to the bathtub and wash them. [Laughs] That's
more or less official. Anyway, he did make a big success in the docu
mentary world. I think he was very close to [Robert J.] Flaherty and
Pare Lorenz and others of that group. There's probably many
associates I don't know of.

And then, after a rewarding career, he had the opportunity to
take over the department of moving pictures — of film — at the Museum
of Modern Art, which is a tribute to his qualities.

Teiser;
Adams :
Teiser:
Adams:

Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :
Teiser:

Adams :

His career just went right along?

It went along very famously and very favorably. He's a fine person.

He started making a living by running a gas station — was that it?

Yes, he was running a gas station over in Piedmont, and a museum
director saw him one day, and he said, "Well, so this is what you do
when you're not in the darkroom. I call it a matter of pump and
circumstance," which is a great pun! [Laughter]

I haven't seen him very much. We're very fond of each other.
He says I'm the only "square" he loves. [Laughter] Well, you can
call me an oddball for some things. [Laughter] Anyway, I know he 's
doing fine.

Then, on my list, there's you and Edward Weston and John Paul Edwards.

John Paul Edwards — I think he was a businessman. As far as I can
remember, he was not a professional photographer. He was an ardent
amateur. And his daughter, Mary Jeanette Edwards, was a great flame
of Van Dyke's before he left for the East. They ran the little studio
together on Brockhurst Street in Oakland. And then something happened-

But John Paul Edwards was an accomplished photographer — enough for you
to admit him to your group?

There's some question, actually, if you wanted to be very cold-blooded
about it, whether he was good enough, but we had no established
standards. I think today a couple of members would have been
eliminated on the basis of standards or accomplishment — for no other
reasons. I don't think he did enough really good work, but he was so
sympathetic! And every organization has valuable enthusiasts that may
not be up to the top level of some of the other people, but still are
very important because they get things done. It's very easy to be
very snobbish in this. But we all accepted him. Which one do you
have1 next on the list?

Imogen Cunningham.

Oh well, she's a great figure. She's very important.

What sort of photographs was she making at that time? She's done a
variety of work.

It has always been mult i -diverse, if you want to use the term. She's
always covered a tremendous field. At that time she was doing
portraits and flowers — details. She made platinum prints. I have
quite a beautiful detail of a magnolia flower. But at that time, you

Adams: see, people's techniques weren't what they are today and chemical

knowledge wasn't much either, and unfortunately many of the works of
that period are fading, including mine. We didn't know about two
hypo baths, for example, and we didn't know lots of important
technical things.

Parmelian Prints

Adams :
Teiser ;
Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :

Many of my works before 1930 could very easily fade, and have!
Oh, is that right?

The portfolio show they had at the Stanford Museum,* the Parmelian
Prints — fortunately it was a very good set. Only one or two had
begun to turn slightly.

What does the word "Parmelian" mean?

Nothing. The publisher didn't want to use the word "photograph,"
so she concocted this little kind of a bastard combination of Greek
terms from black — "melios." I don't even think that is an accurate
use of the term, but she liked it, so it was used.

Of course, it's a trick, because not meaning anything, people
remember it. [Laughter] But as she wouldn't use the word "photograph"
there had to be some other name. People were so scared of photography.

She was Jean Chambers Moore .
brought into it?

Who was she? How did she happen to be

Teiser:

She was a lady in the book world, a friend of Albert Bender's. He
told her that he was going to subsidize this; would she publish it?
We didn't realize then that we could have done it ourselves — a thing
as small as that. But she did handle it. She received the checks
and deposited them and took a percentage — that's about all she did.
[Laughter] She was all right, but timid, you see; wouldn't say
"photographs." And 1^ was very severely criticized for that. I
should have stood by my guns, but I said, "Well, my guns would have
been spiked immediately because if I'd insisted on 'photographs' she
wouldn't have done it." You see, that's forty-five years ago.

Do you remember Joseph Le Conte's review of that in the Sierra Club
Bulletin?

*The exhibit of this 1927 portfolio of photographs by Ansel Adams
opened on February 20, 1972.

Adams: No, I don't.

Teiser: Eighteen prints [reading] "of exquisite composition, each as
technically perfect as it is possible to be produced."

Adams : Oh .

Teiser: [Reading] "The fact that they are the handiwork of Ansel Adams is
sufficient to guarantee their artistic perfection to members of our
club."

He thought the most remarkable was Mount Brewer. It was over
six miles away, he wrote, and it was taken with a "telephotographic
lens." [Reading] "The artist has attempted, and with great success,
to suggest the scenery of the Sierra Nevada in a more pictorial sense
than by a literal representation. By keeping to a simple and rather
austere style, the prints assume a dignity and beauty which is not
generally conveyed by photography."

Adams: Well, that's nice. [Laughs]

He was a very broad man. It's important to realize that a man
of that degree of culture and understanding was interested in the
mountains. He did thousands of pictures, and I printed many of them,
as records of his travels in the Sierra. They were completely
uninspired but perfectly honest photographs. Other people couldn't
tell the difference between his approach and my approach, but he was
sensitive enough to realize that I was trying to add something. I
thought that was a very generous thing, because I definitely was
adding a point of view, where he was interested in the scientific
and the factual.

Teiser: By then had you been with him in the mountains?
Adams: Oh yes, I'd go out on trips with the family.
Teiser: So he'd watched you take pictures.

Adams: Oh yes. And I watched himl He was a wonderful little man and a dear
friend. In fact, there's a book coming out now — his journal. I
forget the name of the publisher.

Teiser: Lewis Osborne.

Adams: Yes, Osborne. I wrote the preface for that.* He asked me questions
I couldn't remember.

*Joseph N. LeConte, A Summer of Travel in the High Sierra . Ashland,
Oregon: Lewis Osborne, 1972,

Noskowiak, Weston, Swift, Holder, Kanaga, and Lavenson

Teiser: Well, back to f/64. Sonia Noskowiak.

Adams: She was a very nice gal. A great friend of Edward Weston' s. They
lived together for quite a while. And of course, like most of the
people who worked with Edward, she was deeply influenced in seeing
and technique. I think she's still living.

I think she didn't have as much force as some of the others.
She was so dominated by Edward, she just — grabbed the style without
the substance. But I have seen some very excellent pictures that
she did when she was more herself. She was a lovable person in many
ways.

You see, the instrument that was used in the classic sense was
the eight by ten camera, and the contact print — the eight-ten format
religiously adhered to. Everything squeezed into eight by ten, not
seven by ten, but eight by ten, and of course nature isn't exactly
built that way. Sometimes it becomes difficult to get something
that really is a 6 2/3 by 10 proportion in the world and then try to
make it eight by ten. You know, it's like buying canvasses 20 by 34
and filling them, which of course you can do as a painter because
you can "adjust." But I have a terrible time when people say, "I
want a 20 by 24 'print' of a subject." Well, that's a category; and
I try to bring one dimension, if the photograph is a vertical, to
20 inches. I try to make one dimension as large as I can. And then
it might be 36 or 30 or 26 [in the other dimension]. So they say,
"It's not 20 by 24," and I try to explain that this is a category
and not based on square inches. I think it's Moulin in San Francisco
that charges for photo murals by the square inch, which to me is one
of the funniest things in the world, because paper comes in a roll.
And what do you do with the little stuff you trim off? Like I made
eight prints the other day in the so-called 20 by 24 category. (It
was actually fifteen — there were some in the ashcan, and two more
went today, so I have six left.) Well, the cost of the paper's so
minor compared to the workl

I suppose it's a very small amount per square inch, you know,
so it looks good, and nobody's going to sit down and figure it all
out. If it were one cent a square inch, it would be $1.44 a square
foot, you see. And if it was three by five feet it would be about
$22.50! But the price might be seven hundred dollars! I've had a
man who was so captious about it that I sent him a check for $1.18,
which was the differential cost of the paper. [Laughter] As close
as I could figure.

100

Adams: Anyway, let's get back to f/64. I don't know too much about

Noskowiak. I don't know where she is. I'd like to follow through;
I was very fond of her. She was the subject of many of Edward's
nudes, in what they call (it's not delicate to say it, but) the
"scrawny" period. I mean, she was rather lean and posed in very
vigorous attitudes. And I called those pictures "morguesque,"
because they were printed rather gray, and they didn't have that
wonderful luminance of what he did with Tina Modotti and others in
platinum.

There's something about the photographic print, the pure black
image, that can be very cold, and I'm trying to break away from
that with subtle selenium tones. It makes quite an emotional
difference. Maybe a little four by five print that is just blue-
black; it's a little frigid and when it relates to a nude.... It
might be all right for a rock, but it's all a matter of complex
taste.

Well!
Teiser: Henry Swift.

Adams: Henry Swift was a businessman and founded Henry F. Swift & Company,
a big bond house — stocks and bonds. It's still going. And
Florence Swift was a painter. They were very charming people. And
he was full of vim and vigor, and did a lot of experimental work,
but the thing that got him into the Group f/64 was the series of
pictures he did of mathematical models at the University. They had
made models of equations — three-dimensional equations — in plaster,
sometimes outlined with string and glass. And he photographed these,
and they're extremely beautiful — extremely beautiful.

Teiser: Perhaps that was what one of the exhibition reviewers mentioned as
abstract.

Adams: Yes. Now, here's an interesting thing: there's nothing more

abstract than a three-dimensional mathematical model, but he makes
a photograph of it, it's still a photograph of the model. So you
see it would give a superficial impression of being a photographic
abstraction.

Well, I don't know what else Swift did. I think he tried some
things like mud cracks — a few things. But he was really quite a
nice person. I think he left photography rather early. He also had
some money and helped us out with some of our material expenses,
although we got by with this whole thing at a very low cost — an
amazingly low outlay. Everybody did their own work, and we chipped
in on the announcements. It's an ideal system — but scary at times!

101

Adams: What's the next thing you have?

Teiser: Well, there were the four people who exhibited with you. Preston
Holder.

Adams: I've not seen Preston Holder, and I don't know what he's doing, but
he was pretty good. I don't remember his being outstanding, but he
was terribly sincere. I think we really got these people on the
basis of their sincerity. They all were really tied up with the
work, and loved it.

Teiser: He didn't go on to become a professional photographer?
Adams: Not that I know of, no.
Teiser: Consuelo Kanaga.

Adams: They all called her "Connie." She was very good. She was very
imaginative, very romantic, did some beautiful portraits, was a
little overshadowed by Dorothea Lange. Dorothea Lange never quite
forgave us for not getting her in the group. She at that time was
so pictorial and so fuzzy-wuzzy that it never occurred to us. And
I really regretted it later after seeing more of her work. At that
time it certainly should have been considered, but....

Harroun: Was she doing mostly portraits at that time?

Adams: She did portraits and worked with some Navajo Indians. Maynard
Dixon, her husband, was deeply involved with the Indians and the
Southwest. I think she and Consuelo were in competition, frankly.
I think it was kind of a stylistic competition, as well as in the
portrait business.

Teiser: They were both in the same immediate field?

Adams : Yes .

Teiser: Alma Lavenson.

Adams: Well, she lived in Piedmont, and she was, I think you would say,

kind of the Julia Margaret Cameron of Berkeley. I mean, she tried
very hard — [laughter]. That's a cruel statement.

Teiser: It gives the idea.

Adams: I assumed that she had means and she could do what she wanted. And
then she married a nice man named Wahrhaftig — but that was quite
late, and I think he's dead now. But she did pictures of the Mother
Lode country which were really quite superior. As I say, I don't

102

Adams: know about her business status or whether she just lived on what she
had or whether she did any professional work.

Brett Weston and Edward Weston

Teiser:

Adams:

Then Brett Weston was the last one.
he making then?

What sort of photographs was

Teiser:

Adams:

He was relatively young, and he was very much under the domination
of his father. So he was influenced technically and visually by
his father's work. Not imitating him, you understand what I mean,
because Brett was always a strong individual. And Brett steadily
progressed to become one of the very best of the "younger"
photographers, but he's sixty-something now. And his latest work
with the 2 1/4 by 2 1/4 format is simply superb. He is now secure
in his own expressive domain. But the domination of the old man
was not intentional and Edward didn't like it, but there it was. I,
in fact, was probably one of the very few that were not dominated by
Edward. I mean I used much of the same equipment and materials, but
I always saw things very differently.

Mrs. Newhall writes in her book that the first time you met Eward
Weston you didn't like his work particularly. Is this true?

Yes, it's true. I didn't react. It was — well, you have to get a
little perspective on Edward. Edward was a portrait photographer
in Glendale who really went for the trade, as they say. I mean he
did soft-focus pictures of ladies and shadows against the wall, and
a peculiar quality of pictorialism that was sometimes quite goofy.
And it bothered me because it seemed very mannered and very much
"Hollywood," as I knew it. (You know, "Hollywood" is a term that
covers a million different places at once.)

He was a very nice man, and I met him and the boys — I think two
of them — at Albert Bender's. But he was just making the transition.
And the prints, to me, were kind of chemically green — what they call
commercial paper color. You still get that color; I have to use
selenium to overcome it. And I felt there was a kind of a sterility
about it, and I fought it for several years. And then after I saw
Strand's negatives and realized what straight photography could be,
I gradually came to realize more and more what Edward was trying to
do. Edward had made vast steps forward in those several years. He
was more generous to me than I was to him in the beginning, by far.
I finally realized that some of this work was really what we're all
after in our own way. So about 1931 or '30 we became very close
friends, and at the time of his death we were very close, I think

103

Adams: really close in understanding and sympathy. He never depended on
anybody — he wasn't that kind of a man. I guess I would be one of
the few people he was glad to have around when he needed them. It's
a feeling. He was very individualistic, and absolutely honest, and
he flagellated himself in his living. He wouldn't compromise one
bit. He used to say that doing a photograph on a commission is
kind of prostitution. And I said, "What about the portraits?"
"Well," he said, "that's just dating," and he used to laugh. [Laughs]

But in the depths of the Depression, Albert Bender was keeping
all his friends going; he got a job for Edward from the MJB coffee
people, the Branstens. They were really very wonderful and generous
people — one of these really great San Francisco Jewish families, you
know. I doubt if there's ever been anything like the families.
There were a dozen of them, and they were the most generous and out
going and intelligent people I have ever known. And they said, "Well,
of course we'll give him a job. We have wanted quality pictures.
Just have advertisements of a beautiful white china cup of coffee
(and set), and just say, 'Photograph by Edward Weston for MJB'."
This is called an institutional ad, you see. And they had this
beautiful set of English china — pure white. So they got that to the
studio and all the coffee he could make. All he had to do was to
create compositions. It was entirely up to him. There was no re
striction and no "copy" with it.

He worked on that thing for two or three weeks and finally he
called them up and said, "I can't do it. It doesn't mean anything
to me." It's a very interesting thing, because the professional
photographer, you see, lives like an architect, on his clients. I
mean, you want to build a house, well, I build the house for you.
I try to keep my standards, but still I try to figure out what you
need. But Edward just couldn't do that. To him, putting a beautiful
piece of porcelain and arranging it any way he wanted, and putting
coffee in it black — you know, typical, wonderful for his work — he
couldn't do it.

And they all understood! They understood perfectly. He'd
done six or seven for them, and they said, "Well, we'll buy these
whether we use them or not, and we understand perfectly. You've
been perfectly honest." That was quite an event, and a credit to
the Branstens.

He did a series of pictures for the publication of Leaves of
Grass — Random House. And he also did some pictures of the West for
the Automobile Club of Southern California. But that was still his
work. They were buying his creative work. They weren't giving him
an external assignment.

104

Adams: Brett has always more or less carried that theory out. It's fine if
it's what he wants to do as an easel painter, without any strictures-
if they can use it.

I think that's a great idea, too. You have to make a living,
though. You can adjust. In fact, I told Brett, "Well, after all,
Michelangelo painted the popes." "Well," Brett said, "that's not
the way I would do it."

You come across all kinds of confusions and strange personal
quirks in this photographic world. Stieglitz never did any commis
sions; Strand never did, except for some social movements. [Eliot]
Porter has never done anything for professional commercial
assignment, to my knowledge; he writes his own assignments. He can
afford to.

Applied Photography

Adams: I've done everything from morgue photography and surgical

photography [laughs] to commercial advertisements and architecture.

Teiser: You've done surgical photography?

Adams: Yes, I've done quite a lot of surgical photography. Very interesting.

Teiser: I should think so.

Adams: Not creative. It's a sheer absolute — it has to be good, you know —

clear. And I did some movies once; it was quite an experience. Very
poor stuff.

[End Tape 5, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 5, Side 2]

Adams: Well, I'm a peculiar mixture, and one of the few I know of that

combined the professional life with the creative life. That would be
a very important thing, I think, in the future, to find out how many
people would do that. The only reason I got by with it was that I
had some wonderful breaks and great clients.

I did many catalogues for the [San Francisco] museums, pictures
of paintings and sculptures, and I did, oh, a lot of architectural
work. I think one of my biggest projects was the series of
photographs of Maurice Sterne's murals in the Department of Justice,
which were produced as original prints. We made quite a few port
folios of these. Then Albert Bender had acquired a very handsome set

105

Adams: of Chinese carvings — marbles — and we did limited editions of that.

And, as I say, I'd have an advertising job and an architectural job,
and I'd have a surgery job, and a portrait now and then.

I think the worst surgical job I had I was on the platform, very
high. And operating rooms get very hot, and I was not bothered at all
by the operation; this was one of these breast resections with an
electric knife. Well, the combination of the anesthetic [laughter]
and the heat, and the peculiar smoky effluvia of burning epidermis!
And here I was up there — it must have been ninety- some thing degrees,
hanging over this tripod. And that's the only time I really had
trouble, because I just needed oxygen, you know. [Laughs]

Then, during the War, my last days in Los Angeles at Art Center
School, we had a small group who went and worked with the Civil
Defense group, and one of the problems was the hypothetical
identification of corpses, should there be an attack. How do you
identify them? So I worked out a system using a mirror. And we'd
make a photograph of the victim, but he'd be in a mirror so you would
get the full face as well as the profile. Now the full face, then,
had to be and could be easily reversed in the enlargement. We would
go over to the Los Angeles morgue and make these photographs.

Oh, they got into all kinds of situations. I remember one time
they wheeled this old character out — he was a drunk, he may have
passed out for good. They lifted him off the table, threw him on
the floor and gave him a kick with the foot and said, "Now this is
probably the way it looks after a bomb attack." So after you got
over that, you figure out, "Well, here he is. The figure's lying
there, and how do you get the camera in and what focal length lens,
and what adjustments to get his profile, and what lighting?" That
information could be very valuable, even if very morbid I

My last session there was through at ten-thirty p.m. and I had
my car all loaded up and I drove right up to Edward Weston's in
Carmel, and got there in the late morning and was absolutely
exhausted. And, oh boy, I still smelled of formaldehyde.' Edward
says, "Whew, where you been, Lazarus?" [Laughter] Funny. So he
made a photograph of me. (I now have a beard.) I was looking very
weird, very tired, but then I was through with Los Angeles, thank
goodness — and then I went on to Manzanar.

Giving Photography Museum Status

Adams: Well, now, how about the — any other names to consider there?

Teiser: Those were all the names I had in connection with f/64. Were there
other people who also exhibited with you in later periods?

106

Adams: No. But what I wanted to say — I think I may have mentioned it
before — was the fact that we existed only for a short time.

Teiser: You mentioned that you made a manifesto. Was it published anywhere?

Adams: I think it was published in a magazine somewhere, or on the museum
wall. That's where it really was. But Weston had decided that we
could very easily create a cult or be typed, you see, by continuing
this — this f/64 — into a continuing thing. So we voted to disband,
and in one sense it's one of the most healthy things you can imagine
in not perpetuating a cult or an idea or an association, because all
of us could have been very easily tied in then with a "school" — you
know what I mean. Edward Weston school, West Coast school.

Now we still are in that mess, but it's not intentional. So
many of us are criticized as being just a continuation of this old
"West Coast" school. Well, of course, nothing could be further from
the truth, see. Our Friends of Photography has covered many, many
facets of photography — the most contemporary back to historic. It's
surprising anyone should get labeled these days, but they do.

Teiser: Well, this was one of the other things I was interested in about
Group f/64, that it has had such a very long-lasting effect.

Adams: It had a tremendous impact. There was no plan to have an impact.
Well, I guess we thought we would help, but I mean, we had no idea
at all what would happen. And within that year it influenced the
whole course of American photography.

Teiser: Do you think it was in any way what they call an idea whose time had
come?

Adams: Yes, I think absolutely it was that. It was a group of young people,
and they weren't radical activists as you have today. They didn't
spend their time figuring out ways of doing things. They figured
out more the doing of them. And it was this problem of being
dedicated to the idea.

The idea of closing f/64 off, very short duration, was the
healthiest thing we could do, because we weren't any kind of a formal
organization. We had no offices, we had no board, we weren't
"founded." We were just a very informal group. And Willard
[Van Dyke] and I, I guess, were the ones who did most of the
activating and planning of things. There were others who did much
too. But there's always a few that take, you know, more credit than
effort.

Harroun: What part did Edward Weston play?
or—?

Was he really interested in it

107

Adams: He contributed. He didn't do much to the concept — he just agreed
and contributed. Most of us did that. But there was always some
body who had to do the telephoning and sending out the cards.

Teiser: Who actually chose the prints for the exhibit?

Adams: That was the group. We sent out cards to all the members. I think
Willard did it or I did it or we both did it, I forget. Willard did
more than I did. We said we have an opportunity for a show, and now
we'll all meet when we can, and gave some dates. And they all met
over at Brockhurst or at my place. I think we met twice. And we
picked out a set of pictures for the show and then the director — his
name was [Lloyd] Rollins — a very sympathetic, wonderful guy — he
helped us design the show. And he threw out the baddies and kept in
the goodies. You know it's always very important to have an objective
analysis from the outside. In other words, if I'm going to have a
show I never would put it up myself. I might pick out a hundred
pictures that I like and that I wanted up and then say, "Well now,
we've got to get sixty out of these." Nancy Newhall did that big
show in 1963. I was terribly upset because there were a few of my
favorites that were not in it. And when the show was up I realized
why they weren't in there — repetitive. She was absolutely right I

And the same with selecting portfolios. For Portfolio Five,
which is ten prints, we had twenty potentials. And we'd just show
them to people and talk and say, "Now what's your reaction?" And
I would see their points of view, and I got it down to ten prints.
And it was very good because of that, better than if I had just made
the selection myself. Many photographers don't do that. They feel
that they're the only ones that can judge their own work. But a lot
of things are done on the emotion of the moment, and it's awfully
hard for the artist to have an objective point of view.

In fact I'm thinking now of putting in Portfolio Six two
pictures that were done in the twenties. They really have an impact.
It took this long to find it out. [Laughs]

Teiser: Was Group f/64's a big show?

Adams: No, no. I think there were — oh my — seventy or eighty prints, in
that area — maybe less.

Teiser: Rollins was interested in photography, was he?

Adams: He was. He was simply marvelous. If it hadn't been for Rollins,

I don't think we could have ever gotten the show, ever got recognition.
Because he was young and he was very much ahead of his time and very
alive.

108

Teiser: It seems to me that as late as the fifties, the photographic

magazines were complaining that museums didn't recognize photography.
But we've been doing it in San Francisco for quite a long time.

Adams: Yes, I think we were one of the very first. Well, I won't say that —
the Buffalo Institute of Art [the Albright Art Gallery] gave the
Photo-Secession show [in 1910]. But there were very, very few shows.
The Metropolitan had some prints. They still have some interest. I
just got a letter the other day (relative to my forthcoming exhibit
in April 1974) saying they'd like me to conform to their mount sizes
because they have the frames for them. My god, they're spending
$25,000 on a show, and they're worried about a few lousy frames and
mats, 14 1/4 by 19 1/2, or something. Throws the whole thing out of
kilter. [Laughter] God] But I think I can get over that all right.

But things are institutionalized. And out here they were hung
under glass and people had their own size mats, and we all had
different size mats in mind. Your mat is part of your vision, I
mean. But you go to the Metropolitan and other museums and you'll
see little things this big, you know, in a 14 by 19 mat, I mean,
because that goes into the frame. [Laughter]

One of the important things is that museums were scared. It's
the art groups — painting and sculpture groups that scalped photography.
They didn't want to confront these "new" people. Now you had that
same thing in San Francisco, my beloved home city. The artists
there have been very negative to photography. In fact to the point
of — almost sometimes just wishing they could cancel things out. Due
to Mr. Eldridge T. Spencer, when he became president of the Art
Association, *after the War [World War II], he was able to promote
a department of photography. There was great opposition from the
"art" people, Art Association people, I should say. But he put it
through, and I went out and got ten thousand dollars from the
Columbia Foundation and we started. We had a wonderful department.
He was happy and I was happy.** But whenever we tried to get a gallery
to do something with our work, the painters were there first. Maybe
the artists weren't really afraid of us. They were just jealous of
time, space, and money.

And the majority of painters today, I think, look on photography
as an intruder. Very few painters I know have any interest in it or
any sympathy for it. We have more sympathy for them by a hundred
times. I was asked to put on a show at the San Francisco Museum of
Art in October 1973. It was supposed to be a very important show.
And they put on a big song and dance about it. It was to be
coincidental with the reopening of the museum — the whole museum is
being redecorated, reorganized. I said, "Well now, I want a
description of the gallery space so I can start thinking." They
said, "Well, it's going to be in the corridor. The corridor's going
to be improved." And I said, "Nuts to that," in not exactly the same

*The San Francisco Art Association.

**See also pp. 374-375 and other references to the California School

of Fine Arts as indexed.

109

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser :

Adams :

words. I said, "If I'm having an exhibit, I'm having a gallery or
else." I was thinking about myself and photography. I mean, if this
was, as they said, an important show, then it deserved a gallery. I
wouldn't mind in the least having my pictures in a group thing in the
corridor if they're going to bring out part of their collection and
put it in the corridor. Well, that's all right. But when you have a
show, an exhibit, and it's an important one, and it's an artist —
somebody who's achieved a certain level of distinction, and that's
what they tell you, and they want that, I don't want it in the
corridor. I mean, it's just a matter of — I guess you'd call it
principle.

That's where they hang most of the photographs at the museum —

Yes. It-'s terrible — awful light. Well, they're fixing it up a
little better, but they still don't know anything about light. They
won't listen. I can give them a mathematical formula — so many foot
candles, so many candles per square foot, environmental percentage,
all of that has been worked out. It's baby talk. And yet I know the
last diagram I saw of the gallery, the lights were no higher than here
at home. There won't be enough light on it. "Well, double the
lighting." "Well, we can't. The circuits won't stand it." "Well,
double the circuits." "We haven't got the money." [Laughter] God!

So this whole proposition of struggling to get recognition for
photography ... .I'll gladly put myself down for photography as a
whole, and if all they had was a corridor and there wasn't anything
else, well, that would be all right. I mean, you're often shown in
terrible situations. But part of the f/64 objective was to give
photography museum dignity. In other words, if it's good, it's good
enough to show it in a museum. Painting, and etching, and
lithography, and drawings and photography. The Metropolitan Museum
now has a division called the Department of Prints and Photography
in the Department of Art. Well, that's a step — they at least use the
word.

The first photographic prints in American photography, did they show
in galleries early?

No. And I can't give you a detailed account, but I think the Photo-
Secession show was the very first one to have a museum show. Now,
Beaumont Newhall could tell you that; I can't. But there were
damned few and far between. Not until Newhall became interested in
photography at the Museum of Modern Art in the thirties and forties.
San Francisco and the f/64 came first, and then the Museum of Modern
Art had a series of photograph exhibits after that.

In 1933 I went to Yale and had a letter to Dean [Everett V.]
Meeks. And Dean Meeks was a very charming, rotund gentleman, and he

110

Adams: looked at my pictures and said, "Why, remarkable, remarkable,

remarkable!" And I had a print about this big [gesture]. He said,
"That's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. What's
it of?" I said, "Foliage at Mills College." He said, "You don't
understand. What's it of — what tapestry?" And I said, "It's a
photograph of nature." And he looked at me and he said, "Well, now,
I don't — I just haven't made myself clear. What work of art is that
a representation of? What did you do that of?" And I says, "I took
it of a bunch of weeds.'" [Laughs] I was just out of my mind! I mean
I couldn't believe this man — I said, again, "These are all photographs
not of paintings or drawings or anything, but they're photographs of
nature." "Well, that's remarkable, you must show these."*

So I had a show at Yale in '34 or something. But here was the
Dean of Fine Arts at Yale University who could not get through his
head that all these photographs were not photographs of something else
somebody had done on some graphic medium. He never thought of taking
a camera and photographing a landscape or a detail of nature.

Camera Clubs, Groups, and Galleries

Teiser: This was part of the reason for all the camera club magazines perhaps.
They didn't have anybody else to show the pictures to.

Adams: No, they didn't. The camera club is a very interesting thing. It's

primarily a social get-together of people interested in a hobby. Most
camera clubs have never made a pretense of art. The Photographic
Society of America, of which I'm a Fellow (I don't know why), largely
represents this approach to photography. They're absolutely divorced
and separate from the creative stream. For instance, the admiral —
awful nice man — Admiral [E.G.] Forsyth makes just beautiful pictures.
He is a trustee of the Friends of Photography, and his pictures are
really something. Just one little theme: light and sunset, light
reflections on water, dark/ light. He never does anything else, but
he does it so well that I've got one of his prints that's a beautiful
gem in my collection.

Well, he said it would be fine if we could have an article on
the Friends in the journal of the Photographic Society of America.
And we had the article, and there was no comment whatsoever. It's
just the kind of photography that's — it's just another world. It's
a sewing bee. They have a technical section which is ridiculous.
Anyhow, it's entirely a world apart.

Then of course, with the advent of the Depression and the photo-
documentarists, you had another world apart. We had the Photo League

*See also pp. 319-320.

Ill

Adams: and we had what is now known as the "concerned photographer." It's
a very important term, and you have to take it for what it means.
It really means photographers who are concerned with our environ
mental and social conditions. Now they're concerned with that, but
that doesn't necessarily make it creative art. I'm concerned with
something else too. I'm supposed to give a talk to them in the
fall, and that's going to be my theme — that my concern is different
from theirs. But it's just as deep concern, because I think it
includes the whole thing. And of course I can go on and probably
put myself out on a limb very quickly with it.

Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street, that book he did on the
ghetto, is a very important thing, and some of the photographs he
did are extraordinarily fine. But our group of photographers are
interested, no matter what your subject is, in the photograph. I
mean does it have an emotional wallop, aesthetic wallop, and is it
"technically adequate"? It looks better if it has a theme, and I
think that's one of the things that I've had to contend with. I've
always had some kind of a theme, whether it's been conservation or
Japanese-American relocation, etc. But the person today either
works with a definitely social theme, of minority groups or the
oppressed, or else with some absolutely internal, personal kind of
experience, what we often call a "trip."

I think I mentioned the other day the photograph, 11 by 14
inches, of a lawn in which there was an out-of-focus dog in the
middle of it, and that was hanging on a museum wall. Now that was
a symbol of something to the photographer, but to the spectator,
God knows! [Laughter]

Now there are groups in New York, like the Circle of Confusion —
those people are largely technical. They sit around with drinks and
dinner and yak, and they don't do much of any work. All over the
country there are workshops beginning and unfortunately ending,
because they just don't have the complete picture of the problem.
But they are important because they bring people together in the
creative sense.

The sad thing is the number of galleries that are starting up.
Having had a gallery myself, I know whereof I speak. They have
absolutely no concept of the work and the money involved in it.
They have great enthusiasm to have a gallery. And they put in a
gallery and lights and put out an announcement. But they don't
realize that running a gallery takes a terrific amount of publicity —
primarily an important list of artists who may be shown. You have to
do that. You can't go out and just ask "Joe" to show, and just
extoll "Joe the photographer."

112

Adams: New galleries are starting. Some of them are very well funded, with
a tremendous amount of money. The Light Gallery in New York is
typical. What I saw there was certainly of no consequence whatso
ever. The Witkin Gallery is I think the best in the country,
because Lee Witkin combines the books, the old stuff, the new
stuff. It's a nonpretentious place. It's just a mixed up,
beautiful, simple setup, with no obvious money involvement that you
see. I know the rent costs him something and he has a nice deck
for entertaining. The gallery itself is small, but he has a
priceless treasure of photographs. He knows photography, knows how
to get it, and puts on these exhibits without pretension. And he's
doing very well.

But there was a gallery started in Chicago, called Limited
Image Gallery, that started out with a big fanfare and had a big
show of mine and others. And all the money they took in selling
prints, which were not prints from the wall, but prints on order,
they spent for the rent, the lights, and so forth, so they went
bust. And I'm in the hole for three thousand dollars, and several
other people I know are out. I'm the prime loser in the case
because I had more prints. But they had absolutely no sense. They
stuck labels to the back of the prints, which contracts the prints
and shows on the surface. Well, they might be used for other
exhibits, but you can't sell them. When you look at them in the
light, you see the defect.

Liliane De Cock had mounted her color pictures on beautiful
mats, and then they stuck overmats on them, and a label on the back
in addition. And then one print was just scratched right across —
the only one of its kind. She couldn't possibly make another one
like it.

So here's a gallery that started up and they didn't even know
the fundamentals of care of photographs , let alone operation of the
gallery. And we have that now, all over the country — new galleries,
new failures.

And quite a number of publications, which are not — well,
Aperture is about the only one that survived. Friends of Photography,
they're starting a quarterly.* I think that will be pretty good,
because we have a good background. We don't have any money, but
we're out on a big fund campaign now. We're a non-profit educational
organization. We have the Ferguson Fund of twenty thousand dollars,
which gives about fifteen hundred dollars a year to a creative
photographer. It's been run not as a fly-by-night thing, but pretty
solid, well planned.

*The initial issue of the quarterly, Untitled //I, was published in
the autumn of 1972.

113

Adams :

Teiser ;

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser:
Adams:

But here's photography, in which there's more millions expended per
week than all of the old masters in the whole time of the
Renaissance spent on canvas and paint — or frescoes. You know, it's
just fantastic. But most of it is a diary. The Polaroid process
is in one sense directed to the diarist. Instead of saying, "We
went to Grandma's for Thanksgiving turkey," by gosh there are
pictures and pictures and pictures of Grandma and the Thanksgiving
turkey! This is very important. But they've also gone into the
potential art field with their four by five, and very much into the
"concerned photographer" field with the pictures that are made by
photographers who want to record the scene.

Well, I'm sort of getting ahead of myself.
Coming up to the present and going back to the past — that's fine.

I guess you've said what in general the over-all effect of the
f/64 group was.

My only regret was that we didn't do one publication — one portfolio
or one publication, because I think that might have had historic
value, but on the other hand, it might have rigidized it a bit, too,
you see.

Rollins had also an exhibit of Moholy-Nagy.
Did that have any effect?

Do you remember that?

That was the first of them. Yes, but not as photography because
most of his photographs were photograms. I think I've described
what the photogram was.

No one picked up any of that here?

Well, I won't say that. I think it's quite an illuminating thing.
His photographs as prints were simply terrible. They were spotted,
they were ugly, they were bad tones. But his concepts were very
important. Moholy-Nagy was entirely interested in design and not
substance — not the subject itself. So I think he did have a
definite effect on this approach, and I think that people didn't
forget it.

The Golden Gate International Exposition Exhibit

Adams: Of course, you have to say that the biggest photographic show was at
the 1940 Fair [the Golden Gate International Exposition]. I think
I told you about that.

114

Teiser: You haven't. We have the catalogue, A Pageant of Photography, and
were going to ask you about it.

Adams: Yes, because that was very important in the sense that it was just

big, and I griped and I griped and I griped because at the 1939 Fair
there was no photography, and Tim [Timothy] Pfleuger — he was a great,
really great man, a wonderful person — he called me up one day and he
said, "Adams, we've got a little money. Would you like to run the
photography department?" Well, I didn't have any money, but I said,
"God, yes. Tell me about it." He said, "Well, in the Fine Arts
building, we'll give you some galleries and we'll give you a
secretary — she's a very attractive Italian girl who spells **f with
a 'ph'." [Laughter] And he said, "We've got sixteen hundred dollars
in addition to the secretary. It's all yours."

And I went over there, and there were these big rooms, and we
painted them, and my God, they looked beautiful. The lighting was
only fair, but I didn't worry about that. And I had the equivalent
of thirty-seven large galleries of photographs. And I'm not a
museum man at all. I had Weston, both Westons, and Moholy-Nagy, and
Arnold Gen the, a big show of contemporary color photography, and the
Photo League. And early western photography which, if you look back
at, there's some extraordinary things in it. But it's gone now; you
can't find them. They printed on leather — 1868, something like that.*
And I had the equivalent of the f/64, a group show.

Boy, that was an awful hard job, but it was a contribution, and
that's what brought, for the first time, photography in many of its
approaches, to the attention of the people in the West. Before that,
nobody 'd ever seen anything. I tried to get a show from Stieglitz
and, you know, the old boy nearly did it. He said, "I'm sorely
tempted," and I said, "God, Stieglitz, this is the chance to do
something. I'll paint the gallery any way you say. We have guards;
it'll be perfectly safe. And if you'd only — " Well, then he
finally decided that he couldn't do it. If he did it, he'd have to
send to other museums. He trusted me to take care of them, but he
couldn't trust any of the museums to do it! He gave me all this
fantastic negative monkey business, but still I was sorry I lost
that. But I did have "The Steerage," a reproduction from Camera
Work.

It was a very good show. It did bring to San Francisco, at
least, an awareness of photography it had never had before.

*The exhibit included an 1861 photograph on leather of Brewer Camp
near Monterey, photographer unknown.

115

Timing in Photography

Teiser: Who was it, incidentally, who did the ten billion studies of a cup
and saucer? Edward Steichen?

Adams: That is apocryphal. [Laughter]

Teiser: I was thinking of that when you were talking about Weston taking the
MJB photographs.

Adams: Any photo-scientist, technologist, even at that time, would have been
able to figure out the reciprocity factor and would not have needed
to make ten billion pictures of the cup and saucer. These stories,
you know — like the one that I waited for three days to get this
picture or that — I never waitedl The only time I waited for anything
in my life was on top of Kearsarge Pass, waiting for some clouds to
go away from the Kearsarge Pinnacles, and they didn't. I waited all
afternoon, and all the clouds kept moving right along the line. But
we have to be very fair about that, because when we know what we're
going to do, especially when we have assignments, then we have to
wait. But my "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" picture was taken
with the differential of only fifteen seconds. The Lone Pine
sunrise ["Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine"] — I just
was there at the right time. The "Grand Tetons and Snake River" was
all within ten minutes.

Weston used to say, "If you wait here trying to see if
something's going to happen, you're probably losing something
wonderful over there." So he never waited. And I wouldn't unless
I really knew something was to "happen."

I mean like one night we had a green flash coming up — the sun
goes down against a sharp horizon, and there's a green-emerald
momentary flash. And there was a ship coming, and I thought, "This
could be one of the craziest things." And I got out the big camera
with the very long lens, you see. The idea was that it would be
perfectly marvelous if we could photograph the ship in front of the
setting sun with the green flash. Well, it almost made it. If I'd
been living a quarter of a mile down the coast, I would have gotten
it. Then I figured out, well, so what? [Laughter] My lens wasn't
really big enough — you have to have one of those huge mirror lenses.
But, it was a pretty good green flash. Might even be one tonight.
Ever seen a green flash?

Teiser: No. Mr. Spencer said you had a great interest in the green flash.

Adams: Well, the green flash is a very interesting phenomenon. It takes a
knife-edge ocean line (there can't be any clouds) and as the sun
descends, I guess you would say, the spectrum is sectored. The blue

116

Adams: light is completely scattered, the red rays are refracted, and

there's a beautiful emerald flash for about a tenth of a second —
it's very short — just pht! Like that. And it's a beautiful
emerald. We've seen it here quite often. It has to be, as I say,
a knife-edge sky, because if there's any diffusion or clouds you
don't get it. We might get it tonight, but I don't know.

Teiser: I have another story that's probably apocryphal, but I'll ask you
about it. This is about you, and someone told me tha£ you were in
the mountains in the summer, and you saw something that you thought
you'd like to photograph in the snow. So the next winter you packed
up all your equipment on an animal, and one glass plate, and went
up into the mountains, took the picture, and came back. [Laughter]

Adams: I never did such a damned thing in my life I You can discount that
one. [Laughter]

There is a story, however, about the Santa Fe Railroad. They
had a terrible wreck at Durango in New Mexico, and they sent out
their photographer from Chicago, who was just, you know, the
railroad photographer. And he arrived on the train the next day,
and he got out and walked up the hill and studied very carefully,
and he took one picture and went back to Chicago. [Laughter] He
said, "They told me to go out and get a picture, which I did."
[Laughter]

No, these stories are really remarkable. They probably stem
from the fact that the picture of Half Dome ["Monolith, the Face of
Half Dome"] was taken when I only had two plates left; I had taken
many plates that day, but I only had two plates left, and I did one
exposure of Half Dome with an ordinary K-2 filter. And that was my
first insight into visualization, because I suddenly realized what
the image was going to be — the shadow of the cliff and the sky
would be about the same in value; it would be dull, and it would not
have anything at all of the romantic, really super-dramatic impact.
And I had one more glass plate, and a very strong F filter,
Wrattan F, and I put that on, and I made this picture — this big one —
it's around the corner [on the studio wall]. I knew what was going
to happen, and that's probably my first conscious visualization.
But that was just because I'd packed this camera up through this
God-awful snow; it was really very difficult getting there. I'd
taken quite a few pictures, and how easy it would have been to have
taken all the pictures before I got there, or made a few mistakes.
See how chancey all this is.

I sat down on one of the best plates I ever made, in Yosemite.
It was of Tenaya Canyon from above. I leaned these plates against
a chair, you see, and then I moved over to fix something else, and
then I sat down, and one of these plates had fallen down. Cra-aa-ck,

117

Adams: crunch. And here was this picture that I'd spent three hours

climbing down a canyon — I took three pictures, two of them weren't
any good, something happened. This one was a beautiful negative.
I just ruined it, you know. [Laughter] So, I mean, it's not always
apocryphal. Happens all the time.

Teiser: You know what you want, but you do take a number of exposures still,
do you?

Adams: What I do: if I come across a very exciting thing which I know is
a picture, especially if I'm taking film pack, I'll take at least
two, three, or four. But they're all the same. I don't "bracket"
my exposures. What's called "bracketing" is nothing but indecision.
[Laughter] When I read my values, I like to know what my exposure
is. Once in a while, you'll think of another interpretation and do
it a different way, and give a different development on it. But the
idea like Margaret Bourke-White had, of just setting up and going
from f/45 to f/3.2, up and down the line, knowing that one would be
a better exposure than the others....

Teiser: I have my usual list of many questions here, but would you like to
stop for today?

Adams: I can go on some more. Let's finish the tape.
Teiser: All right.

Edwin Land and the Polaroid Camera System

Teiser: Perhaps you have something in mind that continues what we were

talking about now. For instance, what about the Land camera and
visualization?

Adams: This is a very important thing. I've always been interested in

anything new in the mechanical aspect of things, and before 1950 —
'47 or '48 — I met Edwin Land.

Teiser: How did you meet him?

Adams: I heard him at an Optical Society lecture when he presented the

Polaroid camera process, which was an historic event, and then we
went to Cambridge [Massachusetts] and came over to this little
laboratory, and he took my picture with a great big eight by ten
camera. The process was in eight by ten format in the laboratories,
He sat me down under lights and things, and exposed the picture,
processed it; there it was, brown and of rather awful quality. It

118

Adams: was his very first experimental work. But by gosh, it was a one-
minute picture! And that excited me no end; I mean the thought
that you could really do that.

So I told him that I was interested, that I felt that he had
something absolutely unique — an historic step. So he said, "Well,
I'd like you to be a consultant for the company (at one hundred
dollars a month) and just send in your ideas." *And so that's where
it all started. I'm now up to memo 2078. It's considerably more
than one hundred dollars a month, thank God. But out of all this
came the idea. They progressed from the brown tone to a clean
black and white image. That seemed necessary; it was a first step.
Of course, by 1950, 1952, he had the whole future planned right up
to now and beyond. The development of color, the new cameras; it
was all written out, and many groups in laboratories were given
assignments to develop. And nothing like this has been known before.
It's fantastic.

At first I claimed that the thing against the print was the
color, and that it should be black and white. I'm no real tech
nician, but they would send out films, and I would take the camera
out and try all kinds of experiments and then I'd send in my
comments, and in good time came the black-and-white image.

And then I urged we should have something for the professional,
meaning something he could use in the conventional view camera. If
Polaroid was not going to make a view camera, they have to use what
we've got. So we must have an individual "pack." Well, in Palo
Alto [where Edwin Land spent some time], we used to walk up and
down the street in the evenings. Land said, "Well, how many people
would use it?" I said, "Oh, gosh, I can think of fifty right now."
Slight exaggeration, but I believed it. [Laughs] I said, "I'm a
professional and I can think of nothing more wonderful than getting
a Polaroid print out of a view camera in the four by five category."

Well, today we have it, and you can see it on the wall [of the
studio area, where prints are hung]. Some of those prints, a couple
of them, at least, are very early ones, and the whole technique and
the whole idea of the adapter and how it would work — the technique
is all theirs, but I was just promoting the image quality. It's a
very interesting thing: a person employed by Polaroid who works
along all the time (this would apply to any company) — he's working
with a film, say Type 52, and he knows what the film can do. Then
he begins to look around for subjects that fit Type 52. Well, the
whole thing becomes static, and a lot of beautiful pictures come
in because there's nothing better for Type 52 than a foggy day in
Point Lobos. But my job was, as a professional, to take it on
certain assignments, real or contrived, and see where the film
failed. That was the important thing.

119

Adams: Here's the thing that I, Ansel Adams, was requested to do by their
advertising agency, and I do it, and the scale of the film isn't
adequate. So in a sense I was responsible for the present four by
five, by pleading and begging and support. And now it's approaching
a twenty-million-dollar-a-year sale, just alone on the four by five.
But the multi-million dollar thing is in the camera which is for the
public, and all the four by five, black and white, color, and the
experimental material — all this stuff couldn't exist without vast
public sale of the popular products.

Teiser: What are the implications of the four by five? That you have a
permanent negative?

Adams: You have several varieties. You have Type 1, which is a very high-
contrast print which is used in the graphic arts, and is really
quite remarkable because you can make screened images of it. You
put an engraving screen in front of the negative and paste the
resulting pictures right on a sheet with type, and re-photograph it
for "offset" purposes. You can also do all kinds of fancy, really
very interesting aesthetic experiments, because this has only a one
to two-and-a-half step range. You can exaggerate textures. (You
can do a texture image of that drab cloth, greatly exceeding its
original contrast.) Type 52 is the standard high-speed film, 500 at
least; they say 400, but my exposure trials usually give 500-plus.
It has a limited exposure scale as does color, but it gives a
beautiful print.

Then there's Type 57, which they call their 3000 film, which is
for me 4000 ASA daylight, the fastest film that was ever made. It's
extraordinary. Sitting in here, at dusk, the light would be almost
too bright for it. But you can work at night with available light
and get the feeling of environmental lighting. I've used some film
up to 20,000 ASA, experimental film — fantastic stuff.

Then there's the Type 55 PN, which gives you both the negative
print and the negative. It's quite remarkable; not fast. It's
quite slow — about 50-64 ASA. Then there's the Type 58, which is
Polacolor, four by five, and the pack film, Type 108. Then there's
a new camera, the Aladdin (which is a temporary name — I guess they'll
use it), which is totally different and absolutely remarkable.

Then they have a very high-speed film that they use for
oscilloscope photography — around 10,000 ASA. And they have also a
marvelous material, which people don't take advantage of as they
should, called Type 47, which is one of the sharpest transparencies
for slides. And you have ways of controlling contrast with this
material.

Teiser: It's used in laboratories and industry.

120

Adams: I have a whole collection of slides in which photographs are

projected on a screen with the standard lantern-style projector.
It is remarkable. They tried it one time with a 2 1/4 by 2 1/4
projector, but it didn't get over, and it was too bad because the
images were so sharp and so beautiful — such a great range to them.

Then they also have another material known as PolaLine 146-L
which gives a very high contrast transparency. If you want to do a
graph or a page of type, it would be perfect. Because of the
particular chemistry and the physical system involved, this is the
sharpest image available to date. The diffusion is within a very,
very short angle.

I've always considered the Polaroid process as an intensely
creative one, not only because of the inherent beauty of the
material, which has, if you want to speak photo-scientif ically, a
linear scale and cannot be duplicated by any ordinary print. But it
also has the element of immediacy. You see exactly what you're
getting. When you're making a picture under static conditions, you
can make an immediate correction. Or if you're working in fast
situations, once you have one picture you know what the others are
going to be.

There is a new aesthetics involved in this immediacy, and
that's what I think is so important.

I'm talked out!

Harroun: Your photographs on the backs of Aperture — those are marvelous.
They must have had —

Adams: Well, I'm responsible for a lot of those. Not my own, but other
people trying to get good images with the process.

Teiser: Yours must have had a tremendous impact.

Adams: I was one of the first ones that used it. Yes, I guess I was the
almost first one outside the company. Paul Caponigro and a few
others used it, but I'm the one that totally believed in it.

And a typical instance — in a day or so I'm getting a new pack
of film, something experimental — the Type 55, in which we think
we've made a breakthrough. Well, it's so complex technically I
couldn't begin to understand it, but I go out and make some pictures,
and the breakthrough is valid if I get a good picture and a good
negative. And does it have the scale, etc., required?

Teiser: It will have a negative?

121

Adams: This is the 55. It has the negative.*
[End Tape 5, Side 2]

[Interview V — 20 May 1972]
[Begin Tape 6, Side 1]

Mortens en

Teiser: Let me ask you one more question that has to do, indirectly, with
Group f/64. Why was William Mortensen considered so dreadful by
you and the others?

Adams: Mortensen represented about the lowest ebb of pictorialism, a very

literary approach through his titles, his mannerisms and techniques —
"abrasion tones" and matrix masks — oh, I can't think of the word —
it's things you print through that give the appearance of canvas —
it's texture screens! He was imitating some of the worst of the
Romantic painting, and using Roman letters for inscriptions, and all
kinds of manipulation. It just seemed to be as far from photography
as possible. He still is very popular in some circles, but for us
he was the anti-Christ. We stood for exactly the opposite of
everything he represented.

The interesting thing is that he had a man named Paul — I don't
know whether that's the first name or the last name — who helped him
write or actually wrote the book Mortensen on the Negative, which
has many very fine ideas in it. I was quite embarrassed later to
find that he had anticipated some of my pet ideas of technique;
controlled exposure and development of the negative, etc. (But not
the Zone System developed around 1940.) The book is very good; it's
just that the illustrations are such rather sad examples. A very
interesting thing is that in all of the history of flagrant
pictorialism, you don't find it has important museum recognition.
The pictorialists call their exhibitions "salons." When I went to
St. Louis about 1938, some of the museums might have such shows, but
now I don't think they elect to touch it because the motive is
"hobbyist." It's awfully hard to put your finger on it. You say
it's bad taste and the answer is, "Who are you to say it's bad
taste?" What is taste? What's good taste?

*Did not work out! [A. A.]

122

Adams: I don't have Mortensen's book here. I had it once; somebody stole

it. But the illustrations were just over-retouched, over-modulated.
He'd take these young nude models and grease them so they'd shine,
you know. [Laughter] And they'd be in poses —

Teiser: Didn't he write a book on the print, too?

Adams: Yes. And Monsters and Madonnas was one book he wrote. [Laughter]
Well, they were like a bad dream. They're still publishing
portfolios of Mortensen's, printing from his negatives. I guess
the P.S.A. Journal has been advertising them. I remember writing
a letter in which I suggested he negotiate oblivion. My father
persuaded me it wouldn't have the desired effect. The controversy
was kind of silly.

But anyway, his work was the exact opposite of what f/64
stood for. He would have classes down at Laguna Beach, and wealthy
capitalists from the East would come out and spend a thousand
dollars, I was told, for a weekend. And after they'd returned home,
all their work would look like his. I remember how these men would
get together, say in Chicago, and they'd hire a model for the
weekend. The model would be a platinum blond, usually wearing
nothing but high-heeled shoes. You know, that kind of thing!
[Laughter] All very decent, but all done with such conventional
poses of holding a jar on their shoulder, etc., and they'd have
names like "Dessa" or "The Girl with the Flaxen Hair." It was so
obviously phony! All made-up and greased up. It was a way of
getting highlights on nudes. In fact, some of the early photograph
ers did this sometimes in portraits to accentuate the highlights on
the face. And in the early days, they had to chalk the face,
because the film wasn't sensitive to anything but blue light, so
the face would come out over-dark. Anybody with a dark complexion
or with freckles usually had to be well powdered. Any hand would
show all kinds of spots. Anything that went to the pink, yellow or
red and would go down in value. So a lot of the daguerrotypes were
taken in rather strong, soft daylight, and probably powdered up a
bit — like in television now. On television they have to powder my
head so it won't shine and blow the tube. (That's what happened on
the moon.)

Vision and Photography

Teiser: To take you back still further into the past, let me ask you if

your motives, for your earliest photographs, were in effect the same
as your motives for taking photographs now?

123

Adams: A motive is a subconscious thing; I wouldn't know how to answer that
question. I think that in the earlier days, I was technically and
aesthetically naive, so many of my early photographs have a much
simpler and more direct statement, and all the ones that are the best
are the ones that are motivated by "instant recognition." and then
just doing them and having the technique to back it up. Which I
didn't have in the earlier days, so I'd have many an exciting vision
but zero results because I wouldn't know what to do. Now we know
much more, but at the cost of a certain spontaneity, if that's the
term you want to use. It's very hard to say this, but as you get
experienced and you see a lot of work, in any art form, you can't
help being influenced, and you automatically judge and check your
reactions to your experience.

Today I went out trying to get this picture of this very
marvelous old dead tree. It's looked the same for ten years, as if
it's going to blow over. But the sky is usually blah — it's just
nothing. Today there were some rather interesting clouds. I was
setting up the camera (and there are only a few places you can do it
for this subject) and I had to wait until those clouds behaved. See
now, in the past I would have just seen a cloud and thought, "There's
a cloud or a tree'" I wouldn't have seen the cloud-tree relationship
so precisely. And when I met Strand, I found that was one of his
basic themes — the marvelous, precise relationship of "this to that."
Trying to get a moment when all the branches in this tree were in the
cloud. If they were against blue sky they might be "lost." And you
wait until things would be right. And a couple of times it was right.

In the 1920s I wouldn't have been in the least bit aware of such
relationships. I can look back and see many photographic situations
when I really missed the moment. The idea was there, but I didn't
visualize that perfection of arrangement. Some photographers never
have that facility; others have it to an extreme degree.

There's one wonderful photograph by Stieglitz at Lake George,
the porch where the white turned post is seen adjacent to the window
and window edge. There's a thirty-second of an inch hairline
separating them. And it's this hairline that really suggests space
and organization. You see, the spectator is convinced, or feels, or
is aware of the fact that the photographer was aware of the relation
ship. And I have one, that I show in my slides, of a picture that
was done with a Polaroid at the Rochester Institute of Technology of
a building of the "Greek revival" period. Here these marvelous
columns are seen in the near/far mode in exaggerated scale. In the
first one I did, the curve of the near column broke into the
rectangular pedestal of the column in the back, and I realized when
I saw this in the Polaroid-Land print; I'd missed it in the ground
glass. All I had to do was to move the lens a little bit to the
right (two inches), which allowed it to see around the column. It

124

Adams: created a little "hairline" of separation which succeeded in

maintaining the integrity of the curved shape. The foreground
pillar wasn't lost in juxtaposition with the back shape; a "merger"
was avoided.

Those things are hard to describe verbally. And of course when
you do overlook one, then you try to justify it. You put a lot of
what they call "phrases" into the equation <o make it come out to
zero. [Laughter] Then in about a year you may look at it, and you
wonder, "Well how in the world did I ever get by with that?"

I'll see somebody's work for the first time, and that's the first
thing you see — the disturbing mergers and distractions. You look at
a print, and then you find your eyes going around to the spots and
bad edges and all the funny things a photograph can contain. You can
put your finger over one of them and say, "Well that's an interruption."
They see the problem for the first time. I can go back and get some
of my early work and do exactly the same thing — because I didn't see
the defects to begin with.

More and more as you work, you try to visualize the image ahead
of exposure. It's more difficult with the little cameras, but of
course the "saving instrument" is the single-lens reflex, because
there you really see the image — just what the lens is seeing.

Teiser: With the rangefinder camera, you partly guess at it?

Adams: The rangefinder or the viewfinder is not on lens axis. Now, if I'm
a long ways off, the parallax effect doesn't make any difference.
But if I'm sitting here with you and my eye is the lens, your hair
line, for example, is just touching the fossil. If this "eye" would
be the finder — it's usually off to the left — I'll compose you as the
finder sees it. But my lens sees you cutting in one inch on that
fossil behind you. So that the composition is not as anticipated.
The old Rolleiflex has this kind of vertical offset — you have to raise
the camera about two and a half inches to be sure the lens sees what
the finder sees.

Teiser: Doesn't the Rolleiflex have a compensating mechanism?

Adams: Oh, the new one — ^the single-lens one — but not the double, the twin-
lens design. What the twin-lens does is to tilt the viewer mechanism
so that the plane focused on comes to the center of the field. But
because the lens is taking the picture at a lower level, it can't
take care of the parallax. You're only tilting the viewing lens. The
distance of the lens from the subject determines the perspective. So
with the Hasselblad single-lens (Buperwide) I must raise the tripod
three inches to get just what I see in the finder. I compose very
accurately with the finder but must make this adjustment when working
with near/far subjects. After composing, I just crank the camera up

125

exactly the difference in distance between the camera lens and the
finder lens. Then the camera lens is seeing what the finder lens was
seeing. I can show you a picture of that in my book, Camera and Lens,
where there's quite a profound difference evident.

Flash Mishaps

Back to your earliest photographs, you were speaking the other day
of the fact that you've been able to maintain photography as a
commercial project and practice it as an art at the same time. Do
you remember the first photographs for which you were paid?

There's one very funny one that really is not of much consequence.
My next-door neighbor taught at the Chinese school in Chinatown, and
wanted a picture of her class. So, I had an old four by five camera
(my first one) and a flash gun. You used to use flash powder —
magnesium — very dangerous. You'd put a dynamite cap in this tray,
and you'd pull down the tension cord, and you'd jet the safety catch.
Many people have been blinded with this stuff firing in their faces.
I figured out how much magnesium was needed and I looked at the table
and it said, use four number three capsules. Well, I thought number
three capsules were the small capsules. They happened to be the big
capsules (each were four times the strength of the small ones). So I
loaded this pan up with magnesium powder, held it over my head, pulled
the slide from the camera, and checked if everything was ready to go.
Then you open the shutter, fire the flash, then close the shutter.
There wasn't any modern synchronization. So here were all these kids,
and the teacher said, "Now look right at Mr. Adams and smile. Now I
think it's all right, Mr. Adams." So I opened-bang-shut, and of course
there was a large explosion. I used about fifteen times the amount of
flash powder needed. Vast clouds of smoke rolled through the room,
and the kids fell under their desks. We opened the windows, and the
smoke poured out, and somebody put in a fire alarm. [Laughter] And
of course it blackened the wall and ceiling where I was standing, and
I was persona non grata. But it was understood, and forgiven in time.

The developed negative was as dense as a stove lid, it was so
damned over-exposed; about fifteen, sixteen times, I guess. But I
took it to a friend who reduced it, and I got a pretty good print out
of it. When I tried to take another picture of them, they'd
disappeared. They were just terrified!

Then I did a wedding. By that time I'd mastered the flash
technique pretty well. I was standing in a house with a nice white
colonial room, and the bride and groom were standing by the fireplace.
So I set the flash off, and as it was right under the lintel, it
blistered the paint for about four feet! [Laughter]

126

Adams: Those were the first two things I was paid for, and they were both
disasters. The clients were very kind — I offered to pay for the
lintel, but they said, "Oh no, we were going to do the room over
anyway." Which was a lie — the room was beautiful. But it was very
embarrassing.

And then another one later. I was doing the — I think it was
called the San Francisco "round table" — a gtoup of the real bosses
of San Francisco, big lawyers and financiers. They would meet at the
Palace Hotel, and have this big "round table" lunch. Fortune magazine
wanted me to photograph them. So I arranged with Mr. Lurie — Louis
Lurie was in that group and he was very helpful.

One person was very nasty, but I called another and he said, "Oh
sure, you can do it." I said, "Well, you know, it's quite a little
job. To get you all, I'll have to be set up. When the lunch is
through, you're going to have to spend maybe fifteen minutes with it."
"Well, we'll do that," said my friend.

Ron Partridge was helping me. (He is Imogen Cunningham's son.)
I got the camera all set and everything looked fine. We were using
large flash lamps. I had five lights. But at that time the only
synchronization you could get was a switch that was built in the cable
shutter release. You pressed in, opening the shutter, and also made
electrical contact. Well, it usually works all right. The contact
operates the flash.

But this was one of the last buildings in San Francisco that
still had direct current, instead of alternating current. And it
appears that when you make such a contact with direct current, you
get a flaming arc that is quite surprising when unexpected I

So here I am. I got one picture, I thought. But I said, "Well,
I'll have to get another one." So Ron tore around town — almost
arrested for speeding — to find a contact device. In the meantime,
I had a Rolleiflex, and I went up to every man with a flash gun and a
globe (I had no film in the Rolleiflex, but I thought, "I'm going to
have to keep this going") — so I go "click, click, click." One of them
said, "I've got a date." I said, "Listen, Ron will be back in a
minute. And after all, this is a Fortune magazine job I"

So back comes Ron with this new flash contact, and we got
another picture. But he handled it separately. I counted; I'd say,
"One, two, three." On "two" I opened the shutter and on "three" he
operated the flash.

Teiser: You were holding the lens open while he shot the flash globes?

Adams: I was holding the lens open. So I'd say, "One, two, bang!" — Close.
Then, "Gentlemen, you can go home."

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams :

127

Then they said, "Well, I want to see those little pictures you made;
I'll bet they're the best of the bunch."

I got letters later [laughter]. And I couldn't tell them. I
said, "Well, I had a disaster with that too. That was a very bad
day, gentlemen." [Laughter] That's the only way I could have held
them fifteen, twenty minutes sitting there. Such things happen to
photographers.

Did you get a good picture in the end?

Oh, yes. Fine. I still have a print somewhere,
valuable historical image.

It's a rather

Now it'd be so simple! You'd take it with available light, or
just bounce a couple of lights around the room. (It's called "bounce
light," where you direct strong lights against the wall.) You get an
effect that looks like available light. If I want to duplicate the
light in this room, the only way would be to reflect it, or "bounce"
it. And once you put a light directly on the subject you get harsh
shadows and you're in trouble. But then you were working with slow
film at 32-64 ASA at the highest. And now we work with 400, 500 and
higher.

Photographic Printing Papers

Adams: The first serious job was Parmelian Prints of the Sierras, a

portfolio of original prints. And I did a frontispiece for the Book
Club* edition of [Robinson] Jeffers's poems, which (I'm very embarrassed)
has faded. That was done in 1928 or 1929. We didn't know about fixing
and washing. The effect was probably accelerated a bit by the
character of the paper they used in the book — probably a lot of sulfur
in it.

Teiser: That brings up — how did it happen that Dassonville put the emulsion on
the Taos Pueblo book paper? Wasn't there any that was adequate?

Adams: Nothing like that. The idea was to have the paper the same throughout.
The special rag paper had to be ordered anyway, because you did not
then just go and buy such papers in book quantity.

We ordered an ample amount in rolls, and Dassonville coated a
certain number of them with his bromide emulsion.

Teiser: Could that be done now in a very expensive book?

*Book Club of California.

128

Adams: Oh yes, but you would have troubles. With rag paper and the papers
used for platinum prints, the emulsion sank into the paper fiber
rather than lying on a baryta coating. The emulsion was pretty
thick, and that gave quite a quality of "depth" quite different from
anything you see today. The papers today are baryta-coated. Baryta
is a clay, and the paper fibers are filled with this clay, making it
of course very smooth. Then the emulsion 4s deposited on top of the
clay. Then, to get different textures, such as "pebble," "silk," and
"tapestry" surfaces, the papers are put through calendars, a calendar
meaning a roll with a pattern. It could be a perfectly smooth
surface to begin with and then ruined by this treatment! Practically
all of these "pictorial" papers you see are calendared into surface
patterns. The best papers today are chemically very pure, given a
neutral baryta coating, then the various emulsions. In the emulsion,
the degree of gloss may have something to do with the starch grains
that are incorporated. If you put more starch in the emulsion, you
reduce the gloss. Now, I'm quite sure that today they have more
complex chemicals, but that's what Dassonville did — he could make a
very, very flat surface quite "dead:" no gloss at all. Or he could
leave all of the starch out, and get quite a nice brilliant finish.

He hated to leave the starch out, because he didn't like it too
brilliant. I wanted it as brilliant as I could get it.

Now what we can do today, we can take papers of that type and
get all the advantage of the natural paper color, and then we can
spray them with a neutral lacquer like Krylon or Goodman lacquer.
As far as we know, that's permanent, but putting a varnish on them
can be fatal. They used varnish in printing in earlier days, and it
yellowed.

We put a blancophor into the paper to increase the whiteness,
and that works well for daylight. Any light that has a preponderance
of blue rays in it excites these blancophors and creates a fluorescent
effect. Some of the papers have that, and there is a difference in
the whites when you look at them. But it drives the engravers crazy
because it fools them in their exposures. These emulsions are
sensitive to fluorescence and ultraviolet. And that increases
contrast. Giving the engravers a sepia-toned print is also bad,
because their films aren't sensitive to such colors.

See, when an engraver makes a color reproduction he has to make
color-separation negatives first with three color-sensitive films —
red, green, and blue or the complementaries. And they have to be
made, of course, on panchromatic film. In the old days, when they
had ordinary or orthochromatic emulsion, it was terribly difficult to
get the red. They had to fake the red sometimes, and color
reproductions could be very bad. When they get their three black and
white separation negatives, representing the three colors, then they
can transfer the images to their "plates."

129

Writing the Basic Photography Books

Adams: Going into reproductions, I did an article for the London magazine,
Studio. They liked the article and asked me if I would do the book
on photography in their "How to Do It" series, in which they had
Levon West, the etcher, who later left etching and took up photography
and was known as Ivan Dmitri. He was a pretty good etcher. His book
on etching, I understand, is excellent. He was a fair photographer.

Well, I did this book, and now we're thinking of reprinting it
just as an historical object, because it was at the time one of the
most concise works on straight photography.

Teiser: What is it called?

Adams: It's called Making a Photograph. The first edition was in 1935. I
asked for good reproductions, and they agreed. The plates were
beautifully made, printed on very smooth paper, and tipped in — which,
of course, is an ideal way to do it. It gives the illusion of being
originals, but if one corner gets dog-eared, or if people lift them
out, you know, you can get into trouble.

Now there's no need of that at all with modern double offset.
You just print text and images on the same paper. You use smooth
paper, and then you can apply lacquer with what is called tint block
on the press. Lacquer increases brilliancy.

But Making a Photograph in 1935 was the only book of its kind
known that was quite that simple and had anything like those repro
ductions. They were simply marvelous.

I remember going into Chicago one time, waiting for a train,
and went to a big bookshop, where there were a lot of photographic
books, and I pointed to mine and I said, "How's that going?" He
said, "Oh, it's going fairly well. It's written by one of those
highbrow Englishmen." And I didn't have the heart to tell him that
I was the author.

It's interesting that a photographer living in San Francisco
would have his first book published in London, or the first book of
any consequence in the instructional sense. Now that I say that, it
sounds very conceited, but still it has a function that's very, very
good, and there would be very little in it that would be changed.
Of course it was done long before the zone system appeared, so there
was no real analysis of exposure development and control.

Teiser: Your Morgan & Morgan Basic Photo series —

130

Adams: First there was Camera and Lens — Book One. That's now been revised;
it's a rather handsome 304-page book. Now I'm working on revising
the others — The Print. The Negative, Natural-Light Photography, and
Artificial-Light Photography. And then Book Six is the Polaroid
manual [Polaroid Land Photography Manual^. The revised edition will
probably come out, if all goes well, very soon. But as soon as a
book's out, they've got a new process! The first edition of that
was very bad, because PolaColor came out right after the book was
published; I knew there was to be color, but I had no idea when it
was coming, and they couldn't tell me. So we had a filler inserted
afterward.

And now the new process, the SX-70 system, which is a fantastic
achievement — that will be in the revision. God knows what else
Land's got up his sleeve.

Teiser: It must have been hard to sit down and write.

Adams: Well, I'm very glib. I need an awful lot of editing, but I'm very
glib. When I get going I can write very fast — quantities.

Teiser: But those books are so precise.

Adams: Yes, but if you know your subject you can write. The difficulty is
checking to be sure you have all the details right, and when you
read your own manuscript you find that you often overlooked important
things.

I got a letter today. I mentioned a tripod number, 403 733 A,
Goldcrest. Well, this man writes, "There isn't any such tripod.
The Goldcrest people say it probably means 337 A." What it was, you
see, I'd put down number 403 337 A, and the typesetter made a
mistake in his composing machine, and I didn't catch that in time.
I'm going to have now an editor that will do nothing in the world
except check word for word and number for number.

Teiser: Did anyone read over them?

Adams: Yes, but not the way it should have been. Not a technical person.

I had another instance just the other day. A man wrote, "In
your warm-tone Glycin formula [page 14, The Print] , you say 'potassium
bromide, four grams', and right under it you say 'potassium bromide,
40 cc at 10 percent solution'." I never caught that. It should have
said "or" because that's the same thing. He said, "Why did you want
to put that in? Why didn't you just use more bromide?" Of course,
anybody who knew about it would realize they were the same, but
the word "or" is left out.

131

Adams: You say that's easy, but there's hardly a scientific book that comes
out that doesn't have a page of errata in it, and some have ten or
twelve pages. I've seen one very complicated thing on the photo-
physical chemistry of photography that had four or five pages of
errata — slight changes of formula, etc. And of course unless you're
a mathematician, you wouldn't realize it, but when a mathematician
tries to work something out and he finds something wrong, he is
disturbed!

Teiser: When you work on such technical things, do you take whole days, or
do you take a whole period when you don't work on photographs?

Adams: Well, realistically I should just cold-bloodedly set aside a month
for this and a month for that , but sometimes I go at it for several
days, and then suddenly the curtain rings down. I've completely
lost the facility to think. I'm loaded with work continuously. So I
go on to do something else. And when I did the book on the University
[Fiat Lux] , I couldn't stay more than three or four days in one place
because after that I just stopped "seeing." I could say, "Oh, I have
to do a picture of that building," and it meant nothing. So I'd
"pogo-stick" to another campus and then have several days of
excitement, and then all of a sudden you don't see any more and you
must move on.

The Zone System

Teiser: Your writings on the Zone System —

Adams: There are so many versions of the Zone System. They all come out
right, but the best one, the clearest one, is in the Polaroid Land
[Photography] Manual. People buy the Manual just for that, and I
never realized that. It is a kind of distillation and applies the
principles step by step, in much clearer style than the other
expositions.

Teiser: You said that Minor White's article or pamphlet on the Zone System
was an extension of your work?

Adams: He has a booklet. He's doing a new one, which I haven't seen yet,
which goes into the mystical interpretation of photography. It
worries me a little because I think he's inclined to go off the beam
and be inexplicable (is that the word to use?). It's a form of
"camera as therapy," and I don't know; between you and me, it's not
entirely healthy, it's too mystical. It's a constant justification
and explanation, where photography should be a rather simple thing.

132

Adams: But he has some very good exercises, and details for working out the
Zone System, for students. I find it very complex, and he makes a
few errors, which I think are deplorable. It isn't whether he agrees
with me. I didn't invent the Zone Syst<fa. I simply codified
sensitometry. If you want to juggle with it and say, "Well, you
know, you can't print Zone I, so we'll start with Zone II," that
isn't scientific. That isn't sensitometry, you see. [Laughter] I
can't say, "Look, you're hurting my system. You can't do that." I
just say, "It's not right. It doesn't stand the test; you have to
begin one end of the exposure scale at Zone I."

There's a man in Sacramento who thinks he can get by with five
zones. Well, if he wants to do it, okay. But it's still not right
in sensitometry. The values that we can refer to with confidence
are in geometric ratios. And if you know anything about lenses,
you know how the stops of lenses progress from, say, f/8, f/11, f/16,
and so on. The point is that the f/8 means the focal ratio of the
diameter of the stop to the focal length of the lens at infinity.
So f/8 means the diameter of that stop is one-eighth of its focal
length at infinity. So therefore f/8 is a factor number that relates
to any focal length lens, one inch to twenty inches. F/8 will always
be a stop in that ratio, and will always transmit the same amount of
light, no matter what the size of the lens is.

Then you go on f/11, f/16, so you think f/16 would be one-half
of f/8, that it would let in one-half the light. But you're working
with the area of a circle, and that means f/16 is letting in one-
fourth the amount of light f/8 does, because a circle one-half inch
across has only one-fourth the area of a circle one inch across. To
set one-half the exposure you multiply eight by the square root of
two, 1.414 (here's geometry again) and then you get f/11. 3. You
actually progress at 11.3, 16, 22.6, 32, 45.2 — those would be the
exact numbers, but we approximate them by just saying 8, 11, 16, and
22, etc.

Well, some people don't know what a square root is. They know
what a square is but not a root. It's just basic geometry. Now,
there used to be the old U.S. system, which meant "universal system,"
and they started at f/16 being the same as U.S. 16. And then, f/8
passed two times, f/4 passed four times, f/2 passed eight times the
amount of light, with ascending numbers like 16, 32, 64, 128, 256.
Every one was doubled, and it meant 2X, 4X, 8X, 16X, and 32X instead
of 4X, 16X, 64X, 256X, etc.

The Europeans, instead of having f/8 as the base, used f/9 — but
the same thing. You get f/12.7, f/18, f/25— the ratio is always the
same. And ASA speed numbers are 64, 125, 256, and between each of
those are two other numbers — like 32, 40, 50, 64; 100, 125, 256.
And if you once get that geometric idea in your mind, fine! But

133

Adams: meters come out with exposure values with arithmetic numbers, but

which have geometric significance — all very confusing. On the Weston
5 meter, number twelve was equal to 100 candles per square foot,
number thirteen equal to 200, number fourteen equal to 400. So in
reading these numbers, you really have to think geometrically. But
many people don't think, they just take for granted a number on the
dial. They put it on the "arrow" and they read the exposure. You're
just pressing buttons without any knowledge of what's happening, and
I think that's very serious. And the exposure formula is so
absolutely simple once you know it. You don't need any dials; you
take the readings of your subject.

A typical example would be if I want to make a picture in
Yosemite, and it's a contrasty day, but I want to get a tone value
III in the tree shadows, and those tree shadows read 6.5 c/ft^. I
put 6.5 c/ft on Zone HI, go to 13 on IV and 25 on V, which is the
"geometric mean." So the exposure is 1/25 of a second at the lens
stop number, which is the equivalent of the square root of the ASA
speed number. And people collapse. And then you try to explain
again and say, "Well, that's nothing. Now you know you have 25
opposite V, so that's 1/25 of a second; that's simple. And if you're
using ASA 64, the square root is eight, so it would be 1/25 at f/8"
(that's your base exposure; you don't need a dial). Or if you're
using 125 ASA, that would be f/11, or ASA 250 would be f/16. You
just memorize a little table of squares. Kodachrome at 25 would be
f/5. The whole idea of photographic exposure is really a geometric
system. That doesn't mean that you don't work between stops to
balance and control. The Polaroid electric eye camera is extremely
sensitive, and you don't think of any f stops or shutter speed there;
you know it's calibrated to render a single surface luminance with
a value VI. And there's reason for that. It automatically registers
the values in this infinite series of adjustments, but you can make
it lighter or darker, according to the contrast of the scene, by
using the lighten-darken (L.D.) control. But the theory is exactly
the same .

Meters and Automation

Adams: In the earlier days, we did everything "by grace and by God" and by

tables. I had a little meter — a tint meter — that would use sensitive
paper and there would be two reference colors, light and dark green,
or light and medium green. And you'd hold it in the light and count
seconds until the sensitive paper was the same color as one of the
reference colors. But of course it's very hard to do, to be exact,
because your eye doesn't like to make that kind of decision, you see,

134

Adams: especially if there's an edge. But you count, say, fifteen seconds
and then you relate that to some mark, and you set the exposure. It
was fairly accurate if your eyes weren't too tired.

Then I had extinction meters, where you look in and see a wedge,
and you look at the scene through it, and you read the highest number
you can see — it might be six, it might be fifteen. The tragedy was,
if you came out of a very bright light you'd see a very low number,
and then the longer you looked at it, the higher and higher and
higher the number you'd see. [Laughter] So you had to sort of balance
that out. If I was sitting here now, I could look in this room and
I'd trust what I read. But if I were looking out at the ocean for a
while and then tried to read in the room, it would take me about two
minutes before I was confident that I was seeing the correct number.

Then the Weston meter came out, which used the selenium cell,
which is a self-generating cell — selenium on one side. As light
strikes this material, it creates energy and works an ammeter. The
Weston cell was a great invention, and it's used in many, many ways,
and it's probably one of the most accurate and dependable of all the
meter devices. The only thing that can go off is the little
electrical ammeter, which is working on a very low current. The
current is just generated in the cell entirely by light. There's no
batteries in the meter at all.

Then the next step was the cadmium sulphide cell, which is
extremely sensitive and is operated with a very small battery. But
it is inclined to be very erratic. It has to be primed. You have to
show it the light for a little while. That's the average cell,
although the one Dr. Land uses is apparently "capsulated" and gives
immediate response.

And now most of the meters out on the market — Weston Nine and
the Gossen meter and the Pentax and all those in the cameras — are
based on little sulphide cells.

Then there's the standard visual photometer, like the S.E.I.
meter (made in England). That's probably the best thing of its kind
made within the price; you can get photometers up to four figures.
But this one has a battery and a light, and you adjust this light to
a fixed brightness, which properly illuminates the comparison cube.
Now you match the light from the scene through a little telescope by
operating the main rheostat until it matches the fixed brightness
spot. That gives you the photometric measurement. But that is using
a fixed value to match — not like the extinction meter, which depended
entirely on whether the eye could see a number or not in a dark field.

The S.E.I, meter has a diameter of field of view of one degree.
They've increased it a little bit lately — it's one and a half now, I
think. So that means I can take the shadow on that tree trunk, and

135

Adams: I can take the white rock, and the highlight on that lamp, and the

white picture frame with the picture on the white mat from here, you
see. You just put the dot on it, and turn this thing until the values
match. That's really a great invention, because it gives you command
of what you're doing. All on the assumption that your shutter and
your diaphragm are correct and that your film and developer are
properly functioning.

[End Tape 6, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 6, Side 2]
Teiser: Have you had any experience with the light cell in the camera?

Adams: That's a new development which is primarily a gadget to sell cameras
to indulgent and wealthy amateurs. It's extremely clever and many
are extremely well made. If it is a meter which averages the light
coming in over the entire field — it's like holding a Weston meter up
to the field of view. If it's a spot meter, then you have the
inevitable selection of what you point it at, because the spot
doesn't know; it will respond to the tree shadow, and to the water,
and will control the exposure accordingly. I've made tests with the
new Leicaflex, and it was extremely accurate — a beautiful piece of
equipment — but I still had to make up my mind, putting the spot on a
snowbank or on a tree, and the exposure will always be on the
geometric mean.

Now they have new meters which are a combination of the two,
which probably is a little better. But the camera can't make the
aesthetic selection if it is purely automatic. It can approximate
it. But as 90 percent of the pictures taken are of people, most
cameras and systems are calibrated to flesh tones. So if you point
this box, this finder with the spot meter, at the skin of a person,
you will get a reading which will put that on the proper point on the
exposure scale. God help you for anything else, because everything
you point it at will come out at the same point on the scale.

I went through this whole complex scene in Yosemite with my
photometer, and the Leica meter was very accurate. But still, that
was just the meter. Now what do I do_ with it? Do I want to place
that tree shadow on Zone V? I might want it at Zone II. Where do
I put it? So the only way you can control that situation is to set
your ASA and set the related lens stop. You then control the shutter
speed dial until the needles match, and then you have the candles per
square foot.

Teiser: So it's more trouble to override the automatic system than not?

136

Adams: Oh, it's terrible. It's much better to have a separate meter, read
it and set the camera accordingly. But then some automatic cameras
don't like to be "overridden." I've se^n people with cameras that
cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars completely frustrated; they
had no idea what was happening, and they were getting terrible
results. The camera was doing the best it could — beautiful optics —
but the user had no knowledge of what to do.

Teiser: I suppose there will be a whole lot of people who adapt themselves
to the automatic camera.

Adams: Oh, there are now, yes, to a certain extent. But see, where the

Polaroid is so far ahead of them is that with the Polaroid electric
eye receptor you have the ability to make it lighter or darker. Now
that's not too easy in the standard camera. You have to change stops
or shutter speeds. Well, what are you changing, you see? In the
Polaroid you can change two stops to light and one to dark. They're
going to try to get it two stops each way. And that's a very
intricate little system, but they can put it on their very cheap
cameras. And when you press the shutter it releases a certain amount
of current that controls the electronic mechanism.

Now we are getting those cameras that have electric drives. The
Hasselblad electric is just simply winding the film and setting the
shutter. It doesn't control the exposure, thank God. But you can
put it on sequence, take a picture every second, or you can just
press the button and have one image. They sent me one, but really,
I still have enough strength to wind the film! [Laughter] But it
really is wonderful when you have these 70-millimeter magazines with
many, many exposures to make in sequence. You're doing, say, a
series of portraits, and you're talking, and you just press this
button, and press and press; it's "sh-sh-sh," like that. But that's
not exposure reading; it's something else.

Now some equipment has electronic shutter control, and they're
having a little trouble. They're awfully complex, you know. Polaroid
is the only one that, so far, has been able to make these things in
quantity. Everybody else has had trouble. I guess Kodak is all
right with the Instamatic. And they use the same general principle.
Unfortunately, that principle of electronic exposure was not patent-
able — not controllable by Polaroid. The thing was patented many,
many years ago, and it's now in the public domain. It wasn't used in
shutters. It was used in scientific instruments. It was used first
in engraving, so no matter what happened to the fluctuating arc lights,
the exposure would always be the same. And this was called an
accumulator. There would be a little meter on a copy board in the
engraving camera. They'd set the exposure, say, for three minutes,
and then the meter would take care of it and balance all lighting
variations. All these things are so interesting technically, and
they all had their roots in various applications, long before they
were thought of in actual field camera work.

137

Technique in Relation to Aesthetics

Teiser: When you were a youngster, were you interested in optical instruments?
Adams: Oh, yes, I loved instruments — always been an instrument lover.
Teiser: Were you interested in your father's astronomical instruments?

Adams: Yes, oh yes. Of course, we only had a small telescope,
go up to Lick Observatory, see the big telescope.

We used to

The thing to get over is this: that I think my contribution,
if there is one (the creative work is something which only critics
of photographic history can say whether I did any pictures of
importance or not — I'm conceited enough to think I did a few) — the
main thing is that, as far as I know, I'm the first one that
codified technique in relation to aesthetics. You see, now there 've
been many, many people who've codified technique in relation to just
facts — exposure and instrumental control and all that, and far
beyond anything I've done in physical accuracy. You know, when
you're making photographs in terms of nanoseconds and tracing spark
gaps, and doing things from the U-2 plane with slit-shutter cameras
at sixty or seventy thousand feet or higher (and you can see gravel
on the railroad beds) — these are optical achievements that are
infinitely beyond me.

But as far as I know, and as far as other people know, I'm the
first one to have said you can control exposure and development in
relation to aesthetics, not just in relation to the photometric
equivalent. And the photometric equivalent means the light measure
ment which has the proportionate values of the subject, getting a
negative, and then, with light passing through the negative, getting
the value equivalent of the negative on the print. It's called the
photometric equivalent, and it has nothing to do with expression. It
relates to an approximate simulation of reality. And, in aesthetics,
we attempt departures from reality, whether we do them by trick and
by guess in the darkroom or whether we do them all ahead of time by
visualization .

I remember one of Minor White's great achievements. By the way,
he's one of the great photographers, and I have the utmost affection
and respect for him, so when I criticize what he did with the Zone
System, that just means the difference of technical application.
But he did a series of photographs of performances of Ibsen's Ghosts
in San Francisco, and in doing this, he wanted to give the nonliteral
feeling of the unworldliness of the characters. It was done very
simply by just using the Zone System, placing the skin values very
high. So all these people in the images are white — very pale, very

138

Adams: unreal. And then, you see, it's not just value. If you go up the
top of the curve, it flattens off, and your contrasts become less,
so the face would become smoother, much higher in value, much less
defined. But you can visualize all tha*t. So that is, I think, the
contribution which is now being pretty well accepted.

Science and the Creative Photographer

Adams: I had the funny comment of a photo technician from, I think it was,
Eastman. He says, "You know I'm up there in that pretty hard-boiled
lab, and we're working with some of the most complex photochemistry
and physics that's going today but," he says, "when I want to know
something about photography, I read your books." [Laughter] I said,
"Well, thank you. I understand the difference." You should see
sometime one of the technical manuals! You know, it's just up in the
domain of higher mathematics and advanced physical chemistry. But
everything has its place, and that's what enables them to make the
materials that we people can throw around in a so-called creative
sense.

Even at this late date, they are not absolutely sure what
happens in the formation of the latent image. You've got a silver
crystal, which is a nice-looking triangular crystal — different sizes —
I forget the name of it — it's got bevels and edges, but it's primarily
a triangle. And that is silver halide, composed of silver bromide,
chloride or iodide in different proportions. And then, light strikes
that crystal and changes it to the "latent image." It's a matter of
the quantum theory, if you want to really describe it, which I can't.
It relates to the production of "electron holes" in this crystal, and
when this condition is established by the action of light, the
crystal is then developable, and these holes then attract developing
agents, and the silver crystal is reduced to metallic silver. That's
a very crude description. A scientist would probably be aghast — but
I mean, that's about what happens.

So then when you develop your image, your image is metallic
silver, but there's all kinds of silver halide still left in the
emulsion. Then you put the negative or print into the hypo bath (the
sodium thiosulphate solution) which removes unexposed and undeveloped
silver halides remaining. So you have left the pure silver image,
which in the electron microscope appears as filaments — looks like
seaweed. The negative in principle is about the same as the print.
But with the Polaroid print, instead of having a comparatively coarse
grained image like a conventional print, it's ionic silver that's
deposited. It's attracted across the developer to the receiving
sheet, and the positive image appears. These of course are too small

139

Adams: to be seen, even in the electron microscope. But the ionic silver

depositions (and there is a kind of a structure), when that gets too
compact you have something like silver plating, and the surface of
the print will show what they call "gilding," a metallic sheen.

So if you take a four by five print — conventional print — and
you could consider the surface area of all those crystals, it would
probably be as big as this room. If you took a Polaroid print and
could lay out the surface of all the particles, it would probably
total an acre. And that is why it's extremely susceptible to any
chemical contamination, because of this large surface, which picks
up sulphur and other chemicals. Silver loves sulphur! Sulphur does
not "degenerate" silver, it's just silver going to its most stable
compound form. That's why an ordinary photomural is usually toned
to an "egg yolk brown," sepia tone. It is really silver sulphide,
and that's permanent. The problem is to keep plain silver from turn
ing to silver sulphide. When a picture fades, like mine (and many
others') did in the earlier days, it was because the print was in a
condition to combine with sulphur.

Teiser: Why in the world did people make sepia prints?

Adams: I think largely for that reason — they were relatively permanent.

Besides they weren't just that ugly old black-and-white; they had a
romantic [laughter] — a romantic color to them. There are all stages
of tone. You can get a blue-black and a neutral black and a brown-
green black and a selenium purple-brown black. My prints are toned
to get away primarily from this peculiar green-brownish tone (there's
more green in it than anything else) of the commercial paper. That
seems to be the natural tone of the silver image.

Teiser: I think of these big brown Southern Pacific photographs.

Adams: They had to be that color because there was no way they could process,
at that time, without toning, with any permanence. Sepia toning was
done by bleaching and redevelopment. There are "matrices" in the
gelatin. The gelatin is a very strange, stable substance and keeps
its form even in submicroscopic pattern. And there are sulphur and
silver nuclei left therein. They're invisible, so the print after
bleaching has practically no image at all. And then you redevelop,
and the image that was silver before has now become silver sulphide.
And silver sulphide is inert. I suppose some things would affect it —
stains, and all that — but it's basically permanent. Very seldom you
see a brown sepia print that's really turning or fading.

Teiser: I was wondering, when you were speaking yesterday about the develop
ment of the Land process: I remember, oh I suppose in the thirties,
at Fisherman's Wharf, there used to be a man with a camera, and you
would wait for a couple of minutes, and he would give you kind of a
funny little picture on metal —

140

Adams: Tintype.
Teiser: — instantly.

Adams: Well, the machine was pretty clever. I don't really know the
process. It's not very permanent.

Teiser: No. The one I have has faded.

Adams: It could be — but, well, you have several methods — reversal processes,
for instance. I just can't tell you what they used.

Teiser: I think it had been used for many years before that —

Adams: Oh, many years. It's an old, old process. But it isn't a very

attractive process. It's very dull, whereas the daguerreotype is
very beautiful. I think the name for a daguerreotype, "mirror with
a memory," is one of the great verbal descriptions.

But you see, one of the problems we have in portraiture is
satisfying the subject, and the daguerreotype was extremely success
ful in portraiture because it gave a mirror image. When you looked
at the daguerreotype, you saw yourself as you look to yourself in
the mirror. And sometimes we look very different to others than we
do in the mirror. I can't see myself at all except in the mirror.
Now, when I see a picture of myself, I sometimes say, "Well, that's
not what I see every morning when I'm putting Vitalis on what's left
of my hair." [Laughs]

I must say, there have been a multitude of processes developed
in the history of photography. And now it's boiled down to the
processes as you see them, plus the fact that we're getting into
some forms of dye or electrostatic photography like Xerox. And
every laboratory is just working twenty-nine hours a day trying to
get a nonsilver process, but for some strange reason, way back in the
1830s, silver halides were found to be the only practical light-
sensitive material. And when you speak of platinum or palladium
processes, those salts are not sensitive in themselves, but they
ride on a ferric process. This process is very slow, but it can
produce beautiful image qualities.

The Polaroid is a total miracle and is not just one thing; it
is a system of very many, very complex processes which are
constantly advancing, changing and adapting.

I wish you could see the patent for the new camera in process.
You can buy one. I don't recall how many pages it is, but there's
about sixteen pages listing the organic compounds that can be used.
An interesting thing is that there were two hundred copies ordered

141

Adams: by Eastman Kodak Company! [Laughter] Perhaps they're trying to
find some loophole in these patents, you see, where they can get
through. Polaroid has a large staff of patent experts.

Polaroid started out with a silver sulphide image, a brown
image, and then advanced that to black and white. And they
achieved two hundred speed. I don't really know the details, and
I'm not authorized to say if I did know, but I know that the process
is constantly being refined year by year. Then they achieved four
thousand speed! Land was out in San Francisco before we moved down
here, and he had an experimental twenty- thousand-speed film! We
were taking pictures by starlight, out the window, at a fifth of a
second. They weren't very good quality prints, but they were
informative images. Now they have a film that's on the market that
is used with the oscilloscope — ten thousand ASA speed, and that
enables the recording of very faint, really very faint, images.

For some reason, the quantum theory limits the "speed" of
emulsions (ASA rating) to about forty thousand. Without electronic
image amplification you couldn't go possibly beyond forty thousand.

But a whole new world opens up with the vidicom tube; modern
X-ray technique is a fine example of that application. Now they're
using it in astronomy and seeing things that are totally beyond
visual and ordinary photographic recording. So maybe one of the
next developments will be a light amplification system, where your
image will be produced in numbers, like in the Mars pictures. They
don't come back in pictures, they come back in a continuous series
of numbers. And there's an image put together, and it's about one
or two centimeters square, I think.

The Mars system is so marvelous! The image is made photo
graphically; then a scanner moves across. It has 128 levels of
intensity, which are translated as numbers. They're given a code
number on the tape. Now, when the scanner reverses direction it's
sending in the response of a lot of other instruments on board. The
next cross-scan is of the image. So what they get here is equivalent
to an endless tape with numbers. Every so often, those are put
together, and they become a stack of strips. Then they're translated
into density values, and you have your picture.

From the moon we had actual pictures, but from Mars we have
nothing but numbers which make pictures so sharp and remarkable that
it is almost unbelievable.

142

Sensitometry as a Creative Tool

Adams: Well, anyway, this whole idea is of scientific interest — I think I
should clarify that statement. In no way could I be labeled a
scientist or, in the classic sense, a technician. I don't know
enough and don't have the capacity to use the technical facts of
this world in any other way but applying them to creative work. So
the emphasis should be, I think, in the fact that in codifying the
Zone System, I made sensitometry available as a tool for creative
people who wish to express themselves or depart from reality; but it
is at a very simple level. In other words, there are several words
that are different: "approximate" and "precise" and "exact." Most
people approximate; I think I approach the precise, but I can't
presume to be exact — there's too many decimal points involved!
[Laughter] And if I use the square root of 2 — it is 1.41422, and
that's far beyond the precision I need. Well, 1.4 would be enough
for all practical purposes, like developing. Take 8 and multiply it
by 1.4 — it's closer to 11.3 in reality, because when you multiply by
1.414 you get 11.312. So how precise do you have to be?

So I mean I mustn't be represented as a scientist or a real
technician. I'd like to be known as an artist and teacher but, you
know, never go beyond the logical bounds. But I don't know whether
I've violated the original theme that you presented.

Teiser: It's all pertinent.

Adams: Most of the creative photographers in the world never knew anything
about the Zone System or ever used anything like it. They're
entirely empirical in approach. And you learned by trial and error
that under certain conditions you exposed a certain way. Sometimes
you modified development, if you knew what you'd done and could
rectify some of the errors in the darkroom — which can be done to an
amazing degree. So we can't say Edward Weston or Stieglitz or Strand
were questionable photographers because they didn't understand sensi
tometry! But from the point of view of efficiency, getting a
negative that I want, I can run rings around them, and I do not
"bracket" my exposures.

This awful word, "bracket;" in color pictures you bracket one
or two stops, just to be sure. Well, my ego won't let me do that.
I know what the values are; I know where they fit on the scale. If
I have to take pictures of an important subject — a photograph that I
know is valuable — I'll take several duplicate pictures, but they'll
all be the same exposure.

In the time of Group f/64, I would say practically everyone was
working very empirically. I don't think anybody was really control
ling anything. Weston went to Mexico, and he learned the lighting

143

Adams: situations, and he probably had many failures in the beginning. He
probably had failures in the field, or at least he had darkroom
struggles. I did; everybody did.

It was around '36, '38 that [Beaumont] Newhall sent me a
clipping about the S.E.I, meter. I was laid up with the flu. He
sent me an article, a clipping on it, and I immediately ordered one
by telephone, and I thought, "This is it!" At that time we were
working on the Zone System, and the S.E.I, meter was the thing that
really pinpointed it.

I'd like to say that any intelligent person, in an hour's time
of serious discussion, can learn the whole basis of the Zone System.
It's that simple. We had kids — students in the California School of
Fine Arts in San Francisco — in six weeks time they could photograph
anything I could think up. I don't say they'd make a great picture,
but they could photograph — could expose correctly. They went into
reciprocity failure tests. That's another domain. It's pretty
complicated. And they tried many different developers for special
effects. And at the end of six weeks they had a very fine mechanical
mastery. Now what they did beyond that, that's something else.

Teiser: When you were developing the Zone System — in the mid-thirties, was
it--?

Adams: Well, no, it was when I started teaching in the Art Center School,
Los Angeles.

Teiser: Early forties?

Adams: Well, late thirties and forties. I don't know the dates.

Fred Archer and I worked out the Zone System, and we got the
Weston meter representative very excited, and he said, "I'll
mimeograph you a lot of your charts. I think they're very important."
We had several charts — exposure charts, which are standard; they
haven't changed any. And then we had density charts — curve reading
charts — where you have coordinates on which to plot values and relate
them to zones.

One time I remember the students, everybody working along hard
and everything coming out wrong. We had forgotten to include Zone V
on the chart, which meant a factor of 2 was omitted! Well, [laughter]
those things can happen.

I found out that serious people want to know how to control, and
many people tie themselves in a knot wanting to know how to begin.
The ones that always give me a real pain in the neck are the ones
who say, "I can judge the light." I said, "Well, anywhere?" "Oh yes,
anywhere. I never need the meter. I don't need a meter."

144

Adams: Well, it's physiologically and psychologically impossible. It's

just like saying I can judge your weight by looking at you. I can
make an empirical guess by looking at a lot of other people like you.
But it's a pompous thing to say. If I didn't have a meter, I would
have to bracket exposures. I would have to make a guess and then go
above and below it just to be sure. I don't really know light values.
I know in Yosemite, from ten in the morning until four in the
afternoon, the shadows in the trees on a clear day are so much, and
I know where granite is on the scale, and so on. But in New England
I fell flat on my face — missed all the light there. At Santa Fe I
again fell flat on my face — misjudged the light. Had to make tests
and find out what it was in general. Hawaii was the same, although
by that time I knew how to use meters. When I went to Hawaii I
wouldn't trust them. I mean, I'd say, "Well, this can't be." And
then I'd give in and say, "Oh, I must trust the meter. It was a
good meter, and I was just applying experience as well, which was
all right.

Teiser: The quality of light is so curious, isn't it? We were just discussing
it as we drove along.

Adams: Well, the quality of light — in the early days when 0' Sullivan and

others worked in the Southwest (in fact, anybody at that time) — the
films accepted only blue light. You don't get the optimum amount of
blue until about nine-thirty or ten o'clock in the morning, and it
begins to go at four o'clock and the light becomes redder and redder.
With blue-sensitive plates this posed a real problem.

But, I don't think that these early people could work except
between ten o'clock and two or three o'clock with any assurance.
Then when the orthochromatic film came in, which accepted green,
you had more leeway working with longer wavelengths. With ortho-
chromatic film, you could still get into trouble with late or early
light.

The light now (6:15 p.m. Pacific daylight savings time) —
it's deficient in blue. It's all right; I can still get by with
panchromatic (red-sensitive film) without much difficulty. But you
wait until seven o'clock. In the old days, even with orthochromatic
film you'd have to multiply the exposure four or five times. But you
never really knew how red it was. We now have color temperature (°K)
meters to inform us of this quality of light. The eye-mind complex,
being an absolute miracle of construction, adapts to differences of
color temperature. You're not aware of the light now being very
much of red quality.

You take a white piece of paper and put it under a tungsten
light — it appears white; you take it outside in the sun or shade and
it also appears white. The difference would be apparent when you
could have both together. The best example I ever had of that was

145

Adams: Mills College Art Gallery. I went over there with Albert Bender to
see some big show, and this whole gallery was illuminated with
tungsten light. We were in there, and everything was perfectly
normal — white labels, white shirts. But I looked out the door,
looking out into the woods, and they were absolutely turquoise. We
call it cyan now. I mean, here was a bluish-green gorgeous thing,
and I thought, "What's happening?" And I went out, and as soon as
I'm out, it's perfectly normal — they're green. And I looked back
into the room, and it's gold. The eye has adaptability which the
film does not. In this case there was opportunity for direct
comparison.

Now, I'd be conscious of a direct physical reflection of blue
light from the sky, or red light, or orange in your dress, or
similar things. I can see a little orange light on your face from
your dress. But a color film would just accentuate that — the shadow
might be distractingly orange.

So all this matter of visualization relates to seeing the image
you want, but you have to also take into consideration all the
idiosyncracies of the light itself, and the meter and film sensitivity.
That's why photometers are important. You take any Weston cell or a
CdS [cadmium sulphide] cell, and over an hour or so from now its
response to changing daylight differs. Whereas a comparison photometer
is something else, because if the spot looks bluish, you just put in
a light filter that can control its response (as well as that of the
film). In fact, my S.E.I, photometer is a practical color temperature
meter if I have somebody to hold a compensating filter in front of it
while I am using it. (Takes two hands to operate it!)

Suppose I wanted to copy a painting in a gallery, and I know
the light is tricky, and I know what's going to happen, and I have
to do it in color photography. If I have a fifty-dollar color meter,
which will give me readings in mirads, etc., I can figure out what
filters to use, etc. But I can take this S.E.I, meter and look at
the gray card, and if the spot looks yellow I may use a variety of
number eighty series filters — or other filters — held in front of the
meter. And I may find a filter which makes the spot neutral and
that's the filter that may correct the film for color. Because I
match the color with the fixed brightness which is already filtered,
for both tungsten or daylight, by selecting one of two built-in
filters in the meter. If I'm using tungsten balanced film, I set in
the tungsten filter.

So there's a strange dichotomy — the principles are rather
complex, but the devices we have to control them are fairly simple,
and the photographers who use them are, 90 percent of the time,
extremely dumb, because they don't take advantage of the devices
we've got. [Laughter] And then when they make a mistake of exposure

146

Adams: or development, they immediately justify it by making some further

mistake in the printing, or maybe trying to pull something out of the
hat by processing experimentally. And sometimes, of course, miracles
happen. You know, you could really get a bad negative and neverthe
less get a print that might have exciting qualities.

But I'm just not built to accept what is called the accidental.

Contemporary Images

Teiser: I was looking at photographs in the latest U.S. Camera magazine this
morning by "coming" young photographers. And one of them was a
picture of a whole bunch of people standing lined up in a field and
all their heads were blurred — their bodies weren't, their heads were.
I didn't take time to read what was so good about it.

Adams: Well, the tragedy there is sociological. I mean, our whole society

or government, or whatever we have, hasn't given anybody any challenge
to think. Everything is mechanistic, technical. Thinking is all done
in Route 128 outside Cambridge, or up here in Sunnyvale, at those big
research centers. Everything is carefully thought out, but the
social situation is very unclear. And most people have nothing to
say. So they're inventing symbols. And they'll make a photograph,
and then say, "Well, this means something to me." Now, perhaps we
can say of this lineup (I haven't seen the picture), "This would be
an unusual approach to the certainty of the body and the uncertainty
of the mind." You'd be surprised what is read into these things,
into picture after picture! Or a picture done in Rochester of George
Eastman's house porch. It's just a square picture of a dark column —
frantically bad.

Jerry Uelsmann has really made a great advance because he's
combined negatives and created true fantasies. Personally, I find
they wear thin after awhile, because the whole thing is a bit limited.
And then you begin to think of what Dorothea Lange did in interpreting
a human situation. And of course what all the great painters of the
Renaissance did in the religious area — you have to remember that
there were no other themes in Western art at that time but the
Christian religion, and the portraits of a few potentates and princes.
The art that was done outside that field is miniscule. If you're an
art historian, you may correct me — there may be some done, but as you
move on later, then you get into the genre of the Dutch and landscapes
and the Barbizon school. But art always fails if there isn't a theme.

That's the trouble now with abstract expressionism. It did its
job, and it was wonderful when it did it. It was part of a protest,
and I think art now is at the very lowest level it's been. And that's

147

Adams: why they're painting paintings as big as this room. They're trying
to regain some grandeur by just going to big paintings. But how
many great painters can you think of today? Well, I can think of
[Georgia] O'Keeffe, who's still a great living painter. John Marin,
[Edward] Hopper — they are dead. (I'm trying to think of modern
painters.) [Andrew] Wyeth I think is a glorified Norman Rockwell;
I simply can't — I think he's one of the greatest fakes going. Some
of his paintings are absolute copies of snapshots I The reason I feel
it is this: In his large book there is a graveyard scene in the back
of a church; a good photographer with any sensibility would see the
formal relationships of these gravestones with the church. I mean,
he'd make some effort to compose. This picture shows no effort to
compose. This is just a "click," and there it is, and he painted it.
And that bothers me.

But think of [Charles E.] Burchfield's picture, the "Hot
September Wind" — or even some of Wyet-h's, like that "Wind in the
Curtain;" there is magic in them.

But who's really doing anything among photographers? Well,
Bruce Davidson did a book on New York [East 100th Street] which is
very important. But so many of them withdraw from any human project
and just sit back and ruminate — smoke pot, and get an idea that the
chair is important, "I'll take a picture of it. Now, you undress,
you be a nude and you sit in the chair, and I'll do a double
exposure, and maybe I'll put something else in the picture. Now I've
done something!" [Laughter] And this means just something, little
thought of human communication. But you'll see many of these double
and triple exposures most of which are terrible. Some of them can
be beautiful, but most of them are so trite!

There's a whole mode now of a living room scene with the
members of the family sitting around nude. They're mostly extremely
unattractive people, and the photograph has absolutely no distinction.
[Laughter] It's completely commonplace. It used to be a little
daring. Now you say, "Oh, I've seen that before!"

And — the human body, in 90 percent of the instances, is far more
aesthetic with clothes than without. [Laughter]

The Nude

Adams: I haven't done nudes for the simple reason that the human body can
be extremely beautiful, but I've seen very few photographic nudes
that can do what painting does. I've always had that in the back of
my mind — "Why should I photograph a nude?" Now, Stieglitz and
Weston of course did some beautiful ones. [Interruption]

[End Tape 6, Side 2]

148

[Begin Tape 7, Side 1]

Adams: Now, the question of the nude has always been very important in

photography. And some of the early nudes I think were very ghastly
because they were usually done in settings of drapes and formal
Victorian rooms. We're talking now about serious nude photography.

I can't tell you about English photography. I think Julia
Margaret Cameron did some — I just don't know. There were some
painters: [Thomas] Eakins, I think, did some nudes, but I've always
had the feeling they were studies for paintings.

Then there was Ann Brigman who did nudes creatively related to
other forms — tree forms, for example — in the early 1900s.

Then there was Stieglitz who did a magnificent series of nudes
of O'Keeffe and others. Most are platinum prints. But there again,
you have this high quality of taste. These were beautiful things.
The platinum print color and the approach always gave you the
feeling of living flesh; a very important thing in photography. The
painterly nude or drawing is always just what it is. And you always —
from your Goya to your Rubens , and on to Picasso — have a nude quality
which is something apart from the ordinary.

In photography, there's very, very few that have ever done a
nude that have had that equivalent of the painterly quality. I
think Steichen did a couple (I don't know for sure). And Weston's
nudes of Tina Modotti, who had an absolutely beautiful body — as
people say, one of the most beautiful bodies extant — were really
marvelous.

And then he attempted nudes of various subjects; they're
rather scrawny. They became very strangely stylized. As I said the
other day, they were morguesque. They look like corpses on a slab;
they have no life in them.

Then Charis Weston — had a very fine body — very smooth and tall.
Weston did some beautiful things of her — in sand dunes and in various
poses. I think some of those were quite remarkable, but all in all,
I can't remember too many. I remember one nude that's simply
marvelous. It's by Ruth Bernhard. And it's a seated figure, and
all you see is the leg and the knee. And it's an absolutely monu
mental photograph — one of the great photographs.

Teiser: I was about to ask you about her, because she's one who's doing
mostly nudes now, isn't she?

Adams: I guess so — she's doing a lot of them. She is a marvelous woman.
But I haven't kept up with her work. But this one nude picture I
just think is one of the most beautiful things in photography. And
I wish there were more like it I

149

Adams: I've never had any interest in nudes because I never liked what I
saw. I mean, I felt that there are few bodies that really lend
themselves to the photographic aesthetic — something more than
members of a nudist camp. Mortensen got young girls of seventeen,
eighteen; but he ruined their quality by, as we say, "oiling" them
up.

Contrivance, Arrangement, and Simulation

Teiser: You were mentioning Wynn Bullock. And he's used nude figures — but
not for themselves, as I remember.

Adams: Well, there's some kind of a complex situation with Wynn. Mind you,
Wynn is one of the great people, one of the finest men I know. He's
just a marvelous human being. Lots of his pictures have bothered me
because they are mannered. And I'd like to clarify that. Perhaps
the word is "contrived." Now "contrived" has got a bigger meaning,
in the sense that if I'm going to do an advertisement, I have to
contrive the situation.

Say I have a model and a dress. I'm thinking of Anton Bruehl's
studio I visited years ago in New York. He was doing a picture for,
I think it was, Lipton's Tea. And the model was a quite beautiful
woman in a taffeta dress in a very elaborate setup with a silver tea
service. And she was just sipping this tea. And of course the
lighting and everything was just beyond belief. It was entirely
contrived, and yet absolutely sincere.

Now, contrivance in another meaning is when you "monkey" with
things. Such contrivance would be when a nature photographer takes
along a bunch of azalea branches and puts it in a place for
decorative effect where they couldn't exist.

Teiser: Suppose he put it in a place where they could exist?

Adams: Well, then you say — all right. Yes, yes — it's a moral, ethical

problem, and that's very flexible. You brought up a good point. If
the final result looked completely plausible and was real — all right.
But it's a very delicate thing; very hard to put your finger on.

The arrangement is one thing, but the contrivance — I know, I'll
just say — one of Bullock's has an old building and back of a window
screen is a nude. Well, for me, nothing happens. I mean, he's
trying to tell you something in a literary sense, or he's probably
having echoes of an "art" experience (art in quotes). It's very hard
to discuss — I can't quite put my finger on it. He has a picture of
a forest in Florida, and there's a little baby lying down in the ivy.

150

Adams: Why? You see, I ask myself why. It's a beautiful photograph.

There's one that he has of a little child sitting by a stream in an
enormous forest, and that's a very extraordinary thing. In addition,
it is something that could happen. He may have contrived it or
arranged it by getting her there, but it is something that could
occur. But the little baby lying down in the ivy is a questionable
thing for me. And the woman behind the screen is also questionable.
The woman lying on the bed in the room is not. That's something
that's completely plausible.

You have no idea how many thousands of photographs are made of
nudes lying on beds — with babies, without babies. [Laughter]

Imogen [Cunningham] has one of the great images — just the unmade
bed. There's nothing on it or in it, but it's a very exciting photo
graph.

So there's a very delicate definition here between the real and —
oh, the word that I'd like to use there is the "simulated." Now, to
simulate something is, I think, perfectly all right, because you
begin with reality and you're simulating it. You're trying to get a
re-creation, a simulation of this thing. And therefore it has neither
good nor bad connected with it. Arrangement is arbitrary.
Contrivance has either good or evil connected with it — contrivance
is probably a 75c word for "posing." When I show my picture of
Clarence Kennedy, who is in profile, it looks like the most obvious
pose in the world. But I say: I did not pose him. This is the
stance he takes when he's listening to somebody. In this case, he
was listening to his wife telling him what to get when he took me
downtown, because she wanted some groceries. He was just listening,
but he always put his long finger behind his ear.

Now, superficially, it looks as if I've said, "Come on, Clarence,
let's do a little pose — you know, something funny," but it wasn't that
way. That's the way he was when I made the picture.

But the separation between the real and the contrived, you see,
is very delicate.

Once Edward and Charis [Weston] and I were on a trip. Edward
was madly photographing — we were near Death Valley. And Charis saw
an old boot. So she closes her eyes and she kicks it. Then she
goes over and looks at the boot again. Then she gives it another
kick. My god, it then looked pretty good. She said, "Edward, there's
something here." He looked at it, and he made a beautiful photograph.
Now, it was no more accidental for the boot to be there than where it
was originally, except that it had been displaced and then had been
selected as reality and called attention to as a "found object."
And I don't think Edward ever knew that Charis kicked that boot. But

151

Adams: it just landed right in some sagebrush and some rocks and looked

perfectly normal. Before, it was sort of cluttered; it was difficult
to make a composition of it.

Now, is that right or wrong? If he_ had kicked the boot, then
you'd have a half-way point. If he'd taken the boot up and put it
very carefully down, and sand around it, and carefully arranged it,
then you would have contrivance. So you see, you have an ethical
point to ponder on.

On the other hand, suppose I have a perfectly beautiful
composition of rocks and there's a beer can in it. I think I'm
privileged to remove the beer can. But some purists say, no, I
shouldn't even do that. In other words, I'm manipulating; it's no
longer a true found object.

Teiser: Those are people who were born before Kleenex.

Adams: Yes. Perhaps you have been down in the desert, like Barstow, Red
Lake, some place, you know where the garbage dump is just an open
dump, and the desert wind had taken everything on the ground and
blown it over miles of desert and every bush had Kleenex and papers .
and things hanging on it! This in itself is an extraordinary
phenomenon, and if somebody from another planet had landed there, he
would have found it of the most extraordinary significance. What is
this substance that's on the bushes? I regret that I didn't record
that as part of the desert phenomena.

I do have a [photograph of a] garbage dump at Manzanar, though,
that I never thought of using, but I could now.

Meaning, Shape, and Form

Adams: My picture of the statue at the Long Beach cemetery, with the oil
derricks in the distance, was done as a quasi-surrealistic thing.
I just saw the improbability of this weeping angel and the oil
derricks. It had no definite meaning; this is just a juxtaposition
of opposites. Now, with the present pollution situation, it takes
on another meaning! I People read into that all kinds of things. I'm
even thinking of putting it in my Portfolio Seven just for that
example. It was done for one reason but is "read" today for another.
I'm proud of the photograph. But the meaning of it to me when I did
it was just the sudden shock of the juxtaposition of the statue
against the oil derricks, without any thought at all of pollution or
anything else. And now when you see it, you may entertain a totally
different meaning. Now if you saw the Angel of Death in front of oil

152

Adams: wells, you'd immediately think of environmental disasters, and so on.
And I'd like to make that point clear; it shows how expressions and
meanings can be manipulated over time.

I'm a heathen, and I look at many of the old master paintings
and I get dismally tired of the Annunciations and the Resurrections
and such things. But then you look at them abstractly — what do they
do? Of course, they're all doing about the same thing, but a few of
them always stood apart. A few of them were, I think, very inconse
quential, but have become famous because of their period and
associations. But to me, with my admittedly meager experience, the
most magnificent religious expression of the theme is at the little
santuario of Chimayo, New Mexico. The primitive Penitente paintings
there are so absolutely beautiful that I'd much rather look at them
than any Raphael or any conventional painting. Now, there are
probably all kinds of things like that all over Europe, by the
million, but these really hit me.

The Birth of Venus struck me as being absolutely tremendous,
and the El Greco paintings. I get very mad when people tell me
El Greco painted that way because he had an astigmatism. I think he
was a stylist; I think he just did this thing of certain elongations
for emotional reasons.

We're getting very far from photography, and I'm getting into a
domain that I'm really no authority in.

Teiser: Well, as it relates to your photography, which of course it does —

Adams : Getting back to the idea of the difference between shape and form,
the external world is nothing but a chaotic infinity of shapes, and
the photographer's problem is to isolate the shapes, both for
meaning and for their inherent potentials to produce form within the
format of the image. And I've had terrific semantic arguments;
people talk about natural forms, and I'd say, "Form is a product of
man's mind and concepts, and shape is a phenomenon of nature." And
the function of the artist is to develop configurations out of chaos,
and especially so the photographer. You see, a painter can have
myriad experiences and draw all these things beautifully together,
without regard for their real time or place, but the photographer's
got that camera and lens and that one film, and the maximum has to
happen when that shutter clicks.

153

Time and Reevaluation

Adams: I think maybe what happened after f/64 is interesting and deserves
a little more study. We all kept on. Imogen [Cunningham], as you
know, is something in her own. She's always been, I guess, one of
the most diverse people. The others somewhat faded from the scene.
Willard [Van Dyke] went into movies. Of course, Edward Weston kept
on, there's no question of that, and Brett is doing extremely well.
Henry Swift and John Paul Edwards faded out of the picture.

Perhaps, for maybe a decade, the f/64 wasn't too important.
It had done its job; it settled, and now it's coming back. It's
like what happens with any great artist. You take Edward Weston.
He died and there's a slump; now he's coming back ferociously on
the preciousness of his remaining work. And I can guarantee that
there will probably be quite a long period wherein he becomes a
legendary figure, and then people will begin to discover him as
dementi and Mendelssohn did Bach, and there will be a powerful
revival. I think that will probably happen with every fine
photographer and artist. After their death you'll have a kind of
surge of evaluation — get what you can and get what's left. And
then there'll be quite a long period, maybe a whole generation,
where his work may not have much meaning. And then stylistically,
it will reassert itself: just look at the history of Bach.

You remember that Beethoven had a piano that didn't permit bass
octaves. I know; I played on one of the pianos — an 1812 instrument,
an instrument that he used, or a close serial number to it. It was
owned by the people that were formerly very important in Williams-
burg, and she was a fine pianist and musicologist. And this piano
was in mint condition; you'd play on it and you'd hear it was
beautiful. But, compared to what I've got over there — a 1924 Mason
and Hamlin grand piano — there was little comparison. This was a
time when I could still play, so I remember. There wasn't space for
many of the octaves placed in later editions of his piano music.

So there was a development with the big piano and its modern
keyboard. And then Beethoven was reedited to include the octaves.

Teiser: It's almost as if a new dimension was found in photography which
could put a negative onto a different plane than it is now.

Adams: Well, don't think that you're just making conjectural remarks; the
thing is possibly quite true. Now we have holography. And this is
a very complicated thing, and I don't think I can describe it.
Holography gives three-dimensional effects. Using it, you might
achieve another interpretation entirely from any negative that I
have now.

154

Teiser: That's a fascinating possibility.

Adams: That is a reality. It is expensive and complex. The first color
images were made many, many years before we ever had a color print
or transparency, but they were seen by iridescence. And the silver
grain responded at different wavelengths and therefore would respond
to a different columnated light coming upon it, and you would get a
sense of color. So you see, miracles have always been with us.

Now, holography is something totally different. Some day that
may be very important; it creates the illusion of the three-
dimensional image. But still it's kind of crude and extremely
complicated and extremely cumbersome, using laser beams. But there
is always this possibility of making an integrated analysis of the
rotation of the silver grains. It would be a random thing, and
concern billions of grains practically in every place, but you might
get a feeling of a dimensional quality. You might even get a feeling
of color. But you wouldn't do it with one grain; you'd do it with a
million, a billion, a trillion grains, you see. That's where the
computer would come in.

Teiser: Sounds like a time machine.

Adams: Yes. In fact, I just read an article in Science today of the

reversible time. A theory has been proven in the domain of sub
atomic particles; they move forward and backward in time. This is
mathematical and extremely complex. Nothing to do with ordinary
experience.

The Photo League and Politics

Adams: I think we discussed the Photo League, didn't we?
Teiser: Not at any length.*

Adams: Well, that's important. I think we could end with that tonight.

It was primarily a film [motion picture] group before the war, and

it was quite important. It was always avant-garde, socially and
artistically.

Shortly after the war, it became very active with still
photography. It was dedicated to the contemporary scene. There
were some very fine photographers in it — Barbara Morgan, Beaumont

*See p. 49 and other references as indexed.

155

Adams: and Nancy Newhall, myself, Strand. Strand was one of the leaders.
There were some shows in the East, and I had one show at the San
Francisco Fair [Golden Gate International Exposition] in 1940.

At any event , in the late 1940s I received a call from Barbara
Morgan who said, "I think you ought to know what's happened. The
Commies have taken over the Photo League's board of directors." She
said, "I don't like it, because I joined it as a photographer, not
as a politician." You know, so many organizations had gone that way.
You'd join a photographic society and find out it's something in
support of the Communist party. In this case, then, they got a
photographer in as prime director of education who was a well-known
member of the party. And Barbara said, "I'm getting out, and I don't
want anything to do with this; I'm liberal, but I don't want to be
identified with the Communist party." And I said, "Neither do I."

So I called up my lawyer and asked, "What do we do? I have had
no direct experience, but I'm warned that there's a political take
over in action." He said, "Well, write them a letter requesting
information on the trend. Are they to continue as a photographic
institution or grow into a political institution?" And, with the
temper of the times, he advised me to send a copy to the FBI, which
I did.

I got no response at all, in fact, more adverse reports, so I
resigned. I sent a letter saying, "Not having had a satisfactory
answer to my question, I feel that I really shouldn't continue as a
member. So I respectfully submit my resignation." I sent a copy
also to the FBI. And it was the most fortunate thing I ever did,
because I was cleared later from being associated with a definitely
Red-oriented group.

Now, I'd like to make it clear: if it were a Republican-
oriented or a Democratic-oriented or Red-oriented organization, it
would have the same effect. I mean, I think the Communist party has
an equal right to exist along with the Nixon party. But I don't want
to be associated with those political aspects. And when I came in
for a final clearance, which was through the navy and Polaroid to do
some secret stuff, the FBI told me that the copies of these letters
they held are what made clearance possible. They said, "You clearly
stated your point of view."

Several very fine photographers — a couple of them got jobs with
the Department of Education and went over to Europe to photograph
and were turned back at the docks because they were members of the
Photo League. Of course, this was part of the McCarthy catastrophe,
and we had to fight that. They were the most innocent people in the
world; they didn't know what was going on politically. They just
wanted to practice and help the arts.

156

Teiser: This was a New York based organization, was it?

Adams: Yes.

Teiser: Who started it?

Adams: Walter Rosenblum, Paul Strand--! don't know whether Walker Evans
was in it or not; I doubt it. It was a considerable group of New
York photographers, which was a special breed. They're mostly in
journalism. I don't want to be quoted in the sense of accusing
people by association. But, it was quite a sizable group. Berenice
Abbott I think was in it. I got in it, and Willard Van Dyke — people
who were interested in joining organizations that would do good, like
the Group f/64.

Harroun: It didn't start out political?

Adams: Oh, no, it started out as a — well, it was more or less dedicated to
the American scene, because you don't have much else in New York.
The American situation, the social scene, I should say. And you
realize people who are living in New York and places don't know much
else. If they see a tree, it's a Central Park phenomenon. I mean,
they live in the ghetto, they live in the center of the city; their
whole life is people. Helen Leavitt was another one — did marvelous
photographs of people, but the orientation is totally different
from out here.

It was an organization that commanded considerable respect and
was the only one of its kind in the country. But of course we
cannot forget that hideous McCarthy period, when everybody was
accused of everything. George Marshall was in the Civil Liberties
Congress, which was very definitely a Commie organization, and he was
too naive to realize that. He was a man of very considerable means,
and they got him in. This group was brought up before the Senate,
and it was pretty grim, because most of the leading communists in the
country were in it, and George was the treasurer. (George was the
brother of Robert Marshall who founded the Wilderness Society — very
fine and wealthy people.) And the Senators demanded that he turn
over the books. And he said, "I cannot do this without the approval
of my board of directors as a matter of principle."

"You refuse to do that?"
"Yes."

Well, he was convicted of contempt of the Senate and was
sentenced to prison. Went to the Philadelphia Farm I think it was
for six months. He really went through hell. An extraordinarily
fine man. He was a man of great principle. The Senate had really

157

Adams: no jurisdiction. This is a matter which I do not believe has been
cleared yet in law. But they had no right to demand that he_ submit
the books. He said, "If my board orders me to do so. You order the
board, and they'll order me; otherwise I stand in contempt, gentle
men." It was really quite a moving situation, and it was absolutely
undemocratic and absolutely wrong.

And the photographers — we've had a lot of troubles! Strand
had to move to France or he would have been in jail, because he was
definitely a communist. Having money, you know, he could do what he
wanted. He was much luckier than others.

You're always confronted with sacrificing yourself on the alter
of political belief or being rational and doing what you have to do
as an artist, irrespective of Nixon, or McCarthy, or Roosevelt or

what.

I'm very unhappy about the contemporary situation, because I
think if something goes haywire, which it very well could, we'll
come under a very strict surveillance.

Jack Anderson's comment on the FBI when this new man, [Patrick]
Gray (who apparently is a real dumb jerk), took over: "We have no
personal files." And Anderson had photostatic copies of the
personal files. Now, take the young photographer — what is he going
to do in the world? Is he going to go out and photograph rocks and
trees, or is he going to really pitch in and do something for
society? I would admire the one who would pitch in and do something
in the sociological sense, providing he makes moving photographs.

I tell you, a typical thing was that [Ralph] Crane, I think he
was, of Life — a whole lot of pictures were made of troups departing
for the war. This was back in the early days. And oh, they had
fanfares and they had soldiers and all this stuff. And Crane made
a picture of a wife and daughter in the back of the car — they had
just taken their husband and father to the embarcation center.

That was one of the most incredible photographs I've ever seen —
I mean, just the expressions on these people. And it was a beautiful
photograph. It was beautiful tonally and compositionally. And I've
been trying to find that, and no one knows anything about it; Life
can't find it, and so on.

But there was the whole creative tragedy of the war, just in
this particular photograph of these two women, you see. And all the
other patriotic bombast was — if you read into it with a literary
sense, you thought, "Well yes, they're going over to be shot up; too
bad." That was bad. But the whole thing was summed up in this
extremely perceptive photograph. And in that way the perceptive and

158

Adams: beautifully controlled and aesthetically managed image has the

greatest power. And that's where Dorothea Lange stands head and
shoulders above all the rest of her colleagues, because she injected
that quality of art and sensitivity.

Working with Dorothea Lange

Teiser : I remember her photograph of shipyard people had that same something.

Adams: It's not known who did many of those photographs — she and I worked on
that together. The one of the people coming down, the whole crowd —
that was mine ["Shipyard Construction Workers, Richmond, California,"
1942].

Teiser: Oh, it was.'

Adams: And the picture of the Negress sitting in front of the trailer camp
housing in the mud — that was mine. And the trailer camp children
also were mine.

And then, helped by her son, she got some pictures in a bar,
which I wish I'd done. But that doesn't mean much difference. We'
did it as a joint thing, like we did the story on the Mormons. What
was Dorothea's idea, what was my idea, whether she or I did the
photograph — what difference does it make? Those really were joint
projects, and I imagine it was a fifty-fifty result.* It was a
privilege to work with her, but it was difficult. Even at that time
she wasn't well, and she'd overdo and she'd have medical problems.

I don't regret my life at all. It's been spectacular in many
ways. And you know, working with people is rewarding. Some day I'll
give you a story of my invasion of the South with telephone advertising
people. That would be another story.

Teiser: Well, I'll write it down to bring up later.
Adams: Some of it, if I told the truth, you couldn't even print.
[Interruption — visitor enters]

Adams: Ah, this is Dick Julian, one of my prize students, a very fine

photographer, a very fine electronics engineer. He's made me two

*See also other references to Dorothea Lange as indexed.

159

Adams: gadgets, timers, which put me in this enviable world of

technological superiority! And he's a fine photographer, which is
the most important thing. I'd like to show you his portfolio.

[End Tape 7, Side 1]

Early Visits to New Mexico

[Interview VI — 26 May 1972]
[Begin Tape 7, Side 2]

[Virginia Adams participated in this interview]

Teiser: I can start today by reading you some dates that I have here that

maybe will recall to you your early trips to New Mexico. These are
mostly from Mrs. Newhall's book.

Adams : Yes .

Teiser: Some time in 1927 —

Adams: That's the date I went.

Teiser: — you went first to Santa Fe with Albert Bender.

Then in 1928 you went twice, and then in 1929 in the spring
you and Mrs. Adams went, and then I don't know —

Adams: Well, she [Mrs. Newhall] didn't get all those details in those days,
because it was pretty complex. But I can start it off by saying
that Bertha Damon, who was then Bertha Pope, was quite a literary
figure. You remember, she's written really delightfully. I think
her first book was A Sense of Humus, which was on gardening. It was
just marvelous. And the other one was Grandma Called It Carnal.
That was marvelous too. She's a great stylist. And she was a
great friend of Witter Bynner's.

So Albert Bender said, "Let's us go down in the old bus and see
Bynner and the other people down there." Bertha and Albert and I
drove down in his Buick, which I think was a 1926 coach — terribly
good automobile, probably still running. And in those days the
roads were simply ghastly. The highway over to Tehachapi, that
wasn't so bad, but when you got over to Mojave — from Mojave on east
it was all "washboard" — just dreadful road. Dust. You know what a
washboard road is?

V. Adams: That was the time we took Ella Young?

160

Adams: No, I'm speaking of going there first with Bertha. April 1927 —
that was the first trip.

V. Adams: I don't remember.

Adams: [To Mrs. Adams] She got that out of Nancy's book.

So we arrived in Santa Fe and went to the De Vargas Hotel.
This is very poignant — I met Bynner for the first time in the men's
room.

V. Adams: You mean that's where you were to meet? [Laughter]

Adams: We arrived in a state. It was snowing and a dust storm, so the

snow was literally gray. I've never seen anything like it since.

V. Adams: What time of year?

Adams: April. So then Witter said, "Well, you're all coming to dinner,"
and he gave us the address but he didn't give us directions.

Bertha was sure it was the north side of the Santa Fe River.
I didn't know. So we went up there and got lost and kept calling
on people, and these people only spoke Spanish, you know — it was
a terrible time. Finally we got back to the hotel, and Bynner
said on the phone, "I didn't tell you. We're first meeting at a
party on Canyon Road. So you go there."

So we went there and there was a real wild drinking party,
and a lot of young people had passed out —

V. Adams: That was quite a beginning. [Laughter]

Adams: In those days Santa Fe was really something — very exotic.

And then we got to Bynner's place about nine o'clock, and
there was more partying, and then about ten o'clock he had this
dinner. Well, poor Albert wasn't used to that kind of stuff at
all. Bertha was, but she was furious. The only reason I took it,
I guess, was that I was young.

So we had several riotous days, and we met people — Mary
Austin, Haniel Long, Arthur Davidson Ficke, Shuster —

V. Adams: Will.

Adams: Will Shuster, and the Cassidys, Gerald and Ina Sizer Cassidy, and
quite a few others that were writers and artists and friends of
Bynner and Bertha.

And we toured around a bit. We went to Taos , but we didn't
meet Mabel [Dodge Luhan] .

161

Teiser :
Adams :

V. Adams;
Adams :

V . Ad ams ;
Adams :
V . Adams :
Adams :
V. Adams;

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :
Teiser:
Adams :

You did not?

No, not that time,
came home.

She was in Europe or something. And then we

Didn't you have a trip across the desert, sort of just across the
country somewhere, in Albert's car?

Oh yes, that's interesting. We went to Grand Canyon on the way.
And we left Flagstaff, and the road was terrible. So we stopped
some shepherd by the road, and I said, "Can I cut across here?"
He says, "Oh, go right across." How we ever did it I don't know,
but we got that car across about eight, ten miles of Arizona
desert without any mishaps. It was a foolhardy thing to do — just
absolutely ridiculous. But I didn't see that it was much worse
than the road. We cleared everything. Had a little trouble
getting on the road on the South Rim, though. We had to navigate
for a mile or two to find a place where we could get down the bank,
see. And I had to get out and move some logs, but we made it.
[Laughter] Then we went to Grand Canyon.

Who else was there with you?

Friend of Bertha's.

I can't even think who it is.

I can't even remember the name. I think Albert was very jealous —

He thought that he should have the center of attention, which he
should have.

It was very funny — one morning I left very early to get a picture,
and I looked down from (I forget which point it was — near the big
hotel, I guess), and I saw this little figure walking around in
circles out on this sort of an esplanade, quite a way down. It
was Albert. He was pacing in a circle. He was depressed because
he thought that this guy wasn't worthy of Bertha. I don't know
how confidential to be about this, but it was very funny.

Anyway, we got home safely,
that happened.

How long a trip was it?
Two weeks .

Did you do all the driving?
Yes. Albert didn't drive.

I can't think of anything else

162

V. Adams: The bounding Buick. It bounded that time, for sure.

Adams: Bertha didn't like driving. I could take it hour after hour, but
those washboard roads were unbelievable.

Teiser: Do you remember what your first impression of Mary Austin was?

Adams: I met her at a party. She was rather grim, very nice, to me at
least — didn't like Bertha.

V. Adams: She didn't really like most women, especially here was Bertha,
who had done some writing. She wanted to be at the center.

Adams: At any event, she saw some of my pictures, which I'd taken down
there.

Then the next trip is when we- met the Applegates, Frank Apple-
gate and his wife [Alta], and Mary Austin again.

V. Adams: Was that the time we went together, or were you there another time
after that? You went to New York on the train and stopped off.

Adams: That's right. Several trips there, we went by train.

V. Adams: Yes, because once was just before Christmas, and you took some
pictures of the snow on the adobe house.

Adams: Bynner's home.

Teiser: That must have been 1928. According to Mrs. Newhall's book, you
were there in April and then in November 1928.

V. Adams: Well, that could be. Because, you know, we got married in January
1928, but I had invited people to Yosemite. I had a household
there to work on. And you were going east. And we didn't go
until the spring of '29, when we went with —

Adams: Yes, Ella Young.

Well, there were several trips, and at that time we arranged
to do the Taos book, and a lot of pictures for the Spanish-Colonial
Art Society.

V. Adams: Which Mary Austin was very active in.

Adams: And, of course, I was staying with Bynner in that beautiful house.
But Bynner would party until one in the morning, and then he'd
work with his secretary.

V. Adams: He was stimulated, I guess.

163

Adams: The party would go until four or five, and he wouldn't get up

until two the next day, but I'd have to get up around dawn to get
pictures!

V. Adams: He [Bynner] would go out and work in the early morning in his
garden, then retire. He often did it after work with his
secretary, at seven and eight. Then he'd go to bed.

V. Adams: Yes. His day was over — I mean, night was over.

Adams: He'd get up at two or three to attend the affairs of the day. Cut
his coupons and order the meals. [Laughter]

V. Adams: He had a wonderful cook, Rita. She was with him for many years.

Teiser: Who was his secretary?

Adams: He had several. I forget just who it was.

V. Adams: Was his name Gorman — the one that we knew first?

Adams: There was Gorman; then there was McCarthy — a wild Irishman,
terrible!

V. Adams: Then there was the last one. He died before Hal [Witter Bynner]
did, and Hal felt very badly about that, because they'd shared so
much. He'd built a whole addition to his house that was for this
young man, and then he was gone before Hal. I don't remember now.

Teiser: Did you know Witter Bynner when he was in Berkeley?
Adams: No, I never knew him at that time.

V. Adams: Not until he came back and we were at Cedric's [Cedric Wright's],
That must have been '28, because we were living at Cedric's house
on Etna Street, Berkeley.

Adams: I didn't know him before I went to Santa Fe.
V. Adams: Yes, we met him there.

Teiser: Frank Applegate — there's an awfully good picture you made of him
that's in The Eloquent Light.

Adams: Oh yes, with a cigarette ash.
V. Adams: Oh, he was great.

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Adams: He was an artist. Of course, he was ill — I think he had TB or

some such disease. He was from New Jersey, and he came out to New
Mexico. He was a pretty shrewd man. He built adobe houses to sell
them. Then he would study the santos — he had a great working
knowledge of the bultos and santos. He would acquire them and
restore them, and that has driven the museum people absolutely
wild, because the restorations are confusingly good in many
instances. He had no idea of the "museology" of what he was doing.

V. Adams: You know he was a painter. If he could put a little more paint on
something — pick it up a little bit —

Adams: He'd retouch it and fix it up — put in a little new gesso, etc.

V. Adams: But he first came out from New Jersey and was sent to the Hopi

country. They were having trouble with their pottery. It was too
fragile. And he apparently knew something about clay. And they
lived in one of the Hopi pueblos for, I imagine, a year or so.
And I said to his wife, Alta, "What did you do for the bathroom?"
She said, "Fortunately, it was an old house that had another room
that nobody used, with a dirt floor," so they did just what the
cats and dogs do. They had one daughter who was just a little bit
of a girl.

Then they went on to Santa Fe.

Adams: But he was quite successful. He had one of the most beautiful
new houses — that is, in the real pueblo style. He added to a
beautiful old adobe; everything was absolutely authentic.

V. Adams: We'll have to show you some of the pictures.
Adams: He really knew what he was doing.

V. Adams: And Ansel took a lot of pictures of furniture — chests and things —
for a hoped-for book that Mary Austin and Applegate were going to
do.

Adams: I'll have to remind Ted Organ [Ansel Adams's assistant] that one of
my priority projects is finishing the early New Mexico pictures for
E. Boyd of the Museum.* And why they don't send me a bomb in a
package, because of my delay, I don't know.

*Added by Ansel Adams in July 1977: "I was doing a series of
pictures of Spanish-American art and furniture, etc. for Mary Austin
and Frank Applegate. That folded, and E. Boyd asked for the pictures
I made. She died a couple of years ago [30 September 1974]. I
suppose the negatives still have value."

165

Teiser: Have you promised her a show?

Adams: It isn't that. It's all these things that aren't fine photographs,
but they're invaluable records.

V. Adams: They're records, because this was 1927-8-9.

Adams: [To Ted Organ] Ted, we ought to wash them and refix them and reduce
them — many of them, and really make —

V. Adams: When's he going to have time to do this?
Adams: Oh, he'll have time.

V. Adams: Remember, you promised that he could photograph some of my Indian
baskets for records, but he's never going to have time to.

Adams: That's another story.

V. Adams: I know.

Adams: You're on tape now. [Laughter]

Indian Art and Architecture

Teiser: Let's at least note that you have a fine Indian basket collection.
Back to New Mexico —

Adams: Well, New Mexico's a very complex mystique, and I reacted strongly
to it. One very interesting thing is that I'm really a heathen.
My family I suppose were Episcopalian originally, but half of them
became converted Catholics. Neither my mother or my father or my
immediate family on that side had any direct interest in religion
at all. I never went to church, and Papa was a constructive
heathen, and I hope I am too. But the dichotomy of the situation
is that always the primitive Indians' Catholic life, their works
of art and their moradas, were profound in their emotional effect
on me, and a lot of my photographs relate to cemeteries and some
of those beautiful frescoes and objects. I look at it as a kind of
folk art — a transcription of intense feeling of people. (And I
would probably do the same thing in Hawaii with the Buddhists.) As
far as doing it from the point of view of a Catholic, people don't
understand why I should be interested. And of course the people
down there didn't like you to photograph their old, used-up
cemeteries because they're not taken care of. Now some are taken
care of, which is ruining the "mood."

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Adams :

V. Adams:

Teiser :
V. Adams:

Adams:

V. Adams:
Adams :

V. Adams:

Adams :

The Mormons, for instance, deeply resented our photographing old
barns and old things, because they were trying to raise everything
up to the new qualities and standards. But the people down there
in New Mexico have really deteriorated now tremendously, and
these cemeteries are a kind of desolation. The women can't mud
the adobes any more. You used to see them out there putting it on
by hand. Every year they used to go over the buildings. They
can't do it any more, so they have to stucco these buildings.
They put tin roofs on them. (That beautiful church in Hernandez
in my "Moonrise" picture now has a tin roof.) But there's nothing
else they can do, because there is no way to take care of it.

With adobe structures, it takes a constant putting on of mud.
That's what gives it its peculiar texture and shape. The people
who fake it, they do it with a brush, you see. When they use the
mud, they just go over it and over it — filling in the little cracks.

When Georgia O'Keeffe redid her house, she was able to get knowledg-
able people, and the women really did do it the old way.

It was always woman's work, wasn't it?

Yes, that was. The men, I guess, made the adobes, dried them and
stacked them up, but when it came to the plastering, men and women
worked at it. And the Mexicans did the same thing.

But there's an interesting thing, that some of the people were
doing that with cement. They'd get a very careful cement stucco
and give it the right color and then put it on by hand. It isn't
exactly the same but it lasts longer —

Yes, of course it lasts.

Adobe is built with straw to hold it together,
kind of adobe soil is available.

It depends on what

One of the things that was so interesting to me was that they
could analyze something about the flowers and things that were
growing at the time an adobe brick was made, because they used
this straw for the stuff that made it stay together. And they
could work out the flora 'way in the early days.

But now they use, of course, the modern adobe, and many houses are
being built with that. But that is usually sized with a binder and
it makes it very strong.

You see, some of these places have serious trouble because of
what they call the "main vigas" — the cross beams. Most of the
adobe buildings were really small except the churches, and there

167

Adams :

V. Adams
Harroun:
V. Adams:
Adams :
V. Adams ;
Adams :

V . Adams :

Adams :
V. Adams;

Adams :

they had trouble. But they had enough sense to make a wood lintel
or a brick coping across, I guess you'd call the top of the walls,
because the heavy beam would gradually compress the adobe. And so
they founded what they called the "Spanish colonial" style. They
were built of adobe, but built very trimly — very accurately — with
a brick coping, and then the beams rested on that.

And we saw Senator Cutting's house,
colonial house.

It is a great classic

You see, the real adobe is what they call the primitive,
natural adobe. Then you have the colonial type, which is for more
sophisticated people, who really did design the architecture. But
they're walled-in adobe, and very trim, and the windows have the
colonial cut. And they're still beautiful; the walls are about
five feet thick.

Have you been inside the Carmel Mission?

Yes, but not recently.

There's the same feeling there.

Yes, but that's been very carefully restored.

They have restored that, yes, but —

It went to pieces fast before Harry Downie took charge of the
restoration.

I learned a lot about adobe I Frank and I would tour all over
the region. We went to moradas. I have a beautiful interior of a
morada. A morada was a penitente chapel. The penitentes were —
were they actually excommunicated?

They were at one time, yes. Yes. What happened was that the
Catholics went away from there, and these little village people
kept on with their religion —

In their own way.

In their own way. And this penitente thing that gets talked about,
where they whip themselves and all — the Fathers when they came back
strongly disapproved of that.

The Fathers were German Jesuits. Let's see, in the first days they
were Franciscans and very sympathetic to the natives. But when
the German priests came (I think they were Jesuits) , they ordered
the old relics thrown out; said they were heathen relics! And
they imported those hideous plaster things from Rome. So we would

168

Adams: go into strange places and find beautiful old things, most of

which have now been sold or put into a museum. Once in a while
there are some remaining, like the altars at santuarios. Many
were the most beautiful things I've ever seen. And all too often
there is an Italianate picture of the Virgin — or statue — with
pink cheeks and all otherwise terrible. But they'd dress them up
and put all kinds of geegaws around them.

V. Adams: It remains very close to their hearts, as I think is true with all
peasant groups now.

Ella Young

V. Adams: I want you to talk about the time when Ella Young went down with
us to Santa Fe.

Adams: Well, that's really a story I

V. Adams: There's an interim there, of course. But while we're talking about
that, and before I go and do other things, let's talk about —

Adams: You can cut in on this.
V. Adams: Yes.

Adams: Well, Ella Young was an Irish poet, also an Irish revolutionary.
She was a doctor of jurisprudence; she really was a lawyer. She
was also a very mythical-minded Irish lady who was always seeing
little people — wonderful stories about that]

V. Adams: Her father I think was a minister — not Catholic, but a minister, of
whatever the faith was. And she got away from that, and she lived
in Dublin with Maude Gonne, who was a very fine actress and a great
friend of the Irish writer William Butler Yeats. I think she was
his lady friend.

Anyway, she lived there with them and they actually were
active in that 1916 uprising. Now I don't know that the public
has ever known much about it. But she told me one time that they
did have guns in their home. I think she was kind of a helper to
this Maude Gonne.

Adams: She barely escaped; she got out of Ireland.

V. Adams: And I think whoever was her boyfriend was killed, but I never knew
who it was.

169

V. Adams: But one time she took us with her when we went to lunch, with the
Monsignor at St. Patrick's in San Francisco.

Adams: Marvelous man.

V. Adams: Yes, a charming person, and she'd known him in Ireland. And we
all had lunch together. I felt so sorry for him, because the
old lady that kept the house for him really didn't keep it clean.

Adams: Dusty, you know.

V. Adams: It really was. But it was wonderful for Ella Young to visit him
again, and they talked a little bit about it [the 1916 uprising].
But if you ever have a chance to look up something about Maude
Gonne — apparently she was very beautiful and quite active in that
revolutionary movement.

Adams: She wasn't one of the women in my_ life. [Laughter]

V. Adams: No, no.

Adams: — our lives. I must make this very precise.

V. Adams: But anyway, this Ella Young was a marvelous person.

Adams: She wrote Gaelic fairy tales.

V. Adams: I'll show you some of her books.

Adams: She always wore purple veils or scarfs. And we always used to

meet at Colonel [C.E.S.] Wood's place. At Colonel Wood's eightieth
birthday —

V. Adams: — which was your fiftieth.

Adams: — everybody got cockeyed on the Colonel's wonderful red wine, and
she read the benediction in Gaelic wearing a purple scarf, hanging
on, as I remember, to the top of an Italianate chair. She could,
of course, speak beautiful Gaelic. She would declare that she saw
all the little people. And she practiced all kinds of little
rituals .

Now, we decided that we would go to New Mexico. And I have
pictures of you and Ella and others taken in New Mexico.

V. Adams: We had to wait until after Albert Bender's St. Patrick's Day party.
We left the next day and picked her up at Halcyon, which is down
the coast, below Pismo Beach.

170

Adams: Where the elder Varians lived. It was a theosophy colony.

We drove to New Mexico and had a couple of close calls. They
were rebuilding the road near Taos and it caved in.

V. Adams: Well, wasn't that coming south from Taos?

Adams: Yes. Ella — when she got to the Arizona border (she always wanted
to know when she entered a new state) — she left the car and poured
a little wine on the ground.

V. Adams: And at every lunch on the trip we offered a libation to the gods.
We'd have wine and cheese and other things in our lunches. She
was lovely I

Adams: For a practical man like me, it was a little screwy, but it had a
great charm.

V. Adams: Well, it was fun. We were young and this was funl

Adams: So we got along fine down there. But she was very proper. Of
course, Bynner immediately kisses every woman who shows up.

V. Adams: She didn't want to be kissed?
Adams: She refused to be kissed by Bynner.
V. Adams: Well, I don't blame her.

Adams: "Oh, come on Ella, you're just a friend." "No! My resolution.'"
[Laughter] So Ella was the only one that was not "smacked."
Everybody got "smacked," from six up to sixty-nine.

V. Adams: She had gone to stay with a friend of hers — some woman whose name
I don't remember, some woman who'd been hurt in an accident and
blamed the railroad — blamed somebody. She was suing like mad, and
she was really very ill. She was living in one of the little old
houses that were railroad houses — you know, in New Mexico — the
typical ones — red brick and sooty yards.

Ella Young had told us that she would like to go and see
Mabel Luhan, and she said, "I understand that if you get invited
to Mabel's, you can stay."

Adams: You're in.

V. Adams: That's right. So we had been there a very short time. We were

staying at Mary Austin's little house, and there was a party next
door, and Mabel came. And I guess Ella Young was the one, wasn't

171

V. Adams: it, that the party was for — maybe she'd lectured or something — do
you remember about that? Well anyway, it was through Ella Young,
really, that we got the idea that if you were "in" with Mabel that
you got to go to Taos. [To Ansel Adams] Go on, go on.

Adams: Well, Mabel was one thing, and Ella Young was another. Ella Young
absolutely believed that New Mexico had little people, like
Ireland. So she kept talking about the little people she'd seen.
And Bynner was very skeptical of these things. I had a fairly
open mind; all the Indians I knew are quite real, but I'd never
heard of little Indian people. Bynner said, "Now would you
describe to me just how they look?" And she did, and she had a
most minute description. They had Hopi shoes, and Navajo pants and
skirts, and Sioux headdresses. [Laughter] War bonnets; all of them
had little war bonnets on.

Ella would talk, and Bynner was absolutely fascinated, because
he felt that she had a great poetic quality.

Now, she was sponsored and protected, during the remaining
years of her life, by Noel Sullivan. And you can tie in a lot of
things of Ella Young through the Noel Sullivan history.

V. Adams: She was a great person, really; a very lovely person.

Adams: So one day we were up at Mabel's place, and O'Keeffe was there —
Georgia O'Keeffe. And let's see, I was sitting at breakfast with
Mabel, and in came Ella with a blue scarf. And then a little
later, in came O'Keeffe.

So Ella said, "Well, good morning. How did you enjoy your
walk?" O'Keeffe says, "What walk?"

V. Adams: Aren't you getting it the other way around? Didn't O'Keeffe say
that to Ella?

Adams: Yes — I stand corrected! O'Keeffe came in and said to Ella Young,
"How did you enjoy your walk?" And Ella said, "What walk?"
Georgia said, "I was up in my room and I saw you walking out
towards the morada." And Ella said, "No, I didn't."

"Well," she said, "I saw you. You opened the gate. You
closed it carefully, and you walked on towards the morada, which is
about half a mile." Ella says, "I never did any such thing," and
is looking a little bit dismal. And O'Keeffe says, "But I saw you."

"Well, you didn't see me. You must have seen something, but
you didn't see me." And Mabel was getting quite distressed; this
whole thing was quite argumentative. But O'Keeffe was quite sure.

172

Adams: And Ella said, "Well, it must have been my astral body." And then
O'Keeffe came back and said, "Well, I don't know what it was, but
it was something!" [Laughter]

But this is the kind of thing that was going on all the time.
It was all crazy as the devil, but it's funny.

Santa Fe People

Adams: So there was Marin and O'Keeffe and Paul Strand — at Mabel's.
That's where I met Marin.

V. Adams: That was later on.

Adams: I can't get the sequence right; these things are all telescoped
over a few years.

Well, then Mary Austin fixed it up with the Taos governor
through Tony —

V. Adams: Mabel Luhan's husband, Tony Luhan.

Adams: — fixed it up for me to come and photograph Taos — to do a book
with her.

Teiser: They were very careful about who they'd let in at Taos?

Adams: Yes, they had an all-night council meeting and finally decided I
could do it.

V. Adams: We did a book about Taos Pueblo. Have you seen that book? We'll
have to show you, if you haven't seen it. It's a big book.

Teiser: This is the 1930 book, Taos Pueblo?

Adams: Yes. Mary Austin wrote the text. The crazy thing was, you see,

that Mary Austin had it a bit on Mabel. Because Mabel had Tony as
a chauffeur when she first came, and then she fell heavy for Tony.
And it was no matter that Tony had an Indian wife. So there was
some legal or illegal divorcement. Then Mary Austin suddenly moved
in; she had to protect the Indian wife because of her avowed interest
in the Indians. She arranged that Mabel pay alimony to the Indian
wife as long as she lived. Of course, Mabel was a tremendously
wealthy woman, so it couldn't possibly have affected her. [Laughter]

173

Adams: There's a marvelous story about Mabel. Let's see, it's "Mabel
Dodge Sterne Evans Luhan."*

Well, Edwin Dodge was sitting in his club in New York. And
somebody came in and said, "Guess what your ex-wife has done."
And he said, "I haven't got the slightest idea. She can do
anything." Well, she's going to marry a full-blooded Taos Indian."
Edwin looked around and raised his head and said, "Lo, the poor
Indian!" [Laughter]

When she married Maurice Sterne — everybody's dead now — she
met him in Europe at a salon in Florence or Venice or somewhere,
and they got married. And Mabel went to New Mexico on the
honeymoon, and he went to Florida. [Laughter] So you get some
idea of the whole situation involved in this thing.

Then Evans came before that.
V. Adams: She'd had one son, John Evans.

Adams: John Evans was quite a nice guy. Saw his house in Santa Fe. Of
all the crazy things to build in the Santa Fe country, it's an
English manor house, but that's what he did.

V. Adams: They came from New York.

Adams: Well, let's see. The Santa Fe experience was a very complex inter
mingling of work with Frank Applegate and Mary Austin.

Teiser: What was the original concept of that project?

Adams: It was to be a book on Spanish-American art and decoration.

Teiser: As a whole?

Adams: As a whole. It was very vague. There' d never been a real

scholar involved. It was the first time I realized, I think, what
the difference between the interest of a dilettante and a real
scholar is. Because nobody was analyzing this. They'd say, "Well,
there's a chest," and you'd go and photograph that — and nobody was
really getting this project organized. That's what E. Boyd, who
was an art history person with the museum, a really highly trained
person, could do.

V. Adams: And quite a characterl

*Born Mabel Ganson, she married successively Carl Evans, Edwin
Dodge, Maurice Sterne, and Antonio Luhan.

174

Adams: Oh, she's marvelous, yes. There was Marie Garland —
V. Adams: Hamlin Garland's ex-wife.

Adams: She married Henwar Rodakiewicz — Polish; he's one of my oldest
friends, and he's still living in New York. He's a creative
cinema man.

And we had many parties out there at their ranch north of
Santa Fe.

V. Adams: It's a marvelous place —

Adams: It's still there.

Teiser: How did all these people happen to be living around Santa Fe?

V. Adams: Because they liked to live in that country. It's just like people
like to live in Carmel. It just does something to you — makes you
happy to be there. But they have to have enough money to be able
to live there, because you don't live on the country.

Adams: There are a great many wealthy easterners. It's an impossible

place for a gringo to make a living, except a few bankers who can
sure milk the native populace. But you had some very wealthy
families — the White sisters from Boston, and the McCormicks, and
any number of people came who had the means just to live. Witter
Bynner was financially independent; Arthur Davidson Ficke made a
fortune in Japanese prints. Mary Austin was probably one of the
few really hard-working people who lived there — writing.

V. Adams: But some of the artists live there now by the skin of their teeth.

Adams: Yes. Of course, a lot of the good artists, they'd sell a few

things there, but they'd send most of their work east. Like all
the good artists here rarely show in Carmel. The Carmel Art
Association has an occasional show for many of the few very fine
artists around here, but some of them I've never seen.

Teiser: Was Frieda Lawrence still around?

V. Adams: She wasn't around when we were there.

Adams: I never met [D.H.] Lawrence; Lawrence was before my time.

V. Adams: Did you meet her? I never met her.

Adams: Oh, I met Frieda once. And then I met Toby — Toby's the name of
the ear trumpet.

175

V. Adams: Oh, Brett! The Honorable Dorothy Brett, who had a trumpet named
Toby.

Adams: She was deaf. [Laughter] But when she really became impassioned

in discussion, she'd put the trumpet down in her lap and just talk
to you perfectly normally. But if she was bored or something,
she'd put this up and say, "What?" [Laughter]

V. Adams: She's still in existence, isn't she?
Adams: Oh yes, I think so.

The most wonderful group of nuts you can possibly imagine!
Teiser: You mentioned 'someone named Long?

Adams: Haniel. He was a writer and poet. I think he was a friend of
MacLeish — Archibald MacLeish, but I don't really know.

V. Adams: He was a writer and he published things in the Santa Fe area.

Adams: And he also published in the East. But again, most of these

people had income from outside. Of course, now Santa Fe is a big
place, and lots of people can make money there, in real estate and
stores and so on, but it still is not a real money-producing place.
Albuquerque depends largely on science — NASA, you know, the Sandia
base. And the farming, and the cattle and all that is really small
family stuff still, isn't it?

V. Adams: Well, I don't know.

Adams: I don't think there are any great corporate farms, like there are
in California.

Teiser: You mentioned Will Shuster —

V. Adams: Yes, he was an artist — painter.

Adams: Oh, there were so many I can't think of all of them.

Taos Pueblo

Teiser: Whose idea was the Taos book — yours, or Mary Austin's?

Adams: I think, frankly, it was mine. I mentioned it to Albert Bender,

and he thought it was a good idea, and said to see if Mary would do
the text. And Mary would do the text. And then, Albert got Grabhorn

176

Adams: to do the typography. And Dassonville, who was a photographer and
manufactured, at that time, the finest photographic paper, which
was pure silver bromide on rag paper, he was going to coat the
paper. So we ordered a quantity from a New England mill, which
was divided between Grabhorn and Dassonville — the same paper stock.
And the only thing that we missed on was that the paper should have
been soaked before it was printed by Grabhorn, because the paper
was fairly smooth when it came, but when it was coated with the
photographic emulsion and then developed, fixed, and washed, it
took on a certain texture a little different from the printed
sheets in the book. Apparently, the sheets differ in look and
feel although they're both exactly the same basic paper. And that
was before the time of toning, before the time we knew about two
hypo baths. And some of these prints are not permanent, which
bothers me very much — a few are "turning" a little.

V. Adams: The Book Club [of California] is kind of interested in the idea of
republishing it.

Adams: Yes, it could be published —

V. Adams: Nobody has ever read this text except the hundred people who
bought the book. It's a charming essay.

Adams: You'd have to just use a printing process that would simulate the
qualities of the prints — probably right from the page.

V. Adams: The linen for the binding, the rust-colored linen, was dyed

by Hazel Dreiss, and she made the binding and the end-papers.

Adams: The end leather, they call it.

V. Adams: It came from England.

Adams: No, from Algeria.

V. Adams: Anyway, it's very special.

Adams: Everybody was broke, and Hazel Dreiss called up and said, "The

leather for the book's here, but there's a four-hundred-dollar bill,
and I don't have it. Do you have it?" And I said, "No."

"Well, who's got that money? It will be returned if I don't
pay it. So who do I call?" I said, "Albert Bender." He said,
"All right" and sent the check (as usual.'.').*

*See also other references to Taos Pueblo as indexed.

177

V. Adams: He was a wonderful person.

Adams: He always came through, and he was not a rich man — he was well-to-do
but nothing much above average.

V. Adams: He'd earned it in his insurance business; he'd worked hard.
Adams: He lived alone. But he was the most generous person.

Teiser: In Mrs. Newhall's book, it says he had a housekeeper who was a
terrible cook.

Adams: Oh, perfectly awful.

V. Adams: Mrs. Ayres.

Teiser: Do you recall Anne Bremer?

V. Adams: That was a cousin of his, a very sweet person, I guess. I never
met her. Did you meet her?

Adams: An artist — I met her once — very hazy recollection of it.

V. Adams: And then she died; he was very fond of her.

Adams: That was his great personal tragedy.

Teiser: Over how long a period did you photograph Taos?

Adams: I did it all in one year, I think.

V. Adams: That spring of 1929.

Teiser: All in one season?

Adams: I think I came back later and did one photograph. And of course
there is in the book the great church of the Ranches de Taos,
which has nothing to do with Taos Pueblo and really should not be
in the book. But it was so closely identified with the area!

V. Adams: And was so beautiful.

Adams: It is the greatest building of its kind in America. It's just an
incredible thing. And we put that in, called the Ranches church,
and Mary Austin thought it was all right to do it. But we had the
old church ruins, the new church, and then the Ranches church. And
seeing that these were the intrusions of the Catholics, it didn't
make much difference; but strictly, it's not Taos Pueblo.

V. Adams: Well, they're old and new —

178

Adams: I made a picture of a kiva in a dust storm. The camera was

shaking in the gale. I really got into Taos ; to do it today,
you'd do it totally differently.

V. Adams: You couldn't do it today, Ansel. Because it's different. I mean,
there were still the people there who really felt for it. Now,
you're just a tourist and you pay your money and you get to take
some pictures —

Adams: Yes, but I still think if you went there, and wanted to do a

definitive book — not on a tourist basis — that you could do it.
You'd have to pay for it, which you should.

Teiser: Did you then?

Adams: I gave them a book. I think I paid a hundred dollars too.

V. Adams: Mary Austin said they wrapped the book in deerskin and put it in
their archives.

Adams: It's in the kiva.

Teiser: Oh, it is!

V. Adams: It's very precious.

Teiser: Did they help you? Were they interested in what you were doing?

Adams: Oh yes. They were very good. The word went out to help. And I
didn't have any trouble at all, except one time a big fat Indian
jumps on the running board of the car: "Pay me one dollar." And
I said no, it was already paid for. We paid a hundred dollars for
the right to do the book. He said, "Pay me one dollar." And I
speeded up the car and he almost fell off, and I felt bad about it.

I told Tony [Luhan] about it. "Oh, he damn fool. Pay no
attention." [Laughter]

Teiser: Was Tony Luhan a Taos Indian?

Adams: Full-blooded Taos Indian, yes. Slightly ostracized —
V. Adams: Well, he'd sloughed off his wife-
Adams: Of course, Mabel did a lot for the Taos Indians.

V. Adams: One time I went with Tony to the Indian school, and he talked to

some little boys who must have been his children. He said, "They're
my nephews . "

179

Teiser: The picture of Tony in the Taos book was done in San Francisco?
Adams: The picture of Tony was done in my studio in San Francisco.

V. Adams: It was so thrilling. He would take just a little drum that we had
and he would sit in the yard and sing, and all the neighborhood
kids would come around. Oh, it was such fun. He was sweet.

Adams: It was really an experience.

Teiser: There's such a big literature on all this, and often Tony Luhan is
made fun of.

Adams: Well, the point is that an awful lot of sophisticates try to get
on this bandwagon, and they really don't know anything about it,
you see. Hearsay, and second hearsay, and all kinds of very
strange misinterpretations. But I think he was much more naive
than anybody could imagine. But Mabel was a hunter, and she
hunted all the prominent people to bring there; she literally
captured them!

V. Adams: She took us up to that cave, I don't know where it was.
Adams: Wasn't it near the Blue Lakes?

V. Adams: No. Arroyo something — I don't know. We went up the valley, as if
we were going to Colorado, and then we went up a canyon.

Adams: Oh yes, I know.

V. Adams: And it was something that was supposed to be very serious, and

the light came down at a certain angle at a certain time. And she
said maybe the Aztecs had been there. I mean, it was very super-
super. And some girl she'd taken there just felt that she saw
them all there, and she crawled out of the cave —

Adams: She was slightly fey.

V. Adams: She had a feel for all those things. [Laughter]

[End Tape 7, Side 2]

[Begin Tape 8, Side 1]

Adams: Well, I think an analysis of this whole Mabel Luhan business would
be exciting, because she, of course, had, as I said, a tremendous
amount of money and influence.

V. Adams: You've read some of her books, haven't you?

180

Teiser: Yes.

Adams: She had a salon in Italy, and she was always gathering people unto
her. And the biggest feather in her cap — it was quite a struggle —
was to get Lawrence to New Mexico. Now, as far as I can make out,
from reading the things and knowing her, that poor old Lawrence
was dragged there by his beard, and was very unhappy, because he
became sort of a curiosity. She could afford anything, and she
just kept these people; she would collect these celebrities.

V. Adams: She probably fought with Frieda, didn't she?

Adams: She fought with everybody, in the end. We got along all right; but

she was mad at me one time — furious.

Teiser: Why?

Adams: I don't know; I guess I wasn't sympathetic enough. If you ever

raised your voice in the slightest bit of criticism, you were out.
But I never really got out, I just got put in the dog house.

V. Adams: You didn't fall for her, Ansel; you know, that's one of the things.

Adams: You see, I didn't have any concept at all of being a celebrity, of
being important to anything.

V. Adams: Well, you were just a young man —

Adams: I was just trying to do photographs. Of course, now you have this
feeling — people tell you you're celebrated or well known, and so
on. It didn't make any impression on me because this is the kind
of thing that only historians can define, and I know I've made
certain contributions, but certainly at that time I was a nonentity
and was coming on the coattails (if you'll pardon the metaphor) of
Mary Austin and a few others.

But Frank Applegate and she had a falling out —
V. Adams: Mabel?
Adams: Yes. They had a falling out.

V. Adams: Well, she'd had a falling out with anybody who wasn't under her
thumb, I think.

Adams: I think she was hypersexed —

V. Adams: And you and Frank Applegate didn't fall for it.

Adams: No, thank God.' I must hasten to say that my hyper was very different
from her hyper. [Loud laughter] Hypo too!

181

Adams: Well, anyway, the whole New Mexican picture, of course, is very
mixed. I think we got through a lot of it.

V. Adams: Well, we did go out to Taos. We did stay at Mabel's, and Ella
Young stayed at Mabel's.

Paul Strand and a New Approach

Adams: And that's where I met Paul Strand and saw his negatives, which
changed my whole direction in photography. This was after I had
done the Taos book pictures. Then I saw Paul Strand's negatives,
and the approach was something so tremendous to me that I literally
changed my approach. And I can say that when I came back to
California the seed of the Group f/64 movement was sown.

While other people had been working with the "straight" idea,
I don't think other people had ever stretched it as much. We made
it a bit of a cult, in a sense — that isn't the right word — what
would you say?

V. Adams: I don't know, but you all got together and said, "Now this is the
way we feel photography should be," and they talked about how to
do it, and what kind of a name to give the approach.

Adams: I'm trying to get the bridge between my experience with Strand and
my change of style. My change was very definite after that. I
think I was — with the exception of Weston — the first one to make
the change, and then many others followed.

I'll never forget one photographer (I can't remember his name),
when I did my Golden Gate picture before the bridge — 1933, I
guess*, and Albert had it published — a little printed thing to give
all his friends; he called it a keepsake. This man was perfectly
furious, because he said, "This isn't the Golden Gate." And it was
nothing but jealousy, probably because he'd tried to take it, but
I was lucky and had a good day and beautiful clouds. We've never
been able to find out what he meant by saying, "This isn't the
Golden Gate." Was it because it wasn't his concept, or was he
peeved over the clouds?

V. Adams: Did he want to see it looking the other way?

*It is titled "Golden Gate, 1932" in The Eloquent Light.

182

Adams: No, because the Golden Gate is as you come in — it's the gate to

the harbor, not the gate to the ocean. So for quite a time there
was a little conjecture on this statement, "This isn't the Golden
Gate." And it was a very cryptic statement. It probably was that
the Golden Gate was really mostly fogbound, and that we had a
glorious pile-up of cumulus clouds, which is unusual, and it was
a damned good photograph, and he hadn't made any one as good as
that, so he was probably jealous. And I never have seen a
photograph that carried quite those qualities, and I think that's
entirely a matter of luck, because I lived near there and I saw
these clouds, and so on!

V. Adams: How big a picture could you make of that now?

Adams: Oh, I have 30 by 40 — 40 by 60 inch enlargements. It's a little
soft. I used an old Kodak film, but I made the best prints I've
ever made of it just the other day,

V. Adams: Just looking at all these big things today — and the ones that were
good and the ones that weren't good enough — is quite an experience.

Adams: That's it. Yes. Now, I don't know why that isn't the Golden Gate.

V. Adams: I don't know why it isn't either.

Adams: Except that probably the man didn't like clouds.

V. Adams: Well, Ansel, did you use any of that in the American Trust book?
[The Pageant of History in Northern California]

Adams: No, I don't think that's in it.

V. Adams: He did a lot of pictures for the new Bank of California.

Teiser: When?

Adams: Within the past decade. I have three rooms in the new building [the
headquarters building in San Francisco]: the Washington room, the
Oregon room, and the California room. You go and ask, "Can they be
seen today?" It would be a very good idea to see it; it might be
interesting to see how pictures are used in decor in a room.
They're all stainless steel frames.

For the book I did for Wells Fargo Bank — that was the American
Trust Company then — we wanted "The Triumph of Enterprise" as its
title. And the one powerful man on the board of directors was the
stupidest man I've ever seen. He said, "I don't want any of that
crap. That's one of those goddamned phony titles. I want to call
it a 'Pageant of History in Northern California'." I had to give in
to it. But imagine: "Triumph of Enterprise" tells the whole story
so beautifullv.

183

V. Adams: Beautifully.

Adams: Maybe I should suggest they do a new book called "The Triumph of

Enterprise." But it was the triumph of enterprise. It's California
that was nothing at first, begins in gold, but that's only part of
the development. In fact, there was a very interesting discussion
in Yosemite that most of the gold was taken out of California by
the Spaniards long before they left.

V. Adams: Not most, but lots.

Adams: Well, there was all the surface gold. Much more gold than we ever
got out of it in our mining. They cleaned out stream after stream.
This is something which somebody's got to do a lot of research in.
And it was a hundred and something years before the Anglos came
over. But the gold was lying right there in the stream and was
perfectly obvious. And they left some until Sutter's man [James
Marshall] found it.

V. Adams: In Southern California they certainly were mining earlier.

Adams: They apparently were all over the place.

V. Adams: That is a thing I would need to have more documentation on.

Adams: Well, it is a very important thing. And historians shy clear
because there isn't more documentation.

Santa Fe People, Continued

V. Adams: Ansel, one of the times when you were at Taos, Becky [Mrs. Paul]
Strand and Georgia O'Keeffe lived in one of Mabel's houses across
a meadowland. And then later on you went up there, maybe to take
that one picture that you wanted to do afterwards, and for some
reason or other, Mabel was upset —

Adams: Said she had no room for me. And Becky Strand stood up for me and
said, "Mabel, that big studio is entirely vacant, and you put Adams
up in that studio." (Everybody in Stieglitz's group called
everybody by his last name.) "Or else!" And by gosh, I was over
there in a cot in this enormous studio.

V. Adams: But Mabel was just mad at the time, and she didn't want anything to
do with Ansel.

Adams: Very mercurial. But she was very nice the last time I saw her before
she died, and so I have —

184

V. Adams:

Adams:

V . Adams ;

Teiser:
Adams:
V. Adams:

Adams:
V. Adams:

Adams:

V. Adams:
Adams:

V. Adams :

Adams:
V. Adams:
Teiser:

Adams :
V. Adams:

They came down here to Carmel a number of times. And I guess one
of her last times was to get Robinson Jeffers and his family to
come to Taos .

Oh, that was a tragedy, because she got him and started putting
Robin on the make, and Una attempted suicide in the bathtub — cut
her wrists, but it was a failure. It was that kind of an intense
situation. If you didn't have a clinical approach to life...

Well now, what more about New Mexico, while you're thinking about
it?

To conclude the story about Robinson Jeffers, he went?
Yes. And wrote some poems.

He went down to Taos, yes. And his wife was so upset about it that,
of course, it ruined everybody's point of view.

Yes, that was really terrible.

After that, I guess, they went to Ireland once or twice, and they
had a happy time there. Mabel, for once, didn't really win.

Mabel was after Robin, and that was it. And Una wasn't going to
take it. I don't know what his attitude was. I suppose he — she
was a bedazzling person. I mean, you had this opulence and style —

I don't think opulence would affect him, but she was an intelligent
person.

Well, it was intellectual opulence. And Una was a very quiet
person — very intelligent and nice — but there was a very great
difference from the quiet of the Tor House in Carmel to this super
spectacular landscape and house at Taos.

Probably Jeffers just hid behind his pipe and didn't say much of
anything.

Well, you don't know.

We don't know. We weren't around at that time.

What sort of a woman was Mary Austin? Was she a commanding person
too?

She was a commando! [Laughter] She thought she was the most
beautiful woman alive.

Well, not beautiful physically —

185

Adams: Oh yes, the most beautiful and appealing woman.
V. Adams: Noble.

Teiser: Well, in your picture reproduced in The Eloquent Light she's
certainly —

V. Adams: Well, that's the most becoming picture I've ever seen of her.

Adams: She was very intense. Extremely intelligent. Extremely

opinionated, and thought that all men were just going to fall
right at her feet.

I think I can tell this story about Orage at a party at
Bynner's, with Mary Austin. This is really very funny. Orage, of
course, was a provocative person. He was a disciple of Gurdjieff.

Teiser: I didn't realize he was in the West.

Adams: Oh yes. We were very good friends, and I have an excellent
picture of him.

Well anyhow, they were at Bynner's and Orage was giving a
little seminar discussion in which he said he figures that the
value of literary work is entirely what you were paid for it — he
was that kind of a person. He'd say these provocative things, you
see.

V. Adams: Always stimulating conversation with him!

Adams: So Mary Austin said, "I dispute this." He said, "Well, Miss Austin,
history seems to bear this out." She said, "I dispute that." He
said, "Well, Miss Austin, that's what I believe." She said, "Mr.
Orage, do you mean to say that if I sell a production novel, or a
story for the Ladies' Home Journal, for five thousand dollars that
that's more important than my books on the Southwest, my creative
series, my creative work?" He said, "Yes. If you sold it for five
thousand dollars, I would say it was more important." She said,
"Why, Mr. Orage, I would rather prostitute my body than do that."
He said, "Don't worry, Miss Austin, you couldn't." [Laughter] Dead
silence! One of the greatest stories I've ever heard, and I was
right there when it happened. Oh, that's the kind of thing that
went on down there all the time, and Bynner was just about blowing
a cork. He was very, very kind, very intelligent, a very considerate
man, and he couldn't laugh. I could just see him sort of holding
back. That was really a great story.

Teiser: Was working with her difficult?

186

Adams: I never had any trouble with Mary. She wrote an iron-bound contract
on the book with the idea that among friends a contract should be
severe and nothing left to argument. Can you remember one episode
that wasn't pleasant?

V. Adams: No.

Adams: She was mad at you once, because you didn't have lunch ready for
the working man — that's right.

V. Adams: I don't remember that.

Adams: A man was working in the garden, and you said you'd have lunch, and
it was twelve o'clock and it wasn't quite ready, and she said, "Oh,
the working man has to have his lunch right on time." But she
liked you much better than most people.

V. Adams: I don't even remember that.

Well, I remember the trouble I had trying to get things ready
for the working men [in Yosemite] when I was eighteen, but this was
after I had gotten married. I just don't remember.

Adams: That's the only thing. Let's see — she was mad at me for something
else. Oh, I wrote a letter to the Yale Press saying that it was
all right with me to do something extra to the text of The Land of
Little Rain, but you'd have to check with Mary Austin. And her
letter to me was, "You have no idea of the terrible thing you have
done. You should have checked with me first before you wrote the
Yale Press."

V. Adams: She stood on her rights.

Adams: That was perfectly ridiculous, but that was the end of that. I
mean, we were all very good friends.

V. Adams: She was awfully nice to us; she was really.

Taos Pueblo, Continued, and The Land of Little Rain

Teiser: For the Taos book, did you show her the photographs and she followed
them with the text? How did it work?

Adams: No, no. She did the text and left me alone. The text doesn't

relate to the photographs. It's an essay on Taos. It's very good.
I think we really should reprint that.

187

V. Adams:
Adams :
V. Adams:

Adams :

V. Adams:
Adams:

V. Adams:
Adams :
V . Adams :
Adams:

V. Adams:
Adams:

V . Adams
Adams :

I think so .

I think Morgan & Morgan could do that.

Well, Jim Holliday was very interested in having the Book Club do
it.

I still think the artist

No money in the Book Club, dear,
deserves payment.

Well-

There are lots of things that you'll never get paid for anywhere
else that you could let the Book Club do, and of course, the Book
Club does beautiful things.

They do a beautiful job.

But when it comes to a person who's still a professional —

I still would like to see a thing like that done by the Book Club.

Well, it would never get out to the people,
small, tight membership, which keeps it.

It just gets to a

Well, that's true. But it would be kind of nice.

I think there's thousands of things done in the twenties, thirties,
and forties at the Grabhorn Press — like Mark Twain's letter to his
lawyer and laundress, you know — completely inconsequential things.
And done up by such as John Henry Nash in expensive style.

We don't have very many Nash things, you know.

No. I thought he was terrible; a fake. Grabhorn was one of the
greatest printers that ever lived. But if you were very wealthy,
you could say, "Well, sure, we'll let the Book Club do it, and give
it as a keepsake." But I'd like to see that Taos book done as a
facsimile by the Morgans, and I bet they'd sell twenty-five thousand
copies. And the people would see it, and I'd make some money. I'm
getting along. I have to begin to make some money and salt it
away, so I can — afford the papers that have my reviews in them.
[Laughter]

I have plenty of things that we could do. I have early pictures
of the Sierra Club, camp pictures, and groups of the early people,
and little episodes — ideal Book Club stuff. I mean, if I was just to
give my reminiscences of John Henry Nash — well here's the thing: the
Taos book [Taos Pueblo] . Bender had gotten John Henry Nash to agree
to do it. Bender said, "I'll subsidize it." I went over to see

188

Adams: Nash and he said, "Well, I've got the end-papers for it," which
were a great big stack of Spanish parchment — you know, Gregorian
chant music sheets!

"But," I said, "Mr. Nash, Taos is Indian, not Spanish."
"Pueblo, pueblo — that's Spanish." [Laughter]

So I went back to Albert and I said, "This is hopeless. This

guy doesn't know what he's talking about. We can't have a Gregorian

chant as the end-paper." He said, "Well, I guess we'd better talk
to old Grab."

Then there was a very interesting episode there, because [Edwin]
Grabhorn did not print that big a spread as a unit. He printed them
this side and that side, and for some reason they weren't lined up.
And so when Hazel Dreis begins to bind it, she finds that the pages
are misaligned; they will not be parallel in the binding, you see.

V. Adams: Does that show? Or was she able to correct it?

Adams: Oh, you couldn't do it. Grabhorn said, "Why, this is absolutely
crazy. It is absolutely accurate." She laid them out, and he'd
made them a quarter of an inch off. Well, this wouldn't do Grabhorn
any good. We just had enough paper left to print it. And he sent
it to another and larger press [William Eveleth's] and sat over its
production.

But even the greatest people, you know, can make terrible faux
pas. And he had never printed anything bigger than what the press
would take. So he thought that if he fed this in, then reversed it —
not a really work and turn system, but a reversal. And it wasn't
aligned. So you have to imagine that as the pages became misaligned
the misalignment would accumulate in the binding!

And poor Hazel! I remember the perspiration on her forehead.
She said, "I can't bind it. There's no way to bind it. They don't
pull. I'd have to cut every sheet, and put them in and correct
them, and that would cut down the sheet size." And she was
absolutely right.

Teiser: Was the book itself a great success?

Adams: Oh yes. Sold out, and it's worth a fortune now. I don't know what
it's worth. You'd get a thousand, two thousand, anything you want.
One of the rarest books there is.

Harroun: It's a beautiful book.

Adams: It sold for seventy- five dollars, I think.

189

Teiser: But then, on top of that great success, you turned your back on
that type of photography?

Adams: On that type of pictorial image. I didn't exactly turn my back on
it, but I changed. Now the difficulty is — and this is a very
important thing — I can't make what I call satisfactory prints from
most of those negatives, because they were made for another process.
That was empirical in approach. I didn't know what I was really
doing in those days. It was all by trial and error. And I can
print the "Woman Winnowing Grain," and the "Ranches de Taos Church"
and maybe one or two others — like the New Church — I can print those
well now. The others I just can't print on the modern papers.
They're not sharp enough; they're not decisive. That's why just
printing the Taos book again wouldn't work. But if you made
facsimile pictures — took them to an engraver to make a facsimile
plate — and did it as a reprint, in a smaller format — it could be
very nice, I think. It's in the public domain now, so anybody can
do it.

Teiser: You didn't copyright it?

Adams: It's copyrighted, but the copyright only runs twenty-eight years.

Teiser: And you can't renew it now?

Adams: No, no. In fact The Land of Little Rain is in the public domain,

and John Muir's writing. You could do a book of The Land of Little
Rain. You could do it by etchings or drawings or photographs —
anything you want.

Teiser: That was published in 1950. How did you happen to decide to do it?

Adams: Well, this meant so much to Mary Austin. I loved the country and

I had so many pictures of it. I'd like to do that book again; most
of those pictures could be much better reproduced. Because I think
that's quite an impressive book. There are lots of things I could
add to it.

Teiser: Were many of the photographs taken before, or were they done for
this purpose?

Adams: Well, they couldn't be done after the book was published! They all
had to be done before. But for ten years we thought about it. As
I say, the text was public — after her death. And the heirs have
no right to it. In fact, if there were any heirs you should
ethically advise them you were going to do it, but there aren't
any. That's an ethical point. Say that Ella Young had done a book
of poems , and I wanted to take the poems and make photographs for
them, I wouldn't have to pay anybody anything. But still, you would

190

Adams: feel, ethically, that perhaps her heirs would have some rights, so
you'd make a token payment. You'd put something in there for them.
But you can't do it in royalty. That's a personal decision. It
does not have to be done.

Teiser: The work on The Land of Little Rain, then, was done over a period
of years — your photographs?

Adams: Oh yes. Many photographs over a long time. And I've done things
since then of the same areas.

More Southwest Friends and Experiences

Teiser: You met John Marin in 1929, according to Mrs. Newhall.
Adams: That's right. At Mabel's.
Teiser: Had you known his work before?

Adams: Oh, very slightly. He was a funny little man. He was very shy,

mouse-like. And I met him first in a bare room; he was laying out
paintings, and they were absolutely beautiful. It was obvious he
didn't want to talk. And then you've read Nancy's thing about the
piano [in The Eloquent Light]. Well, after that we got along fine.
But I know that Marin would go out and would sit around for two or
three weeks never doing anything, just looking around at the
country and then suddenly distilling it, and in one morning doing
ten, fifteen, or more watercolors — using brush, fingers, thumb,
everything — just pouring these things out. I think he's one of
the greatest artists we've ever had.

[Interruption — discussion of details of coming exhibit at
Metropolitan Museum]

Adams: Let me see, there are some things in New Mexico — Well, much later
I did a series of pictures for the Boy Scout Camp at Cimarron.
That was left by a very wealthy man, who was a parody of rightist
virtue. But it was a very moving thing, and a very distressing
thing, in a way, to see busloads come in from all over the country,
disgorging these kids who'd never been anywhere with any mountains.
Cimarron 's is a low place in the Sangre de Cristos, east of the
mountains.

They would set up their pup tents, and they'd have to go
through all the Boy Scout rituals. And then they'd be taken out
on trips. Unfortunately it's a rather uninteresting area — it's
rather arid. There's only one peak that looks like a peak. The

191

Adams: rest of it's great Colorado-type slopes. I stayed there for three
weeks. I liked the story, but it was awfully difficult, because
the environment was so dry and barren.

Get a bunch of kids from Alabama and Rhode Island and dump
them out in the wilderness and see what happens. It rains,
thunders — oh, it was terrifically stormy, you know; the worst hail
storm I've ever seen was in Cimarron. I have one gorgeous photo
graph of a thunderstorm and clearing clouds, and the wind was so
strong that I had to hold the eight by ten camera down. The
photograph isn't sharp for that reason, because it's vibrating.
But we had hailstones right at the Kit Carson museum as big as
golf balls. And this terrible roar begins, and I'm in this place,
and I knew the car was closed up, and I said, "Well, here goes the
old Cadillac!" That radiator hood will go right to the moon.
Everything bounced off the car; there wasn't a single dent, but
it killed crops. It did a lot of crop damage. When you see hail
stones that big, you get a bit concerned.

Teiser: Were you photographing the kids too?
Adams: The kids, the camp, and the landscape.
Teiser: What was the end result of that?

Adams: It came out in the Boy Scout magazine — big article. Strictly a
professional job, and a very difficult subject to photograph.

In the early days, Frank Applegate and I would tour all
around. We went south of Albuquerque and way up into the Chama
Valley, and visited lots of places. And with my ferocious lack of
documentation ability, I just don't have any real record of it.
Saw a major part of northern New Mexico, and many moradas that no
longer exist.

The roads were unbelievable. At that time, the major
population of the villages north of Santa Fe was Spanish-American;
there was little English spoken. And the Spanish is a very
interesting Spanish, I've been told. It's a bastardized
conquistadore Spanish of four hundred years ago. They've had
scholars from all over come and try to study this particular
Spanish dialect that's used. And there were people at Chimayo
that had been to Espanola, twenty miles away, but had never been
to Santa Fe, thirty or forty miles away, in their whole lives.

I visited the Los Alamos school when it was a school, and it
was just like a camp in the high mountains with log cabins — big
log cabin buildings. I can't remember the design. But it was a
very remote place — a rather special place for kids. This was
called the Los Alamos Ranch School, I think that was the name.

192

Teiser: The Los Alamos School — was that originally an Indian school?
Adams: No, it was a boy's school.
Teiser: Private boys' school?

Adams: When the Manhattan Project came into being, they bought this

whole thing out; of course, during the War I think the school had
closed down. Well, what they did was to draw employees from all
over the area, and the brighter young people from these villages
would go up there and work. And that disrupted the village life —
everywhere. It created a different economic picture.

And now the villages are in, I would say, a rather horrible
state. Lots of delinquency, vandalism, nothing really going on,
nothing made, you know. Chimayo is the top place. They have
Chimayo blankets and the Santuario.

It's important to say that it's Spanish-American and not
Mexican, you see.

V. Adams: They have Anglos and Spanish-Americans in the Southwest.

Adams: And for many, many years — it still is, I think — the government

documents in the legislature were bilingual. But as I say, there
were many times when Applegate and I would go out to the remote
places and there wasn't one person around with whom we could talk
English. There are a few of the older people remaining.

V. Adams: Santuario was, I thought, emotionally very nice when we went this
time.

Adams: Yes, it was good.

V. Adams: There were people who went in with their little children into that
inner sanctuary.

Teiser: Where is that?

V. Adams: Santuario is a place north of Santa Fe.

Adams: It's called the Santuario de Chimayo. Chimayo is a town.

V. Adams: But the chapel has an inner place, a little deep hole with mud that
they feel is healing.

Adams: The hole didn't seem much bigger forty years ago — I don't know what
they do. [Laughs]

193

V. Adans: But here are these people — these Spanish-Americans — coming there

from all over the Southwest and taking their children in; they all
brought back little bits of mud. They'd have a paper bag or
something, I noticed, when they went out, to take the mud home in.

Adams: I remember, the last time I was there, I happened to come on a
very old Spanish-American lady, and she hobbled in and then she
touched all of these things on the railing, and altar, and gave
her Hail Marys in Spanish. And boy, she had a lot of stamina!
She went through that whole building and out the back. That was
her last visit — this was the feeling of finality. She came from
a hundred miles south.

V. Adams: Saying goodbye to all these things known in her youth.

Adams: Yes. Most of these people were very provincial, and as I said,

many of those people in Chimayo had never been as far away as Santa
Fe.

V. Adams: Of course, but that changed after they had the buses to go over
to Los Alamos .

Adams: Then, of course, the whole thing blew up and changed. But there's
still Trampas —

V. Adams: They still have faith in these places, and that's what was very

exciting to us. Beaumont [Newhall] said, too, it was very touching
to him.

Teiser: Has it changed greatly physically — the country and the buildings?
V. Adams: Fewer old wrecks and more tin roofs.

Adams: Very little; I was amazed. I think it's still quite a remarkable
place.

V. Adams: It's beautiful country.

Adams: Canyon Road and Camino del Monte Sol are still pretty much like
they were forty years ago.

V. Adams: It's like here in Carmel. We want to keep the artichoke fields.

In Santa Fe they want to keep the old things. They do pretty well.

Adams: Albuquerque is a mess, in a way.
V. Adams: Well, that's a big city now.

Adams: But where my friends the Newhalls live — La Luz — it's stunning; a
fine architectural development.

194

V. Adams: Modern adaptation of Pueblo style.

Adams: Oh, it's beautiful design — like nothing I know of, actually. You
can go up to Santa Fe in less than an hour. Parts of Santa Fe are
commercial, but still there are these old beautiful things to be
found.

Teiser: The quality of the light there — is it special still, or was it ever?

Adams: All of this "quality of light" business is an illusion in a sense.
Santa Fe is at seven thousand feet. So you have a different
intensity — relationship between sunlight and shadow — because the
sky is a deeper blue, because it's that high elevation. And the
reflection of the ground is different. It's a little lighter than
in most areas in the country, I think. Now apparently the quality
of the light in Greece is due to the fact that there's water vapor
in the air and there's a fairly soft light, and there's a lot of
white. So you get reflections and general illuminations. It's a
very intangible thing.

San Francisco has a special light too. When we test Polaroid
film, we get totally different results than we do in Cambridge.

Teiser: Even though all measurements are the same?

Adams: The measurements are not the same, that's it. If you design a

film for a camera for somebody to make a snapshot, and you design
it for Cambridge and Boston, for many days of the year you're
going to have a different quality than if you design it for San
Francisco or Santa Fe.

Teiser: What do you do then?

Adams: Well, this is one of the great problems. I mean, you get more

contrast. Out here, we always have — of course, today's a fog day —
I mean this is a gray day, but this is a purer gray than you get in
Boston or Cambridge, because there would be smog mixed with it
there. You'd get a little yellower light there. This is very
neutral light now. So, it's a matter — well, if you want to be
technical about it, it's a matter of Kelvin degrees color
temperature. As you go into higher altitudes, you get a higher
and higher Kelvin. The sun is a little brighter, the sky is a
little bluer, and the shadows, of course, are much bluer, because
they reflect from the deeper blue sky.

Then you get to a water vapor atmosphere, like the tropics or
Florida or the east coast, and you have a lower Kelvin, and you
have a little warmer shadows — a softer luminance range. There's
nothing mystic about it.

195

Adams: But Santa Fe gives you the feeling of being on top of the world.

It's at seven thousand feet, like Mexico City. Albuquerque's five
thousand feet. So there is a fundamental difference. There's less
atmosphere — I think one- third less — for the sunlight to go through.
You're getting about one-third the oxygen, maybe a little less.

That's why some people have trouble. The ballet came, you
know, to Santa Fe for a performance. The previous performance they
gave was, I think, in Dallas, and then they were flown to Albuquerque
and came up to Santa Fe and, without acclimatization, gave their
performance. They just collapsed, were actually falling down on
stage. Here they were going to the extreme of physical effort
which was all right under normal conditions, but at seven thousand
feet they couldn't do it.

And Stravinsky, when I saw him and heard him conduct his
Persephone at Santa Fe, was really- exhausted. But they warned him;
he'd been there about a week trying to get acclimated.

I get acclimated very quickly. I've been so used to altitudes.
You know, twelve thousand, ten, Yosemite, sea level, back and forth.
It took me a little longer this time in Albuquerque — a couple of
days. I can "pick up" very quickly. But a lot of people have an
awful time at high altitudes.

Teiser: Is there smog there now that you didn't see before?

Adams: Yes, there is. There's natural smog in Albuquerque, because that's
a rather big city. But the worst thing comes from the Four Corners
power plant. They're coal stripping. They've got one plant;
they're going to have five. And the one already puts pollution
out which is seen in the Rio Grande Valley all the way to
Albuquerque. And Durango, and the Colorado —

V. Adams: That's why they fight strip mining.

Adams: It's a terrible thing. In fact — well, it's not that strip mining
isn't bad enough, but it's the fact that they've absolutely spent
no money in smog control. They say they have, but when you see the
smog coming down, for the first time, to Taos, Santa Fe, and
Albuquerque, you know that there's trouble. There are going to be
five plants. It will be the largest single power producing area,
but I don't know what they're going to do when they run out of coal.
They've drilled deep and gotten the beautiful spring water, which is
the clearest water in the country, which it is assumed feeds the
Hopi Springs, and they're using that to sluice the coal.

So the whole Southwest may be degenerating to a point where it
really will be lost to us forever.

196

V. Adams:
Adams:

Better enjoy it while you can.

Teiser :

V. Adams:
Adams :

Yes. An unhappy desert,
there's so many people,
management.

It's very serious. But that's because
But who wants genocide? I'd rather have

Well, can you think of anything else for Santa Fe? Did you tell
them the story of when you got tight, and what Mary Austin said?

Oh yes. There was a big party at Witter Bynner's one night, and
I drove Mary Austin over. And then I got to saying, because I had
some consciousness left, "Well, who's going to get Mary Austin
home? I can't drive." I was very concerned that somebody get
Mary Austin home.

The next morning I said, "Well, Mary, I guess I lost my
reputation last night." And she said, "You certainly did. But
you lost it so quickly that nobody missed it." [Laughter]

I think I read in Mrs. Newhall's book that Ella Young was
encouraging you to continue writing poetry.

Which he did.

Oh yes, she did. Because I wrote very romantic poetry, and then
suddenly burst out into very avant-garde poetry, and then quit.
But I studied a great deal of literature and I was pretty good on
the sonnet.

Teiser: You write good prose too.

Adams: Well, I never should be known as a poet.

Teiser: Did Ella Young succeed in encouraging you? Did you write more
poetry as a result of her encouragement?

Adams: No. She said I looked like Yeats, and she thought I could write
like Yeats — not to look like him, but write at a certain level.
But that was not something which was accepted. Well, if I didn't
have music and photography, who knows? I might have done a
cookbook. [Laughter]

I remember one time coming back from a party at Witter Bynner's
very late, and it was quite a party. In the morning I go out and I
find a flat tire, and I open the trunk of the little Marmon we had,
and here is one of Bynner's guests all curled up fast asleep. Of
course, somebody 'd put him in there when he was very tight, and why
he didn't suffocate I don't know. It was a horrifying experience
to see this body in this trunk! [Laughter] I pulled him out, and he
was breathing, and he said, "Where am I?" I said, "Well — "

197

V. Adams: Horrible!

Adams: Yes. That was really quite a story.

Teiser: Maynard Dixon spent some time in the Southwest. That was not at
the same time?

V. Adams: He was in Tucson. I don't know that he was in Santa Fe, particularly.

Adams: Tucson is another story.

Teiser: When were you there?

V. Adams: We visited Maynard and Edie.

Adams: Maynard and Edie [Edith Hamlin] Dixon.

Teiser: That was later.

Adams: I did some work for Kodak in Phoenix, and then went to Tucson for
the Guggenheim project to do the Saguaro National Monument, you
know — the cactus forest. And then our very dear friends Maynard
and Edie Dixon were there.

Now Edie is one who can tell you a lot — Mrs. Maynard Dixon.
Edith Hamlin now. And she could tell you a lot about me because
we're old, old friends.

Oh boy. Can't think of anything else.

Harroun: Did you know Georgia O'Keeffe before? Or did you meet her down
there?

Adams: I met her down there. And then of course we got to know her really
well in New York after 1933.

V. Adams: Stieglitz, you know, gave Ansel an exhibit in his rooms [An American
Place] there. He'd practically given up doing anything with anybody
new. But that would be a long story.

Adams: The New York story's another story entirely.
[End Tape 8, Side 1]

[Interview VII — 27 May 1972]
[Begin Tape 8, Side 2]

Teiser: We were speaking of the Santa Fe period. You mentioned several

times A.R. Orage, who seems to have been a most fascinating person,
and I know very little about him.

198

Adams: Well, I didn't know too much about him. I met him in San

Francisco. He had been in New Mexico. He was a disciple of
Gurdjieff.

Teiser: I didn't even realize he'd been in America very much. Did he live
here in the later years of his life?

Adams: For awhile he was here, yes. I really can't tell you any more than
that. Some mystically-minded people are very much surprised. They
say, "You know Orage!" Orage was a guru, I guess, to many people.

Teiser: Yes.

Adams: He was also a provocative discussionist, if you want to use the
term.

Teiser: What did he look like?

Adams: He looked like a British orchestra conductor. [Laughs] He was
smooth shaven. I can't exactly remember just what he did look
like. He was rather intense. He had a very literary air about
him, but he also had a self-assured manner.

Teiser: He was apparently rather well known for having edited a literary
review in London.

Adams: Yes.

Teiser: Was he interested in photography, or all the arts?

Adams: I guess just in general. I can't remember. I did a picture of him;
not a very good one.

Teiser: Did he live in San Francisco for a time, or did he just come and go?

Adams: I think he visited — a month maybe; came to the University at Berkeley
and Stanford, visiting and lecturing. It's hard to remember the
details.

Let's see, about Santa Fe, I've been back quite often, and last
time, I had a good visit with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, and
appeared with Beaumont's group at the University, and then gave a
talk at the Art Museum in Santa Fe; and of course I'm a great friend
of Laura Gilpin's, the photographer.

Teiser: Is she still photographing?

Adams: Oh yes, she just got a grant to do a book on the Navajos in the

Canyon de Chelly. She's eighty-three, and still gets around with
a cane and a little arthritis. Perhaps you saw that wonderful

199

Adams: picture of both of us when we met at the museum — by a news

photographer — giving each other a smack, and we were laughing.
It came out on the front page of the Herald , the Albuquerque
paper.

Teiser: Was the Taos book — the success of it — a factor in your decision to
make photography your profession then?

Adams: I think it was. But of course I changed my style; but it did have
success. And Stieglitz was very much impressed with it. It was
one of these things that sort of proved quality. You see, one of
my objectives is to maintain a very high image quality, both in the
originals and in reproduction. So I have been quite influential in
getting the reproduction of fine prints paid more attention to.

The Reproduction of Photographs

Adams: We did develop, I think, some of the finest reproductions in the
world in San Francisco with the Walter [J.] Mann Company. Mr.
[Raymond] Peterson was the engraver. And that was for the letter
press process.

Now you have several processes: intaglio and raised dot, and
there's callotype and gravure. But the half-tone process means
that the image is broken down into dots of so many per inch usually
lined up at 90° but not necessarily. And in letterpress these dots
stand up like little mushrooms; they are like type.

Teiser: Your interest in printing is a subject that we've got notes on.
I came across an article by Francis Farquhar in Touring Tropics,
February 1931, in which you had a lot of photographs — a whole
section of photographs in sepia on brownish paper. Do you remember
it?

Adams: Yes. That's probably rotogravure.

Teiser: Yes. The article was "Mountain Studies in the Sierra." In the
introduction Mr. Farquhar said, "From the beginning of his
professional career, he has closely associated photography with the
other graphic arts, especially printing. In selecting the process
for an individual picture, he keeps in mind not only the quality
of the negative and the photographic print, but also the relation
ship of the picture to its ultimate surroundings. It is this
comprehension of kindred arts that has made Ansel Adams so success
ful an illustrator."

You had then long had an interest in printing?

200

Adams: Oh yes. Through Albert Bender I knew many of the printers. I had
tried various reproduction processes and made some study of it. At
that time, the so-called offset was a very bad process of very poor
quality. The letterpress was the finest. Of course, you could get
gravure, but gravure is very tricky. It is an intaglio process.
It was expensive and it wasn't really too accurate.

This is the American Earth and Cedric Wright's book, for
instance, were done with that process, and it's really not too good.

Teiser: Was that sheet-fed gravure done by Charles Wood?

Adams: Yes. Well, no, Charles Wood was much better than that. This was
the Photogravure and Color Corporation of New York. Charles Wood
was very good, but I think he realized that there were problems,
because the scale of gravure — certain tones had a tendency to "jump"
around the middle values; they'd go higher or lower in tone. And
the whites had a tendency to block.

Now, Stieglitz's gravures that appeared in Camera Work were
hand-done, and each one was put through the press and watched and
made like a fine print. It must have been a very costly process.

Teiser: I remember the Grabhorns used to use Meriden Gravure.

Adams: Yes. Well, that was one of the worst going for any continuous-tone
image. They could use it for etching or a litho or woodblock, and
they were really beautiful. But when it came to the continuous
tone of the photograph, it was just awful. The reproduction looked
like putty; it couldn't hold photographic values at all.

Teiser: You're speaking of Meriden?

Adams: Meriden. Grabhorn did a lot of reproductions that weren't from

photographs. He really didn't like photographs.* Whenever he made
a reproduction of a photograph it was terrible, because he always
did it with some kind of a soft process on rag paper. A photograph
needs a smooth surface. But the etching and the lithography, etc.,
Meriden would do beautifully I

*See interview with Edwin Grabhorn, Recollections of the Grabhorn
Press, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, 1968, pp. 59-60, and interview with
Robert Grabhorn, Fine Printing and the Grabhorn Press, Regional
Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California,
1968, pp. 54-58.

201

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser;
Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :
Teiser;

Then of course, as I say, the letterpress, the three-color letter
press, is the great Bruehl-Bruges process you see in the old
Vanity Fair magazine — that was really four-color where the red
plate is used as black plate as well and strengthens the image.
If you look at a color picture with a microscope, you see that the
colors rotate at certain angles. It looks like a mosaic. Those
of course were of the raised dot. But you get down to a minimum
dot size, beyond which it's just collapsible and it won't stand up
in the press. I think people don't realize that all the dots have
the same density of value. It's only the area of the dots in
relation to the white space that gives the fractional tones.

What's the highest screen you have used?

Well, the one that gave us the best results of all was the 133-line
screen. Now that didn't give as much definition, if you look very
closely. It's only 1/133 of an inch; one hundred thirty-three
lines to an inch. The deep tones wouldn't block up. And if you
stop to think about what happens, if you have no dots you have pure
white paper, then if you suddenly jump to a dot you get a "contour
line." What is called "highlighting in the forehead" — as sometimes
you see it — shows abruptly no tone to tone.

Then when you get into the two-plate offset, then you have a
very much finer progression of values.

It's two blacks?

It's two "blacks." And it's called duotone because at one time
people used color in one of the plates, and an awful color could
result. But if it's two plates — two blacks — one black ink may be
slightly warm or cold in tone. And then they can make exposures
of "long range" and "short range" and the two plates together will
hold a greater range. And that's the system used now. The letter
press is practically a lost art.

Walter Mann, whom we interviewed* and have known for many years, of
course took great pride in having done work on your photographs.

Oh, he did a beautiful job on the plates.

Everyone has said you had your own specifications,
are very careful, aren't you?

I imagine you

*See interview with Walter J. Mann, Photoengraving, 1910-1969,
Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of
California, 1974.

202

Adams: Well, I tried! There's two ways: you try to make the print which
will fit the process, because the negative that the engraver makes
has to be through a screen. He gets his negative in screen form.
In other words, if you look at it in a magnifying glass you see
the dots of varying size. And that gives a certain limitation in
his exposure scale. It goes to a maximum of 1.4, 1.5 on the scale.
My prints go up to 2.0+ on the log scale: more than a hundred to
one arithmetically. If I want to make a print for an engraver, he
tells me, "I want the print value to be 1.4 and I can handle it."
He can intensify the blacks. He can increase the contrast. But if
the print range goes beyond the range of his film, he cannot hold
the textures in high and low values. The whites go bleak, block
out, or the blacks block up, or both!

Teiser: When your prints were being reproduced by letterpress, did you
always see the proofs?

Adams: Oh yes. I'd try to make the prints the way they'd want them.
Then they'd pull a proof. The letterpress engravers had the
advantage of being able to selectively "etch" the high values.
And we would work for sort of gray-whites to get all the values
therein, and then "etch" them; it raises them up to the optimum
point.

Teiser: That was where Peterson came in?

Adams: Yes. He was wonderful in that; a very sensitive craftsman!

There's a very amusing story when we were doing the Edward
Weston book, My Camera on Point Lobos. Body [Warren], Edward's
assistant, was watching everything with a hawk eye. She went down
to the plant one day, and there was this rather interesting picture —
it was just sand and rock. And she said, "Well, Mr. Peterson, I
don't think you got this one! It's really flat. It's original
sparkle is gone. I think we'll have to do that again." And he
said, "Well, Dody, you're looking at the original print." [Laughter]
He actually improved it. He made this image come to life. The
original print was a little soft; Edward made it that way. She
thought that was the engraving, and that didn't remind her of the
print. But here was the reproduction, which was beautiful in tone.
That's really one of the memorable moments!

Teiser: Well, do you make a different print for reproduction than you do
for exhibit?

Adams: Oh yes. You have to. In fact, when the prints are in the solution
they always look brighter and lighter than when they're dry. And
papers don't all behave the same, so you have to learn how to use
them. Then you have to say, "This is going to be reproduced and

203

Adams: I've got to keep it within the scale." That's why I have a

reflection densitometer. I can check to see that I haven't over
printed. Underprinting I don't worry about too much. I'll show
you something very interesting — [Walks away and voice trails off.
Returns.] These are proofs of a monograph that Morgan & Morgan are
doing.* These are good proofs. These are to be printed in New
York. The one of the tombstone is fantastic. This portrait is a
little too dark, see. Now we'll tell them they made that too dark.
They have to make another plate. The face is too dark, the shirt
is perfect. My print is all right in this case.

This one is one of the most extraordinary reproductions I've
ever seen. They kept the pure white and all the details on blacks.
But that was a soft print. This was a flat print which they
expanded. And they did beautifully on these, except this one was a
flat print, and they overdid the expansionl

Teiser: Is that the Golden Gate one you were speaking of yesterday?

Adams: Yes. This one before the bridge. But you see, this is good; this
is excellent, beautiful. This is a beautiful thing.

But here's where I told the engraver to expand the contrasts,
but he overdid it a little. They'll have to learn — so do l! I'll
have to give them prints that are a little stronger. Psychologically,
this is a warm tone, and here's a cold tone, and you see it's just
terrible; loses all life, distance; but from the same plate!

We're not going to make it quite as brown as that. To show
what I mean, this is just as clear, but it has no life. Now, for
instance, just look at the aspens —

Teiser: My word!

Adams: So, the psychological effect of color, well that's the thing you have
to know about. Talk to them. With engravers and most printers, it's
the same general thing. It's a terrible thing, to have someone who
doesn't know anything about quality come in and make remarks! If
you can give them a constructive pattern, all may be well.

Teiser: Did you do that when Lawton Kennedy was printing your work?

Adams: Oh yes, we'd watch everything. Crocker was very good that way.

They really printed very carefully, and they watched the press runs.

*De Cock, Liliane, ed. Ansel Adams. New York: Morgan & Morgan, 1972.

204

Adams: It would come off the press rather fast, and the printer was
anxious to get it right. You see, in letterpress many things
affect the result. The "makeready" has to be changed, and the ink
may change. With offset, once it's set up, it goes through very
fast; so you sit there, and they put a sheet in, and they run many
sheets and then you study the inking, and once they've got it,
there's nothing else you can do. And if that plate isn't what it
ought to be, it's pulled off and made over.

Now, gravure is on a copper plate. And in the American Earth
book, there were "four up," four pages on a side of a sheet. And
if you changed one letter of that, it cost seven hundred dollars
because you had to change the whole plate. But with letterpress,
you'd just lift out the plate, or the line of type; the corrections
were simple.

I had contact with Albert Bender and all the printers and the
Roxburghe Club, and many reproducing processes. So from the very
beginning that's been very important to me and my work.

Teiser: On the University of California book, Fiat Lux, wasn't that

originally to be done by sheet-fed gravure by Charles R. Wood?

Adams: That was originally planned, and it was done by Wood, for

Doubleday. You see, the University Press couldn't print it. It
was planned to have 286 pages, but Reagan got in as governor and
there was too much economy imposed, and everybody at the University
was scared to print it, so they turned it over to a publisher. And
in order to make it commercially feasible at the publishing level,
they had to reduce it to 196 pages.

Teiser: But the printing was still done by Wood?

Adams: The printing was still done by Wood. I'm sure of it.

Teiser: And by gravure?

Adams: Yes, and some of it's very good.

[Guests enter; interruption. Returns with book.]

Adams: Colophon says it was printed by the Cardinal Company, under the
supervision of Charles Wood. Designed by Nancy Newhall and
Adrian Wilson. But here is a case of approximate quality. You
see how granular that appears? That's really a very smooth
photographic image. It is pretty good in the whites, but certain
tones are not right — see those shadows. This variation in tone
wasn't that extreme in the original. It "jumps" in stages.

Teiser:

Does that do violence to your original?

205

Adams: Yes, it does, very much. There's nothing much I can do about it.
But something like this, just black and white, is just beautiful.

Teiser: What is it that's in the University Archives — prints or — ?

Adams: Proofs. I have all the negatives. And they have a set of prints.
They own the negatives, but I keep control of them, because they
want prints all the time. I've got to turn them over to them
some day. But as long as I'm around I'd like to make my own
prints.

Teiser: That's a wonderful book, I think.

Adams: It could have been better, but it's not our fault. The University
really tried.

Teiser: I suppose books are often compromises unless you publish them
yourself.

Adams: Oh yes. Going up in price, terribly expensive, mechanical

problems, paper problems, labor problems. We did so many things,
went through so many trials. That's why I have a very skeptical
point of view about the convention that things are better in
Europe. They have good craftsmen, but they can go just as haywire
as anybody if they're not under supervision. The best printing
I've ever seen has been right in San Francisco. In Japan and
Europe it's cheaper, except that you have to go there to supervise
it, and you lose copyright privilege — there's all kinds of tangles
in the thing.

Teiser: Working with George Waters, as you do now, with duotone, do they

do the same kind of correction of plates that the engraver can do?

Adams: Well, they can't, no. That's two-plate litho. So he's got to do
it in his negative. In other words, I've got to give him the
right print. We can't monkey with the plate as much as the
letterpress men did. It's very complicated. Waters is doing
beautiful work.

Teiser: Adrian Wilson said that they often do quite a lot of correction.
He said once they took an automobile out of a picture —

Adams: Oh, that's correction in the photograph. I have several photographs
that are very badly damaged. I couldn't sell a print that showed
marks and defects. Walter Mann Company has a very fine retoucher —
an "airbrush" man. He can correct my print. He takes out these
defects. You can't see them. You don't have any sense that
there's any retouching at all. There's nothing worse than re
touching that shows.

[Interruption]

206

Adams: We correct defects and spots. And it would be perfectly

possible to take out an automobile. You can do that. They have
to commercially sometimes. But if I have a fine photograph,
. I'm not going to take out something important but I might take out
a defect. Although, frankly, if I had a beautiful image and there
was a beer can in it, I'd spot that out if it had no relevance to
the picture.

And then there's all kinds of thousands of little things that
happen in photographs when they are this small; they look like
spots; then you take them out. When you enlarge the image, they
may become part of the structure and should not be touched.

Viewing Photographs

Adams: There is the famous matter of Lincoln's mole. Lincoln had a mole
on his face, and in little pictures, the mole looked like a spot.
When they made a nice 11 by 14, it looked like a mole. Now the
ethics are — you don't take the mole out as such; you take it out
only if it is not readable — just a distraction. The eye picks up
tiny little things all out of proportion to the size of the image.

Teiser: This brings up the viewing distance — and how things are supposed
to be looked at.

Adams: Well, that's pretty complicated. The standard reading distance

is fourteen or fifteen inches from the eye, and what is called the
circle of confusion or the disk of confusion is the largest disk
that appears as a point at that distance. When that's about 1/200
of an inch in diameter it's accepted as sharp. Some people say
1/100 of an inch, and it has something to do with the reading
distance. But there comes a point when normal eyes cannot see a
disk other than as a point. Then the image is "sharp." That's a
very great simplification because that doesn't always hold. And
there are several things that are always expressed as basic
principles but for some reason or other are very flexible.

I'll never forget in San Francisco, I had a 16 by 20 print
of a picture taken near Aspen. And it wasn't really sharp. It
was all right in 8 by 10, but it did not look right in a 16 by 20.
But a friend, Dr. Overhage, sitting at the far end of the room —
almost as far as that lamp — looked at this picture and said, "Why
doesn't that one seem sharp?"

Teiser: That's about how far?

207

Adams: Twenty or thirty feet. Now, there's no way to define a degree of
sharpness — it mathematically approached the disk of confusion
limit. Here, the illusion of sharpness brings in the term
"acuteness." And scientifically that is the micro-density
relationship — that is, the sharp difference of one tone to another.
The curve appears as an abrupt "cliff" from black to white. Now
with a picture that's out of focus or not sharp, there's no direct
transition. You take the curve from black to white, that would be
only 45° or more. Now you take a really sharp photograph and the
curve is very abrupt. The eye in scanning it senses this thing.
It doesn't necessarily see a disk and a point; it senses the very
sudden difference in value. It's like an electronic scanner on an
airplane at great altitudes that is used for photographic purposes.

The difference is there. I was making an enlargement the
other day, and I can stand six feet away, and I can "judge" that
focus. I don't try to think about it. I just scan the thing and
judge. And then I go over it with my magnifier and I'm usually
right. If I try to think, try to look at it and get down to see,
"Now do I think this is the grain or it isn't?" it's not so accurate.
This is a very interesting psychological factor.

Then the other thing is that the ideal perspective — say I
take an eight by ten picture with a twelve inch lens and make a
print, I get the perfect perspective effect if I look at it from
twelve inches away. If I enlarge it to twenty inches in length,
I can be twenty-four inches away. Well, I have a picture taken
with my 23 1/2-inch lens of the "New Mexico Moonrise" enlarged five
times — that's enlarged to fifty inches — my heavens, that should be
in correct perspective at one hundred inches, roughly. But I can
walk right up to it, within reading distance, and marvelous things
happen; the whole thing opens up. The psychological effect you see
is not just a physical — optical — one.

Teiser: When people read books the size of Fiat Lux*, do they hold them at
arms' length, do you think, or do they hold them at regular reading
distance?

Adams: I think regular reading distance. They hold them in their lap.
You see people pull a picture away sometimes, but that's to suit
the individual eye.

Teiser: Last Sunday, you were showing the students from Foothill College
a very large print of a bull —

*The page size is approximately 10" by 13 1/2".

208

Adams :
Teiser;

Adams:

Teiser:

Adams :

Yes.

Well, wasn't that supposed to be a poster?
be way up on a wall somewhere?

Wasn't that supposed to

Well, it was used as such, and Europeans use a lot of stuff in
posters, and they make big prints, and they're hung on walls in
galleries. They have what are called "carrying power" when they're
that big. A subtle little print like one of the Polaroids would be
lost in a gallery of that kind.

But they don't care much for either print quality or spotting —
it's very strange. The Europeans have a very poor concept of what
we call print quality. They achieve things that are very theatrical
in a very intense way — a very human way — I'm speaking of the good
ones now, not the picturesque postcard shooting. But what we call
print quality is like a beautiful piano and beautiful playing.
They get the image and the meaning of the image, and primarily
through reproduction because people in Europe don't buy prints.
There are very few prints bought in Europe; very few fine prints
around. You see European people come with a portfolio mostly of
loose, unmounted prints. They get dog-eared and cracked, and it
doesn't make any difference to them.

If that big picture of Half-Dome had a crack in the paper, I
couldn't use it. I threw away four of those before I got one that
was right. That's our standard! It's just like if I were a
pianist I wouldn't let a record out with a false note. I might
make some mistake, but if it's obviously a booboo then I would
retape it. I don't know whether that's a logical comparison. What
is quality? A great many photographers think that my work is a
particular school of photography — very precious, where you overdo
the print quality; that that isn't really necessary; that the only
thing that counts is the image. Then you counter by saying that
the image isn't excitingly presented. It just doesn't get over,
it's not an appropriate or compelling print.

That bull picture is probably an appropriate print for the
way the man saw it. I can't imagine making a so-called fine print
of it because the image itself isn't a fine image. It's grainy and
harsh. I don't know what you could do with it.

Well, if you kept it down to a little tiny size, you wouldn't
notice it so much.

The photographer gave me that, and I should mount it, because it'll
get ruined. And as I say, it would be very good at a distance.
But now my big prints are made for another purpose. They're big
prints for their own sake, and you're supposed to be able to go up
close to them. But you can't do that with most blowups.

209

Teiser: I think you were saying that the prints for The Family of Man were
poor.

Adams: Oh, they were mostly terrible. That exhibit was a great blow to
photography. They were just casually made. The pictures were
selected for some theme, and the images themselves were mostly
disgracefully bad, and the prints commercially done — no sympathy,
no feeling for it at all. They were terrible. From our standards,
they were just "commercial." The exhibit put photography back
twenty years!

Now, there are several things that happened to augment this
thing. The average blowup is terrible. The whole thing is con
ceptual, a big idea may need big prints. You should really
photograph it — see something that you visualize as a large print.
Well, when you do that, you must have a certain optical precision.
If it's a poor negative, it just won't project. But sometimes, you
have tonal qualities that you can get by with an image that isn't
too sharp. But so much depends on the enlarging light.

There's quite a display up in Yosemite in the Mountain Room of
rock climbing pictures. It really is quite an achievement. They're
huge, and I know they're done with a four by five camera. They're
much better than any I've ever seen. They're relatively soft. The
definition is absolutely superb.

Well, I can go on forever on these things.

Light Sources and Light Measurement

Teiser: There's point source light, and then there's — ?

Adams: There's condenser light — varying phases of condenser illumination.
Point source uses a condenser; "point source" means a light of very
small area. The average condenser uses a frosted globe, so it
gives you a little more scattered light, but it still is primarily
columnated. And diffuse light is just light that comes from a
diffusing area.

Teiser: You were asking the students the other day if they used condenser
enlargers.

Adams: You can usually tell, because you get blocked whites, high values.
It's a matter of a pencil of light striking a small area of the
negative and scattering. A certain percentage of this gets to the
print and the rest is scattered beyond the picture area. And the

210

Adams: result is that the image of that particular high density is
proportionately less than the actual diffuse density of the
negative in that area. If you have enough shadows to hold low
values, it doesn't make too much difference.

When you get a diffuse light, every section of that negative
has myriads of pencils of light striking it; it scatters the light
but it maintains its diffuse-density scale. In other words, if
the negative scale is one to 1.7, then the image scale would be
about 1.7 on the enlarger easel. The print could be soft. If you
hold that scale, it would be soft. It could also be very rich in
development and toning and still hold the scale, but the actual
depth of tone would be greater. So we get up to an image scale of
log 2.3, which is one to 200 arithmetically. You see, the densities
are measured in log-to-the-base ten numbers. Some people are very
confused by it. I just sent a memo to Polaroid. There's some
people there that are a little mixed up. They've set their
reflection densitometer to zero (0.0) for the white paper; it is
really about 0.08. For several years, because of this setting,
they don't get the same measurements I do from prints. I've got a
well-calibrated Macbeth densitometer. They say, "We'll take your
density and subtract this." Well, that's all right, but — when you
think of the arithmetic equivalent, when you subtract logs, you
divide, so you're getting a variation of one value to another,
which can be a very perplexing thing, you see.

Well, the best explanation of this is if 2.0 is 100, and 1.0
is 10 and you subtract 1.0 from 2.0, you get 1.0, and that would
be the log difference and represent arithmetic 10. Now, 2.0 is
100, 1.0 is 10; subtract 10 from 100 and you get 90. But 10 into
100 is 10, and not 90. (Maybe this is irrelevant for your project.)

Teiser: What would be the disadvantage of translating all those into
ordinary arithmetic expressions?

Adams: I'm thinking very seriously of doing it, because — we talk in mixed
ways. The engraver says, "I want a print of 1.5 range." That's
roughly one to 32 arithmetically. So, we can talk about a range
of about one to 32. The Zone System would work out just as well
with arithmetic numbers. But H & D (Hurter and Driff ield) , who
developed the sensitometer, just established the logarithmic value
convention because it gives a much simpler curve than you get
arithmetically, although it can be thought of as geometric. I
think that sometimes people just perpetuate errors, because for
the life of me I don't see why you couldn't use arithmetic numbers.
I don't understand it. If you've got 100 and then 200, you've got
a range of one to 2. You can express one to 2 in logs — one to 2 in
logs would be a value of 0.3. If 0.0 is one, 0.3 would be 2, 0.6
is 4, 0.9 is 8, 1.2 is 16, and so on.

211

Adams: You get to read the curves easily. I don't have any trouble with
them. I can read them. You can get a lot out of just looking at
the curve — its shape. But as that log system is geometric, and
every step is 2X, I don't know why we can't call the steps 2, 4,
8, 16, and so on.

Teiser: Perhaps when everything goes on the metric system, all that can be
changed.

Adams: Yes, but they won't change that. But it will be wonderful with
computers. You can write in any log base you want.

That's why the camera can be a terrible thing. The camera is
now taken for granted: own the most expensive camera! You assume
if you buy it, it's got to work. The construction of them is
really a technological marvel. And the lenses are superb; nothing
has been made like them to date.

Technological Advances in Photographic Films

Teiser: You were speaking the other day about film bases and so forth. And
it occurred to me that you talked about the changes in printing
papers but not much about the changes in films and their emulsions.

Adams: Well, there's a progression from the beginning. Let's take the wet
plate. First go back to the daguerreotype and the calotype. Then
the wet plate and its collodion emulsion, it's sensitive to blue
light only, and it had to be exposed and developed when wet.
Collodion lasts a long, long time — it's perfectly good. But it
had that great disadvantage.

Then back in the 1880s they developed the dry gelatin plate,
and that was also sensitive only to blue light. Then they added
dyes to the emulsion and rendered the plate sensitive to green
light. That was called orthochromatic . The function of the dye
is that while the silver halide responds only to blue light —
radiant energy — the dye responds to green light, absorbs it, and
transmits an energy to the halides, an amount of energy sufficient
to reproduce images of both blue and green colors. Then came the
panchromatic plate which had green- and red-sensitive dyes. And
infrared requires another dye.

Later, of course, everything went panchromatic, although you
can still get ortho. You can make panchromatic film of ortho type
by using a minus-red filter. And then you can make panchromatic
film blue-sensitive by using a C-5 filter — which cuts out all color
but blue. The emulsions used to be fairly "thick." Nobody thought

212

Adams: of them as being thick, they were just that way. And they had

what is known as the "gamma wavelength effect." The short wave
lengths scattered very quickly near the surface and the green
penetrated, say, half-way (just for the sake of argument).
Therefore an image in green light would have higher density, and
then the red rays would penetrate much further. The contrasts
would be rather high with a red filter. That was apart from the
color separations. So in the old one-shot cameras, you took three
pictures at once, through the three different filters — blue, green,
and red. You developed the green image normal, the blue image more,
and the red image less to get the same contrast, or what is called
"gamma" in the negatives. And that achieved the required color
balance. Some of the earlier plates and films were extremely
contrasty when made with a red filter. White clouds would be
"burned out," and the sky would be very dark.

With Polaroid, which gives a surface image, you can use all
the filters and you get only a small change of contrast. You get
a change of values — the sky will be darker, the greens will be
lighter, depending on what filter you use. But the whites will not
increase in density to any extent. The shadows will be a little
darker with a yellow, green, red filter, because they reduce the
blue reflected light from the sky.

So most of our present film is known as thin-emulsion type;
one film made by Kodak, Super-XX, has the older characteristics.
It's quite valuable in some work, where we can expand by prolonged
development. With an emulsion we can't expand as much because
there is less silver in the emulsion. But on the other hand, we
get a sharper image.

Teiser: When did that change come about, generally?

Adams: I would say, thin emulsions, within the last ten years. I know

when I got the first thin emulsion pan film I was so mad I called
up Kodak and I said, "You put that on Kleenex! I can't handle it.
It just folds up in the developing tank! When are you going to
use a heavier film base?" They said, "Mr. Adams, it's just the
same film base, but the emulsion is that much thinner." They said,
"We are changing the film base. We have to." It was too flimsy.
You couldn't feed it into the developing reels. That may be a
great shock to people who always thought the emulsion was always
a very thin coating — whisper thin, you know. But it isn't; it's
quite a structure.

[End Tape 8, Side 2]

213

[Begin Tape 9, Side 1]

Teiser: As I remember, at the time the thin emulsion films came out, there
was some claim that they were of higher acutance.

Adams: Yes, they are. Well, I guess we can say that light scatters from
a silver grain at a cosine 4 angle relationship to the direct ray.
Some say it is a spherical diffusion. In Polaroid, the earlier
positive-negative prints, the developing layer was fairly thick,
so you had a loss of acuteness. You still would get all the
resolution; if you look at it under a microscope you see so many
lines per millimeter. But because the silver passes at an angle
through the thickness of the developer, a difference of point of
emergence to the point of exit, you'd see there'd be quite a little
diffusion effect. With the old Ansco Superpan Supreme, which was
a magnificent film in large sizes, when used in 35 millimeter size
you couldn't get a sharp image except with a very long focus lens.
With short focal length lens, the light would come in at an angle;
the loss of acutance related to that angle. And the further away
you were from the center of the film the worse the loss of defi
nition would be.

Teiser: Meanwhile, the speeds of the film emulsions have...

Adams: They've improved speed. But of course that again is, in a sense,
misunderstood. The emulsion speed is a pretty fixed thing, and
you don't change it by development as some think you do; the ASA
remains the same on the exposure index. I have to operate and
work with Tri-X at 250 speed to get the density range I want. It's
advertised at 320 and 400, but that's losing some shadow densities.
Plus-X is advertised at 125; I use it at 64. Of course this means
less development; you get a very smooth image.

Now if, say, 64 gives me a zone I value — proper density value —
and I want to shoot at 125, that moves the exposure to Zone II; at
250 it moves up to III, and at 500 it moves up to IV. And that
means I must increase development, so what is there is a general
increase in density in other areas of the image. Also an increase
in grain. You've seen many pictures where you have no shadow
detail at all — say pictures taken at night, groups in nightclubs
or theaters. They're actually empty shadows. They're shooting
that film at something like maybe 1200, and ferociously over
developing it, and they lost all the shadow values.

Teiser: I suppose you could be accused of overexposure and underdevelopment ,
but that would be a subjective judgment.

Adams: Well, at higher speeds, developed in conventional process, I think
it's Kodak's 8000, which is scientific film, there's not good image
quality. Land has the 10,000-speed film for the oscilloscope,

214

Adams: which does its work beautifully but it couldn't be used very well
in nature. Land actually had film at ASA 20,000 — could photograph
by starlight. Twenty thousand ASA is a pretty fast — you'd have a
hard time not overexposing that under any normal lighting
conditions.

Teiser: Are attempts being made to increase speed in a quality sense?

Adams: Oh yes, they're doing that all the time. But you come into some
very complicated physical laws, I guess — quantum laws apply. I
don't know; I'm not enough of a mathematician for that. But you
see, there are two big objectives. One is to get away from silver.
Silver is getting scarcer. Strangely enough, there's never been
anything as light sensitive as silver halide. And you know that
a halide is silver combined with bromine, chlorine, fluorine, or
iodine. And, there's been nothing that can equal that. They've
been experimenting with color-sensitive dyes and other strange
concoctions, and they haven't gotten very far with it.

Electrostatic photography like Xerox has got some continuous
tone, but it's not very good for general purpose; the equipment is
cumbersome.

The next step will probably be light amplification. That is,
a cathode tube like they use in astronomical photography. With it
you are picking up the impulse of light, and you can magnify that
as many times as you wish. You have it also when you g6 to a
modern x-ray fluoroscope. They don't look through you any more
and see your "shadow" on the screen. You're getting one-fiftieth
of the dose, and they look at a television screen. This is
because the very faint image that is generated can be amplified
electrically. That may be the next step — where you'll have a
very, very faint image which might be amplified in the camera or
might be amplified out of camera. We don't know. But it will
come.

Teiser: What speed films were you using when you started photographing?

Adams: Oh heavens, they were down to 25, 40, 32 — I think 50 was a pretty
high speed. Then they got to 100, and everybody gasped. The
picture of the Golden Gate [1932] was done on Kodak Super Pancho-
press, which I think had a Weston speed of 50, which would be 64
ASA. Pretty grainy, but it had fine quality.

Teiser: Those were the kinds of films that Oscar Barnack, who made the
first 35 millimeter "candid" photographs, was using.

Adams: The first miniature, yes.

215

Adams: I have made prints from old negatives. I have a print of Arnold
Genthe's picture of Chinatown- -1904. It was done with a postcard
Kodak, the film speed of which was probably 16. And this is as
good as anything Cartier-Bresson ever did. It's absolutely
magnificent. It is also a beautiful image. I mean, tonally.
We got a gorgeous print out of it. Now that was just an ortho-
chromatic film. And it was a very curly film. Noncurling it said,
"n.c.," but it was better than the earlier film.

"The Negative is Like the Composer's Score"

Adams: There's always this problem of the photographer having to adjust.
If I have a 35 millimeter camera, I see things a certain way, in
relation to that camera. And I would compose, if I were a
composer, for certain instruments. I wouldn't try to write some
thing for the flute that would sound better on the pipe organ. (I
mean, that's an extreme case.)

Then you go through all these processes. You just try to get
the image that you want. Sometimes you know what it is, and
sometimes you don't. You just feel your way. And a lot of photo
graphers only view something — they don't really "see" it. They
see you sitting there and they go "click." And then they have some
empirical experience, so they get some usable exposure, but they
still may have an awful lot of darkroom fussing to do. And many
times they have no concern whatsoever for tonal quality or
composition.

I had a girl working for me once who wanted to be a
photographer. She'd done a little work. She made some proofs of
my pictures, and I couldn't recognize them. Now, this is an
interesting thing. She had absolutely no print sense. Could not
make a print that had any value at all. And I was printing my own
pictures of national parks, and I couldn't recognize them.'
Because I hadn't seen them just as a picture of the Big White
Throne, but as a value composition. This thing would come out
looking just awful.

Teiser: When you have someone working with you that way, do you ordinarily
have a print to guide them by?

Adams: Well, I don't let them print. Liliane De Cock was the only one
who really made very fine prints. And Gerry Sharpe could make a
fine print. And I think my new man, Ted Organ, can make them, too.
But he just thinks mostly of the work in his own field. But I have
to make my own fine exhibit prints. Sometimes, with the special

216

Adams: edition prints, I can start it off, then have my assistant repeat;
but even that has a very subtle difference. It's very hard to
explain, to put your finger right on the problem. Edward Weston's
boys made prints from his negatives. They were a little more
brilliant, some of them were really "better," but in the main they
don't look like Edward's prints. They don't have quite that
feeling. It's very hard to describe.

I had to make an enlargement of one of Edward Weston's
negatives for an exhibit. I had the print — it was very good — and
he loaned me the negative. I had his print to go by. And I had
one of the most difficult times in my life trying to make a print
that felt a little like Edward's. I can make a print — no trouble
in that. This was a pretty good negative — not too sharp; he'd
never enlarged, you know. But to get that peculiar quality that
was Edward Weston's — to even approach it — was tough!

And the same thing with the Clarence Kennedy pictures of
sculpture. He had the most extraordinary feeling in the marble
quality of his images. I've tried everything under the sun. I'm
printing, I'm bleaching — I can't get that same "feeling." Of
course, what really happened is that he didn't process things too
accurately. In twenty, thirty years high values have bleached out
a little. The high values as they are suggest sparkle and trans-
lucence, which is in a way an accident!

Teiser: That brings up the whole point of what is a negative, and how will
it last? What should it stand for? What should its life be?

Adams: There's the recent trend (of course, like most trends, everything
is overdone) for the "archival" as they call it. People are just
going out of their minds in trying to process and protect the
negative and print images, making the image totally permanent.
Well, two hypo baths and selenium toning will make an image
extremely permanent. If you mounted it on a bad board or subjected
it to sulphur carrying boards, high acid boards and slip sheets,
and other chemical conditions, you could do damage.

Now, I have some of my earlier negatives and prints that are
fading; the ones made before we used the two fixing baths. But I
seldom find a negative, even some I developed in the field, that
shows deterioration. The early negatives, of course, were on
nitrate base, which was very dangerous, because under humid
conditions, if people didn't keep them properly, they would
deteriorate into nitroglycerin. Kennedy had a whole bunch of
negatives with paper separators in a drawer, and all of them were
in almost liquid condition! If anybody would come there with a
cigarette a dangerous fire could occur.

217

Adams :

Teiser ;

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :

And I remember one time an air force captain, Albert Stevens, gave
me a great big roll of outdated aerofilm. And he said, "Look, I
just have to throw it away. So why don't you take it? You can
cut it up and use it. It's fine stuff. It's just outdated and we
can't use it; it'll last for a year or two if you keep it cool."

Well, I kept it around for three or four years, and I thought,
"I'd better dispose of this," so I took it out in a sand lot in
back of my house, dug a hole, and I put the cannister in it. I
had an old flashpowder wick; I stuck that into the roll of film,
and lit it and went to a safe distance. The fire looked like Old
Faithful. The thing blew up, in roaring flames.

The Cleveland Clinic disaster in its x-ray department was of
similar nature. The fire started, and then thousands of x-ray
films, of nitrate base, exploded.

Then the manufacturers changed to acetate base, which is much
more stable. The Golden Gate picture, for instance, has shrunk
over a quarter of an inch in both dimensions. The acetate base
has more stability.

Now Kodak has what they call the Estar base, which has
extraordinary stability. It's a plastic — well, so's acetate,
because they're all plastic of a kind.

We were looking in the Friends of Photography gallery here in
Carmel, at photographs by Frederick Evans. One of the captions
said that his wife required that all of his negatives be destroyed
on his death or her death.

No, they really weren't, because they've been making some prints
from them. I guess his son kept them. Well now, maybe they copied
his prints.

It said they were made from positive slides for projection.

That may be right,
copies from those.

There were positive slides, and they could make

I wonder, though, why would anyone want the negatives destroyed.

Well, it's a great problem we all have. Now, with Weston, his sons
could carry on his work, in a sense. Now, I have a great many
Yosemite pictures which are very valuable commercially for the
family. And it would be terrible to destroy those. But take that
white post and spandrel picture ["White Post, Columbia, California"]
I don't know who else could print that just that way. I have a
certain feeling about it, and it takes quite a technique to get it,
and if it wouldn't be my work, what good would the negative be? It

218

Adams: would be very easy to destroy all the negatives, except the ones
that have historic value or scientific value, or some commercial
value. But my "Moonrise" [Hernandez] print, unless it were made
by me, it would have no value. There are hundreds of them. And
so, if something happens to me and I can't print them any more,
what do I do? My Portfolio V negatives are all canceled. I have
an old canceling machine I got from the Wells Fargo Bank I

Teiser: That's the Varian portfolio?

Adams: No, Varian 's was Portfolio IV. Portfolio V was limited to 110

copies only. That means I never can print any more of the images.
The other day I found two or three prints, and I had to tear them
up because they're not supposed to be out. And I have quite a
number of them — extra ones that were mounted in case of disaster.
And they really shouldn't be around, because my contract and my
ethics say that there were just 110 things printed, and one hundred
for sale. But I have a few temporarily. For instance, an accident
happened to the one a client had; I could supply another. And I
asked for the damaged print back, and that was destroyed, and I
sent them another numbered the same. But I can do that up to a
certain point, you see. But I'd have to have the other one back
and destroy it, so there' d never be any more than the stated number
of prints available.

Teiser: So, in effect, the negative stands for nothing in itself?

Adams: No. The negative is like the composer's score. The print is like
the performance, but it's not a score that can be performed by
others. We say that. Now, of course, it's perfectly possible
that a photographer could come along and get more out of my prints.
But the question is: would it be me? And the collector, the
purchaser, and the expert, they want the original of the artist's
work. Whether the other person doing it would do a better job is
an ethical question that's very important.

Sometimes we get too precious, but it depends. I sell .a print
for, say, $200, $250. The price for a 16 by 20, after this fall,
is going to be $350.* Now, that has a rare value. I mean if a
person buys a print by me and pays for it. That person is not
going to be very happy if he sees another print out that's almost
like it but doesn't have my signature. That's an ethical point.

*After September 1976 it is five hundred dollars for all prints
16 by 20 or smaller. [A. A.]

219

Adams: As far as the creation of a photograph goes, if you can divorce

it from that element, then you should make as many as possible for
as low a price as possible, if you want to get the message around.

Clarence Kennedy, after all his sculpture pictures were out,
claimed he could do prints for fifteen or twenty cents apiece!
He'd have a student printing them. But I think he tried it, but
the prints didn't look like his pictures. There are all kinds of
pictures of these sculptures around. There wasn't a thing he
photographed that hadn't been photographed a thousand times. But
he got something remarkable in his images, you see — a "spiritual"
interpretation of the marble. Then the whole concept related to
the original art element, and the creative photographic element.
For instance, there are many pictures of Death Valley that are
much sharper than anything Edward [Weston] ever did. Edward didn't
worry too much about true sharpness. He didn't enlarge, he didn't
have very good lenses until the end. And it didn't make any
difference with the contact print — an old rectilinear lens gave a
beautiful image. But you enlarge it two or three times, and it
begins to "go to pieces."

But as I say, there's nothing worse than a very sharp image
of a very fuzzy concept. [Laughter] That's one of the illusions
that people have about Group f/64. Actually if we had stopped
down everything to f/64, we couldn't make many enlargements,
because at f/64 the diffraction patterns enter and the image isn't
sharp. It just has great depth of field, which gives an illusion
of sharpness.

Well, I think the reason that I went to the Art Center School
was to teach, and the reason that the Zone System was developed
was that I found that I couldn't teach anything but just the way I
did it myself. And, as a musician and teacher, I was trained that
you had to find out what the student had to say and help him say it
his way. Because all hands are different and minds are different
and feelings are different, so the function of a good teacher is to
draw out, not necessarily to make the student imitate. One of the
most successful teachers in Berkeley, Miss Simpson, taught with
two pianos. And that's one of the most dangerous things you can do,
because her students sounded just like she did. She would play a
phrase and they would imitate it. But a teacher like Benjamin
Moore, for instance, would never play for the student. He'd always
ask you, "Now, do you really think that you have fully developed
that phrase?" etc. And would give me other descriptive symbols,
but would never play.

Frederick Zech was a pupil of Von Billow. He was the most
incredible technician. When he was eighty years old he could do
chromatic double sixths which would put your hair on end. And he
would sometimes show off, you know. "I want you to get your double

220

Adams: thirds," — [makes a sound] "rruup," straight chromatic," and your
double fourths" — "rruup," you know. And I'd go home with these
things in mind and try to get it. But when it came to playing,
he would talk about the playing, not play for you!

I remember doing some Liszt and he'd talk about everything
in the world from pontifical moods to passion, to many things, but
he never would play. He certainly could play it. He had this
ability as a pianist, but he didn't want me to hear him and imitate
him. That wasn't the job. I had to do it.

Teiser: So he had to teach you basic technique.

Adams: Well, the technique and the style is very complicated, because
they're there and they guide you. That was the whole point of
getting the person facile — but it's so easy to imitate. Some
people play "by ear." They've heard something and they can
imitate it. That isn't true individualism in music.

Well, the same thing in photography. You can set up your
tripod, find the tripod holes in the ground your predecessor made,
set up and do the picture, and you may get just as sharp an image,
and with a lens of the same focal length you'll get everything
optically the same.

Then comes the other thing — what kind of a print? I mean,
how you carry the interpretation. You can lose the sense of your
substance, rock; you can lose the sense of light. I don't know if
I'm making any sense now. This is getting a little bit quasi-
mystical.

Beauty or Therapy

Adams: But the photograph can be beautiful and personal. I think the

sense of beauty in photographs belongs to a romantic age. I think
the contemporary whole art spirit is really negative to photographic
expression in the sense that I practice it (or vice versa) . Very
few people are making what we call beautiful prints, where the
print itself is a beautiful object. They're making images —
extraordinary, complex and sometimes very brilliant experiments.
The image may be interesting, but the print inadequate. The idea
is interesting. The actual print can be very ugly. And whether
the idea would ever admit to a beautiful print being made of it,
we don't know.

221

Adams: And of course a lot of the philosophy today is camera as therapy —
that was one of Minor White's points; presuming that everybody has
problems and is a bit on the psychologically sick side. You had to
explore yourself — little outgoing motivation. I think that bothers
me more than anything. The fact of doing something for the outer
world — as Beaumont Newhall said, "After all, pictures should be
things to look at, not just experiments in vacuum cleaning your
psyche." [Laughter]

Teiser: Well, it's communication.

Adams: It really is communication, and the communication depends pretty

much on the state of mind or the condition of your compassion, and
I think the trouble today is that there is a lack of compassion,
which means mutual understanding and acceptance. These artists
are so flagrantly — well, I could choose the word — dominating. It's
a very difficult word to find. It's not a matter of being selfish,
not a matter of being opinionated, but simply — I guess you'd use
the words "flamboyant insistence."

But one of the reasons that the painters have been holding
onto these big galleries is that they're painting gigantic pictures,
you see. Pictures half the size of the wall.

And I saw in Pasadena a beautifully hung show — a lot of
contemporary things which were just structures — attached to the
wall; some came out on the floor. And we had a joke here the
other day, because there was some photographic paper that had not
been developed. It had just been taken out — in long rolls. And
of course they've turned color. It's a kind of a blue and a brown.
So I thought if I could just set that up on a wall and exhibit it.
During the whole exhibit, it would be different every day. It
would change, fade and turn color. And it was just as interesting
as some of the [Mark] Rothko things. [Doorbell rings — people enter]

Astronomical Photography and Videotape

Adams: Now, this man that's coming in is at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
And he brings me moon pictures and Mars pictures. And he's a
fascinating gentleman and very much interested in photography.
I'd like to introduce him, because he represents another phase of
work I'm interested in, moon and the Mars photography. I have
quite a collection. He's Stanley Crotch, Ph.D. He is an analytical
chemist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. They come up
every once in a while to see us, and they're a wonderful family.

222

Adams: But anyway, the description of astronomical photography in plain
and simple form is complicated enough, but now we have image-
amplification and the radio telescope responses, plus satellite
photography; the computer numerical system such as used by the
Mariners where the picture is scanned and instead of an "image"
they send numbers — it's a kind of a super-densitometer — the numbers
relating to the areas of density of the image. And these numbers
come in a continuous stream so they can be picked up by the
computer and put in sequence and line. The scanner goes in one
direction for the image. When it reverses it transmits the read
ings of the instruments on board, then it reverses direction again
for the image and again returns with instrumental information.
When you consider the whole electronic image is about twenty
millimeters square, or 20 by 30 millimeters (and there's hundreds
of lines scanning in that small area), and it travels thirty-five
million miles or fifty million miles, you have a miracle. As
somebody said, the energy received is much less than that used by
a very small fly climbing up the window, and yet these pictures
come out with amazing precision and clarity.

Then the image is put in a computer and translated into
actual tonal values and can be "enhanced." The acuteness can be
enhanced by the computer. The first moon pictures were produced
that way. You saw the actual grains of sand and soil — actually
fantastic. Hence the illusion of extreme definition through
computer enhancement. That can be used in ordinary photography
too, I imagine. It's really quite something!

Teiser: I've been wondering about the videotape system, where you put the
image on tape.

Adams: Oh, that's a tremendous new field.

Teiser: Has it any possible future application to still photography?

Adams: Right now it is not so much still as moving. But there's no

reason it couldn't be still. The whole cassette concept has really
changed the world of television. Your live shows may be the
exception. For instance, we could have a converter set on which
we could show about anything we wanted, black and white or in
color. We could rent or buy tape. And we could have the whole
opera or a travelogue or a scientific lecture or a dissertation.
Anything we wanted, we'd just put in this device and it is
revealed on the screen. I've seen some trials and they're
absolutely beautiful. Now there's no reason why I couldn't go out
with a video machine that will give me an image, you see, on tape —
a creative image. That could be moving or static. It could be a
photograph of a photograph! And they did some very fine things in
reproductions of works of art.

223

Adams: The first time I saw this tape system they used a van, and they

did a picture at Glacier Point. It was a television series, and I
was in it, and I had to come out and talk. They had focussed on
the landscape, and they used filters just like I would. When
finished with this, they said, "Well, I think we have it. Would
you like to come in and see it?" I said, "Come and see what?"
"Come see it in this bus." In this little room were two or three
seats and a screen, and we saw the "take" and it was absolutely
beautiful! The mountains were clear and sharp. The only thing is,
my face was in shadow. It was out of the exposure range, and they
could not hold values in the shadows. We had to do it all over
again, with lights and reflections, and build up the shadow. It
was a fantastic experience; the final results were remarkably well
balanced.

All of that is one form of imagery, and photography is a form
of imagery. I mean, what is a photograph but an image? Now we
are doing three-dimensional photography. There was a show in San
Francisco by Michael Bry. I was quite impressed with these big
translucent panels hanging — moving in space with images on them.
I mean, all these things are very moving if they're well done.
First, they're all valid experiments in the laboratory. Now how
many experiments are worth taking out of the laboratory and showing?
The trouble today is they're showing too many things that still
should be in the laboratory. As if I would rent Carnegie Hall and
play the Clement i octave studies, you see. [Laughs] It's not that
you wouldn't have a student gallery, but I'm speaking of public
communication. Some things are so far-out, so far undeveloped that
they don't belong in exhibits. Too many of our exhibits today are
of that character.

Teiser: Is there any reason why you couldn't use videotape in a still

camera?

Adams: Well, no, the principle is — well, what is a television camera?
It's a cathode tube, which is scanning four hundred lines, or
something, per second. I can put it on tape; I can compose, as I
would a movie. I don't see why it couldn't be simply wonderful,
why I couldn't go out with this camera and a finder, and whether
this camera couldn't have the adjustments that we have with
conventional equipment. I don't know why it couldn't. They use
perfectly beautiful optical lenses, just about the same as camera
lenses. I'd never know the difference if I used one on the camera.

I saw the big CBS studio when I was on the "Today" show — the
lens, for instance, about that big (four inches across!) working
about f/2. Twenty-four thousand dollars for a zoom lens — some
fantastic figure — I don't think that's accurate; it may be a little
less. But it was a very impressive amount. And they're picking up
these images in color and when you see them on the monitors in the
television control room they're really beautiful. They're sharp.

224

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams:

So most of your color, and even black and white, transmission you
get is always of lesser quality than what you'd get in the station.
Except when you have cable television; then you have, of course,
much more accurate delivery.

So we're getting into another field now, but television is an
image process. Being an image process, it has a direct relation to
photography. And maybe the future of photography will be very
closely allied to this technique. And I would very much like to
have a television camera and do a tape which would go on a cassette,
which would be a creative experience.

Have you done any motion pictures?

Oh no, very little. I did a series in Yosemite years ago with a
Zeiss Moviecon, which was a beautiful piece of equipment. It was
like the Kodak 16 camera, and it had a shutter adjustment up to
1/1000 of a second, so you could take separate frames of 1/1000
per second exposure. I did details of water with a very high
shutter speed on panatomic film and had that developed in para-
phenylene-diamine, and had a print made and developed also in para-
phenylene-diamine . It was the most beautiful image you've ever
seen in your life. Beautiful color, warm, rich, and sharp. It
burned up in the fire we had at Yosemite. It was only one hundred
feet, but it proved a point to me. And then I never got back to
it.

Brett Weston is home,
tomorrow?

Why don't you interview him,* maybe

We were going to talk to Henry Gilpin —

Oh yes, that's good. Well, Brett Weston called me and told me he
was back.

I tried to get hold of your neighbor here, Dick McGraw.
Oh, he's gone, he's on a trip. Just left.

I'm thinking of — Fred Farr can give you conservation ideas —
so can the Owings . I think you ought to do a tape on both Margaret
and Nat [Nathaniel] Owings. They're remarkable people, and they

*A series of interviews with some friends and associates of
Ansel Adams was taped. See Interview History.

225

Adams:

have really a big background in everything,
in conservation and the environment.

They'd be very fine

Teiser:
Adams :

At this moment, I'm sort of anathema to a large group of
environmentalists because I insist on using common sense, and I
won't get emotional about some of these things. I'm not a push
button liberal or environmentalist. I'd like to go on record.
[Laughs] Things are getting really out of hand, and the backlash
is going to be very distressing. People like Margaret and Nat are
very wonderful, sensible people.

You mentioned Garrod, and we'll try to speak to him.

Yes, Dick Garrod. He's the city planner at Monterey and he's good.
McGraw is good. I think he — well, you get another side. He's an
extremely critical person. We are very old friends, dear friends,
but we scold each other, so he probably will give you some valuable
but slightly negative ideas about what I should have done, and what
I didn't do, and so on.

Rosario Mazzeo, he's quite important.
Who is he?

He's a very fine musician, a clarinetist, and he was the first desk
clarinet with the Boston Symphony, and the personnel manager as
well. And he also is a very experienced photographer, especially
in wildlife. And he's going to do more photography, I hope. Don't
quote me — he's got a very good eye, but he doesn't know yet how to
print. I scold him all the time. But both he and his wife are
extraordinary musicians — she's a pianist. And Rosario 's quite a
force. I mean, he's a very potent gentleman. We've known each
other now for twenty years, and he can give you all kinds of details
of my life in Boston. I introduced the Lands to them, and I
insisted on painting their dining room ceiling blue, which they
liked very much because it made a terrible difference in the Boston
stuffy apartments. This was a kind of Italianate space. I said,
"Well, this room is kind of brown-gray dim. If you just take the
ceiling and paint it blue, you'll have a sense of space." My God,
Katy did it, and it looked beautiful. I kept my fingers crossed,
because I am no decorator! [Laughs]

Anyway, he's somebody you might see, and he's somebody that
really would deserve quite an interview in himself, because he works
very closely with the University and at Tanglewood. Big musical
background, very big. [Interruption]

226

Adams: This is Dr. Stanley Crotch.* This is the oral biography project
for The Bancroft Library. So if you have anything to say about
me... [Laughs] I've been telling them about my interest in
astronomical and satellite photography, and I have a total lack of
technical knowledge about it, but a great interest.

Crotch: Well, you've sort of come in at I guess the highlight of the whole
thing — the renaissance, if you will. And probably the end of it
for a while. We in it can see just another few more years of it,
and that's probably going to be the end of it for a while. Within
probably our creative life.

V. Adams: What about the brilliant things we read about in the paper the
other day?

Adams: Supernova, they said.

Crotch: I don't know much about it. It's not that we don't hear it, but we
really know little more than anyone reading a paper. And you know,
it's only when it comes in the scientific journals that you find
out a little bit more in terms of technical details. It's a very
specialized —

Adams: What was exciting about this was that this was a real supernova,
the first one observed for many years. Now with our knowledge of
radio-astronomy, they know how to really look at such things.

Crotch: Well, the whole field of communications — when these spacecraft get
out there hundreds of millions of miles away, it's no mean trick
to be able to pick up their signal — the radio signal. In fact,
that's the only contact we have with them. And the technology for
being able to do that is really an extraordinary one. Just simply
being able to hear something transmitting with a few watts of power
at several hundred million miles away.

Adams: And the energy that comes in is about equivalent to a gnat slowly
crawling up a window pane.

Crotch: A drunken gnat. lLaughter"] No, the whole technology of being able
to do that — and that of course has gone over into this area of
radio-astronomy — of being able to pick out these extremely weak
sources — is incredible.

Adams: She was asking about photography — extending photography into

different fields. I was talking about computer enhancement, digital
frequencies and —

*See also p. 221.

227

Crotch: I think they're only just beginning now to scratch the surface.
It's really remarkable that the whole thing has existed, maybe,
ten years. It's so new, and it's changing so rapidly as more
people get into it. It's very hard to see it. One doesn't see it
yet as a creative kind of thing, perhaps because the people who are
in it are basically not artistic as such, but are more scientific.

You know, the guys at JPL I the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena], when I mentioned I might see you this weekend, said
you've got to come and see some of the facilities they have there
for doing exactly what you're saying — computer processing.

[End Tape 9, Side 1]

Early Years in Yosemite

[Interview VIII — 29 May 1972]
[Begin Tape 9, Side 2]

[Mr. and Mrs. Adams. Mrs. Adams alone at the beginning.]

Teiser: When did you meet your husband?

V. Adams: I don't know — 1923 maybe. I don't know. You know, my father had
that shop and studio* in Yosemite Valley. Mother died, and I was
taking care of the house. And we had a piano. Not many people
in the valley at that time had a piano. This was an old square
Chickering. There was a ranger-naturalist named Ansel Hall, and
so one day he brought this young man in. He said, "I'm going to
bring in my namesake. And he'd like to play on your piano." And
I thought — you know, namesake . To my mind, it was the last name,
and I kept wanting to say, "Mr. Hall." It seemed to me to be the
natural thing to do. It took me awhile to realize it was the
first name.

Well anyway, Ansel was acting as custodian at the LeConte
Memorial in the valley, and his custom was to take photographs for
a month after this summer in the valley, and then go back home to
San Francisco, and he'd spend weeks developing all the pictures
he'd made. You know, there was no darkroom in Yosemite then. That
was just in the bathroom, you know — things were simple like that.

*The Best Studio. Mrs. Adams's father was Harry C. Best, the
artist, who established the studio in 1902. He died in 1936.

228

V. Adams: Then he'd go back to practicing again. He used to practice eight
hours a day in fall and winter so that — well, when he was really
going on his practicing, he'd start in the morning — his father
would leave for the office about eight-thirty — and then he'd go
into the living room and practice. (This was in San Francisco.)
And about ten- thirty he'd go out in the kitchen and he'd make tea
for his mother and his aunt and himself — that gave him a break,
you see — and then he'd go back until half past eleven or twelve,
and then it was lunchtime, and then he'd practice in the afternoon
too.

Teiser:
V . Adams :

Teiser:
V. Adams:

Adams:
V. Adams:

Well anyway, to go back to Yosemite, he had no piano up there,
and he was delighted at the idea of having one — not to practice on
but to sit and play a little bit. And it took me quite awhile
before I realized that it wasn't only the piano that brought him
down to the — [laughter] Because I just really wasn't emotionally
ready to get interested in anybody, and didn't believe anybody 'd
be interested in me.

So he'd come down — it's about a mile, mile and a quarter,
maybe — from the LeConte Lodge to the old village. He came down
fairly often. He used to make the excuse that he had to go over
to the government warehouse to get something, and they used to
tease him about that. It was his excuse to get out and do something
else. [Laughter]

So that's when I first met him — and sort of the second year,
I was amazed that he was really interested in me. It took me awhile
to really respond. I just thought I wasn't ready for it. And then
when we did get engaged, I went down to see his family in San
Francisco and visited with them. Dad and I lived in San Diego in
the winter time, and so we'd stop by on the way up or down. That's
the first time I can think of meeting his family.

Was he photographing then?

Well, he'd go out for a month on a trip after he'd had the summer
in the valley and photograph, and then he'd come back with the
pictures. He'd go with some other young man and a donkey or two.

At some point fairly early he had started making prints for your —

Shop, yes. He did that. [Speaks to A. A.] Are you ready now,
darling? All right.

[In the distance] Not quite.

Yes, he did. I mean, after we got engaged. Here was an opportunity
to make a little money. Nobody had any money in those days, you
know.

229

V. Adams: [Aside] Ansel, I'm going to go in about one-half minute, unless
you can think of something I can do for you. I can stay —

Adams: You can help by correcting my dates.

V. Adams: No. [To Teiser] Ask me some more, I'm full of facts.

Teiser: What were the pictures he started making that you sold?

V. Adams: Oh, of Yosemite. Not so much of the high country, because I don't
think Dad thought they would sell as well. Pictures of the valley,
and nice delicate little scenes in the forest.

Teiser: Small prints?

V. Adams: Yes. Some were four by five mounted on a bigger card, and some
I guess were maybe eight by ten and ten by twelve, but nothing
like these big things at all.

Teiser: Do any of those still exist? Do you have any of them?

V. Adams: I don't think that I have. I don't know. We'll have to ask

Ansel. It may be that there are some. I know Nancy Newhall tried
to find all sorts of things from early days [when she was gathering
material for The Eloquent Light] .

Teiser: Incidentally, you asked if we'd like to see some of those papers,
and maybe sometime we would.

V. Adams: Well, I know she sent back a lot of things. We'll have to ask Jim
where he filed them away.* There were many things she took east
right in the beginning. Then they had a big fire in Rochester, and
there was smoke damage on some things, and things that I didn't
know what had happened to them turned up to be safe and came back
west again.

But I know there are lots and lots of things, and I've got
pictures and pictures and pictures.

Teiser: We were speaking this morning to Mr. Mazzeo...

V. Adams: The Mazzeos knew Ansel when he'd go to Boston, and I didn't get

east. I had to stay here and run the shop in Yosemite, so I didn't
get out very much. He said he's got a beautiful tape of Ansel's
playing that someday he's going to try to put together. He can't
do it now because of his hands — arthritis.

*A lot of material is now in my vault. [A. A.]

230

V. Adams: [Calling] Ansel, come back now; it's your turn. [To A. A. , who had
come in] Was that '23 when you and I met, when Ansel Hall
introduced us?

Adams: No, I think it was before that. I first came there in 1916. I had
been laid up with the flu, and I read [James M. ] Hutchings's book,
In the Heart of the Sierras, and got very excited. The family was
going to take a vacation, and I said, "Well, why not go to Yosemite?"

V. Adams: Was that the first time they visited Yosemite?

Adams: Yes, 1916.

V. Adams: Because they went almost every year afterwards.*

Adams: None of the family had been there earlier except my grandmother had
in 1870. We were there for the first vacation. I think it was four
weeks long.

Teiser: Was it as good as Hutchings said it was going to be?

Adams: Oh, much core so. Yes. But Hutchings had a definite control,

though — a mood. We took walks up in the Little Yosemite Valley,
and then up the Yosemite Falls trail, and I remember seeing Joe
LeConte running down with his family one afternoon.

Teiser: Helen LeConte** said that he said that you had met in 1916; she
didn't remember, but he said you had.

Adams: It was on the Yosemite Falls trail in 1916.
V. Adams: I didn't realize that.

Adams: We went to the Big Trees. We then left by way of Miami Lodge,
stayed there, and then on to Raymond.

V. Adams: They went by auto stage.

Adams: Coming in you'd take the Pullman at eight o'clock in the morning

from Oakland. You'd get to Merced around noon, and they'd connect
the car to the Yosemite Valley Railroad, and then you'd puff up the
Merced River to El Portal, which was hotter than the hinges of the
hereafter! We stayed overnight at the El Portal Hotel.

*In 1917, '18, '19, and '20. [A. A.]

**Joseph N. LeConte 's daughter. See her Reminiscences, a Sierra

Club interview completed in 1977.

231

V. Adanis: They arranged it so they got to see lots of scenery.
Adams: We came in early in the morning in big white buses.
V. Adams: Well, it's very beautiful coming in the morning.

Adams: Yes, marvelous. And we arrived at Camp Curry. And an old fake,
Mr. [D.A.] Curry, roaming around, greeting people and shouting at
night for the fire fall. It was real circus stuff. And we had
tent #305—

V. Adams: Oh, you did? [Laughter]

Adams: And I think it was that afternoon that I fell off a stump. I got
up on a stump which was rotten. I was trying to take a picture of
Half Dome. I fell off, and on the way down I clicked the camera —
a little Number One Brownie — and got a completely upside down
picture. Mr. [A.C.] Pillsbury developed the film — couldn't
understand how that picture was upside down. "What did you do —
hold it over your head?" And I said, "No, I fell off a stump."
I think from that time on he thought I was a liar. I knew him for
many years .

Teiser: Who else, however, could have got a picture at all? [Laughs]
Adams: It's a good picture. I've got the negative somewhere. [Laughter]

And, oh, I don't know... we did all the things. And then I
came back with my mother the next year, and that's when I met Mr.
[Francis] Holman and went on my first camping trip. Bessie Pond and
the Admiral. . .

V. Adams: Admiral Pond.

Adams: I forget. Bessie [Elizabeth Keith] Pond and a Miss Smith, a Scotch
lady. I guess the admiral [Charles F. Pond] was there, and some
other friend. It was raining; and, oh, Merced Lake was very dismal.
It cleared up that night, and the next morning I remember climbing
up the ridge. We camped between Lake Merced and Lake Washburn at a
bend in the river, and a big glaciated ridge, right out to the north.
I climbed up at dawn, and there were all those crags under Mount
Clark, all shining in the sunrise, and that "did it." [Pause] That
entrapped me forever. We didn't climb Mount Clark that year. We
went to Lake Washburn and Babcock Lake and Fletcher Creek Dome and
returned to Yosemite Valley.

232

Mountain Trips with Francis Holman

Adams: Then the next year I was there with my mother, who stayed at Camp
Curry, and Mr. Holman and I went on many trips. And an old
friend, Mr. Schu, a farmer, was with us. And oh boy, we did some
real scrambles. We got up at dawn and got going with our donkeys.
We would get in at dark and set up camp, and dinner was a mixture
of ants and cinders and hash or whatever it was.

V. Adams: Who did the cooking?

Adams: Everybody sort of pitched in. We had nothing but coffee cans with
wires as holders; we had one frying pan, the coffee pot, and
several kettles — tin cans only. And of course, they'd get all
blackened. So it was quite a job to keep it clean. And then we'd
travel or climb all day.

V. Adams: Where did you go — Merced Lake?

Adams: Oh yes. Well, Merced Lake and Tuolomne Pass and the Young Lakes.
One year, I forget, we got stuck out in the first snowstorm of
the season in October. We had to get out very fast so nobody got
stuck. Went all the way from Young Lakes to Yosemite —

V. Adams: That's a long way. That's a hard day.

Adams: We were a tired bunch of animals and people. It was terrible.

That was more than twenty-eight miles. And the first four or five
miles was through about a foot of fresh snow. And we were scared
to death, because if the snow got too deep, the animals would
flounder in it, and we'd be taking everything off and junking it
and trying to see how far we could take the animals without any
thing in their packs.

And on another trip we went over Isberg Pass to the Minarets,
and all around the Minarets, Mount Ritter, Iron Mountain, and Koip
Pass. In fact, we were often out of the park, in national forest
areas, but never got to the southern Sierras, never went below
Minaret Summit.

Ted Organ: Were you on the first ascent of any of those peaks?

Adams: Oh, I climbed one of the Minarets — but I don't think it was an
important climb.

V. Adams: That was before people did formal climbing.

Ansel bringing in the biscuits."
Camp on summit of Cooper Pass,
California, 1926. Sierra Club
trip.

Left to right: Admiral Charles
Fremont Pond, Helen LeConte,
May Isabel Wocker, May Elizabeth
Plehn, Ansel Adams, four donkeys,

Photograph by J. Malcolm G^eany
Ansel Adams, Juneau, Alaska, 1947

Photograph by Christine L. Reid

Ansel Adams, guest speaker,
Annual meeting of the Friends
of The Bancroft Library,
May 14, 1967.

233

AdaEs: I've got my name in a number of registers. At first there was no
record kept; I can't believe that people hadn't climbed a lot,
especially the shepherds. They were in the country for months at
a time. And all the packers, they thought we were just crazy to
walk. The people would go along the trail riding horses. They
were called "horse muckers." The real elite was the campers, going
along with the donkeys, walking.

V. Adams : What were you?

Adams: I was the elite. I was just walking on the ground and had a

donkey or a mule for my outfit. But the ones who rode, with guides
and things, they were "intruders" [laughs] and "softies."

We climbed all kinds of things. We had a very dangerous
ascent of the gorge east of Lake Washburn. And our technique was
just scrambling — we had a World War I trench pick, and long window
sash cords — you know, the kind that hold up the weights in windows —
which at that time were the strongest material available. We'd
just tie ourselves together with those and climb together.' Of
course, if you ever fell on it, you would just cut yourself right
in two; they were only about one-eighth of an inch thick! We had
no knowledge of climbing and we came so close to disaster so many
times, I'd hate to tell you.

And the worst of all was the gorge in the southeast end of
Lake Washburn. It's just a fault line on a cliff leading up to a
little lake at the top (it's about sixteen hundred to eighteen
hundred feet long). Holman said, "There's a couple of small chock
stones in there." Chock stones are stones that have fallen down
and wedged in the gorge, which was about 70° to 80° steep.

So we started out on a real scramble. We didn't think anything
of it at all; at first I could just go all day long climbing. I
guess it was kind of a tough place, and we came upon the first
chock stone. And there was no way of getting under it, so we had to
go up the face of the gorge wall. The top of the face of the wall
in that case was about as high as this ceiling, sixteen feet. But
at this angle, if you let go, you'd go down about two hundred feet.
Looking down was a bit distracting.

We got over that, and I began to tremble; "How do we get back?"
Because, you know, climbing is one thing, and getting down is
another. And then there was another chock stone and a bigger one.
Mr. Holman said, "Well, we can't go back, we've got to go on." So
we had to start climbing this wall again, and it was really pretty
dangerous this time. And of course, no one had an idea of how to
belay and protect yourself.

234

Adams: I'd get ahead (I was a little more agile), and then I'd sort of

help pull Mr. Holman up, but if he fell I couldn't have held him.
We got up over that difficulty and thought we were almost up, and
then there was another chock stone, and this was the big one. And
that vertical wall was something! It was about one hundred feet
high — straight up!

And we got over that, and we knew there weren't any more,
because we could see the top. But talk about being scared! The
feeling of being trapped at a late hour, and no place to lie down;
it was so steep it was hard even to sit.

V. Adams: Where were you?

Adams: This gorge east of Lake Washburn.

We finally came out on top. Glory Hallelujah! We decided we
wouldn't do anything like that again without knowing what we were
getting into.

Of course, there wouldn't be anything to it today. I mean,
you would protect against exposure. If you couldn't give a person
a safe body belay, you'd drive in a piton and secure the rope
thereto.

V. Adams: They didn't have equipment then.

Adams: Nobody knew anything about real climbing in those days.

Teiser: Who was Mr. Holman?

Adams: Frank [Francis] Holman was a mining engineer who lost an eye at the
age of twelve, and he had, with his one very sharp eagle eye,
remarkable vision. He'd been in South America, and I guess he'd
done pretty well for himself. He was an old bachelor. He could be
very crusty. But a very distinguished man.

V. Adams: How did you and he get together?

Adams: I think it was through Bessie Pond.

V. Adams: He wasn't at LeConte Memorial first?

Adams : Oh no .

V. Adams: You took that together?

Adams: I took that myself first for several years, and he came and stayed
with me.

235

Teiser:
V. Adams:
Adams:

V. Adams:

Adams :

V. Adams
Adams :
V. Adams:

Adams :
V. Adams:

Adams :

Where?

LeConte Memorial. He had his quarters there in summer.

And then, I forget where he'd spend the winters.

And then my aunt, my father's brother's second wife, met him;
she was a professional nurse. And they became companions.

She'd read to him and write his letters because he couldn't see too
well to write.

This was after his strenuous climbing days. His eye was giving out.

So I was taking care of LeConte Memorial for several years, and
then he joined with me, and finally he and my aunt said they'd take
it over. Then I went with the LeConte family for two summers — or was
it three? — to the southern Sierra.

They could camp behind the lodge at that time —

Oh yes, we had a nice little camp there.

They allowed it at that time, to camp right behind the lodge, behind
LeConte Memorial. Now you can't.

We had a regular camp set up: kitchen, camp stove,
the donkey out in Stoneman Meadow.

We would stake

Finally they even got to taking a cook out with them, Aunt Beth
[Adams] and Mr. Holman. They'd come down here to Carmel for the
winter, and they'd take a house that had two wings. They each had
to live their own lives, and yet she was a good companion to him.

We took her on trips. One night up at Triple Creek Fork, the
coyotes let loose. She came over from the designated women's camp,
which was about (very properly) three hundred feet away, about
midnight. It was moonlit and these coyotes were just going strong!
And she said, "I don't care, but I am going to move in with you
men. I'm scared." [Laughter]

Then we lost the donkey. The donkey ran down Triple Creek and
away home, and they can run faster than we can if they want to run,
and Mr. Holman had a marvelous string of repetitive profanity. The
whole canyon ringing with a combination of entreaties to the
donkey and consignments of the donkey to inconceivable areas.
[Laughter]

236

Adams: Once the donkey got stuck on a steep cliff; we had an awful time
getting it out of trouble. Tied it to a belay with a hack rope,
and it fell down several times. It was belayed by the wall. We'd
get it to its feet, and it would scramble along the very steep
granite.

Now there's a trail indicated there. But that was a really
tough place to get up with an animal. Of course, I'd take every
thing off the animal and carry things up. The work we did was just
tremendous — just sheer physical toil.

Perils and Close Calls

Adams: For instance, we'd climb Red, Gray, and Mount Clark in one day. We'd
leave camp about four- thirty in the morning. Those are three peaks
in the Merced Group. That was a pretty strenuous deal, you know.
Lost the camp (many people lost Illilouette Valley) , found it about
ten o'clock at night!

That's the time we had the fall on Red Peak. We were going up
with the old ice pick and the window sash cords, chopping little
steps. It was frozen snow, it wasn't ice, and about a thousand
steep feet of it. About eight hundred feet up, I slipped. And of
course I started to slide — it was about 60° to 70° steep — pulled
Mr. Holman off his feet, and we both went down. He was yelling,
"Keep your feet front — front! Don't roll!" And finally we got
down. We were sliding face-down, and if you just touched your hands
to the frozen snow it would take the skin off. We were really going
awfully fast. And there was a whole lot of rock and snow piled at
the bottom, and we went right through that — but missed all the rocks!
Mr. Holman sort of sat there and rubbed the snow out of his eyes and
said, "Well, we'll go right up again." That was the best philosophy.
So back we went.

Then we came down the Red Peak ridge, and kept on the
connecting ridge, and up to Gray Peak and down that connecting ridge,
over to Mount Clark. Mount Clark was very steep stone and snow on
the eastern side. And the top of it was a little broken crag. It's
one of the great Yosemite mountains. When we got down to the base
of Mount Clark, we came out three miles below camp, which was worse
because we had to go uphill — up the trail — to get to our camp. And
everything looks alike in that place in the lodge pole forest.

So, let's see. What else did Mr. Holman and I do? Well, we
climbed everything around Yosemite. He was a great ornithologist.
One harrowing experience was in the Lyell Fork of the Merced. He

237

Adams: had a little collector's gun. He just hated to shoot birds, but the
Academy of Sciences gave him this commission for collecting. And he
had a can of arsenic salts with which to cure the skins. We would
shoot a bird and feel very sad about it. He would very carefully
skin it, and save all the feathers and everything, and then rub the
inside of the skin with the arsenic salt. And then wrap it all up
in some material so that it wouldn't dry out. He kept the arsenic
in a large salt shaker.

Well, one night at a campfire, we were frying some fish or hash
and it was quite dark. I got hold of this salt shaker, you see, and
I put some salt on the fish. And at that time, he threw some twigs
on the fire and the fire came up, and I said, "This is funny. The
salt looks green." I'd gotten hold of the arsenic, and I've never
seen anybody so disturbed as Frank Holman! He just took that
arsenic and hid it . But that shows how easy it is to have something
happen to you. He just had it in a salt shaker and, oh my!

V. Adams: Like the time that you were at Merced Lake and you had a tummy ache.

Adams: If I'd known it was an appendicitis, I would have died of fright.
I was in terrible pain. Drank a whole bucket of water, all alone.
A storm was coming up. I was not expected back for four days. I'd
been up to Isberg Pass and Isberg Peak, came late to the camp, went
down to get some water at the river, and it was just like a knife
sticking in me. I thought, "Oh, ptomaine poisoning." I felt terrible,
you know. All of a sudden. I'd eaten nothing but grape nuts and a
can of condensed milk. I was on the simplest possible diet. I had
this fever coming on, and this pain, and the only thing I could think
of to do was to drink water. So I just got a bucket of water and
went up to our lean-to and just lay there and drank; all instinctive
ly. And then about midnight the fever broke, and I was drenched,
and it was thundering outside and the lean-to was leaking. I was so
weak for a day, I could barely move around. I tried to get home but
could not manage it.

V. Adams: You said you went to the river and the bridge was under water.

Adams: Yes, the log we used to get over the river was under water for eight
days. I never would have made it home. That was for certain. So
I had the good sense not to get panicked, and spent the night, and
that's when I drank the water.

Then the next day I just realized, "Well, I'm all right.
There's no more pain." The day after, I returned to Yosemite.
was what I got at Taos in 1930.

V. Adams: When you knew it was appendicitis.

That

238

Adams: I got exactly the same thing in the morning — terrible pains. And
the doctor came and put an ice pack on me and took me off to
Albuquerque for an operation. But I know if I had known in Yosemite
it was appendicitis, I'd have simply died of fright.

Of course, the other tragic thing was, say, if I'd had a pill;
say I'd taken a cascara or something, that might have killed me. So
they'd come up and find me dead of natural causes in a wet lean-to.
[Laughs]

Teiser: Did you often go out alone?
Adams: Oh yes. That was very bad to do.

V. Adams: They didn't really talk about that as much as they do now; people
are prepared now.

Adams: You always tell people where you're going. But I just told my aunt,
"I'm going to Merced Lake. I'm going to try to climb Mount Clark,
and I'll be back in three days." Well, I got so enthusiastic. Met
some trail workers, and I asked them if they'd tell my aunt that
I'm going to stay two more days. I went up Isberg Pass. So if I
had not shown up people would have come for me. They would have
probably given me a day's leeway and then called the rangers or
something. But how do you know where anybody is? You just go to
Merced Lake country and start climbing. My God. You never could
find anybody, unless they were yelling or had built a fire or made
smoke in daytime.

So now we go off on well-known routes. I wouldn't mind taking
a trip specifically to Half Dome alone, if I could describe where I
was going — pinpoint it. Remember that time with the Sierra Club
when I said I was going to the Second Recess of Mono Creek? (There's
four canyons called the Mono Recesses.) I was going up the Second
Recess and cross over and come down the First Recess. And take my
camera, of course. I promised I wouldn't go anywhere else. The
only thing I forgot was — I hadn't looked carefully at the map; the
Second Recess was twice as long as the first one. So I thought I
climbed awfully high, and I got over a pass and went down about two
thousand feet and looked up. And there was the Seven Gables —
mountains to the south — and I realized what I'd done — I'd crossed
the whole divide. I'd gone over the main divide, you see. It's
just like having two canyons; instead of crossing over into the
First Recess, I went all the way up the Second Recess — a real
struggle! And the last bit of it was something terrible. I had a
bad time getting back to camp — tried one "draw" after another
because of cliffs on the other side. I never did get to the First
Recess. I got back to the Second Recess, because the First Recess
was too far to the west.

239

Adams: I got home about midnight, very sheepish. Because I'd given people
a lecture on doing exactly what you said you'd do, you see. And of
course I hadn't used my brain; I'd done exactly the opposite. I'd
gone out of the proper canyon — and there again, if anything had
happened, nobody would have found me. They would have gone up and
looked at the map and crossed over and looked all around that area,
which I never was in! I was at least five to eight miles off my
stated route!

V. Adams: It wasn't your fate to die in the mountains.

Adams: No. And I nearly fell off several things. The time the piton came
out when I practiced climbing at Benson Lake.

V. Adams: Yes. That was one of the worst things.

Adams: They had a rock climbing practice, and Glen Dawson was holding the

rope down in the meadow. It was a very long rope — a light rope that
went through a piton. It was set between a great big rock, twice
as big as this table, laying against the cliff on a ledge. They'd
driven this big piton between the cliff and rock all the way. The
rope ran through it. People would climb and get up fifty or eighty
feet and then give up and be eased down on the rope.

V. Adams: Everybody was learning from it.

Adams: And they'd fall on the rope, you see, and the man in the meadow
would hold them; then they'd slide down or start over again.

Well, it was about two hundred feet — 180 feet high, I guess,
with a lot of sharp rocks at the bottom. And I failed it. I
couldn't do it twice. I asked Glen Dawson if he would hold the rope
once more. I just felt I couldn't let this thing beat me. Then I
got up nearly to the top, and I was terribly tired, and I rested by
leaning forward on the ledge. It was an all vertical climb. As I
leaned my weight on my arm, I heard a tinkle and a sliding sound,
and down comes the piton with the rope. And the rope catches over
a point and sticks. If the rope had fallen it would have dragged me
off, because it was pretty heavy, you know — a hundred feet or more
of rope. Here I was completely without any support. One's reactions
are all automatic. I got up to the ledge by just sheer clawing at
the rock, and held up the piton that had come out.

And I'll never forget Glen's face. It was dusk. He just turned
white. This little figure down there with this white face. I still
remember that .

Well, then they had to send somebody up high and around and let
a rope down to me — two hundred feet or so, quite a bit. And then
belay it with a fresh piton so we could get down. That was a close
one.

240

Teiser: Glen Dawson the bookseller?

Adams: Yes. What happened was, everybody falling on the rope had levered
this rock a little, widening this crack just enough so that when
I took my weight off the rope (the crack being at a slant) the
piton just fell out.

Sierra Club Trips

V. Adams: Wasn't that the same trip where somebody — a girl — was drowned,
and we kept trying with the short-wave radio, which was a new
thing to carry along, to get to the rangers?

Adams: Yes. She fell in Benson Lake. Oh, we had a lot of accidents.
I remember two fatal and two bad falling near-fatalities, and
plenty of heart attacks, intestinal obstructions and double
pneumonia, etc.

V. Adams: That belongs in Sierra Club history.

Adams: We always had a doctor. We always brought an intern along as a
camp doctor, but then we had some very fine practitioners who
were guests, and of course in an emergency they'd come out and
help — Dr. Walter Alvarez and Dr. Herbert Evans, for example.

I remember one time, a man was climbing, and put his hand up,
and somebody was up ahead. That's very bad too, to climb too close
ahead. He loosened this rock, and it came down and hit him right
in the hand, literally went through his hand — broke everything.
So this poor guy — we had to get him down to camp.

The intern was really having a fit. He was just a medical
student, he wasn't even an intern. And the nurse said, "Well,
just get hot saline water and keep it wrapped in it." They had
to tell him to get out as quick as he could and apply these
compresses constantly. In those days, you know, they didn't have
penicillin or anything.

V. Adams: The packers would take them out.

Adams: They'd strap them on the saddle and lead them out, and they'd
have to go many miles.

V. Adams: They'd have to go to Lone Pine or to Sequoia National Park.

241

Adams: But this man kept the use of his hand. They had to practically
rebuild that hand. It just shows you what can happen. Now, if
you were alone, or it was just a small part, you can imagine what
might happen.

Well , they did have that awful thing years ago in the Palisade
basin, where a woman was climbing the North Palisade. While in the
talus, one of those huge rocks rolled over and caught her, right
on the pelvic area and broke both pelvic bones. So they had to
improvise a stretcher and carried her with great difficulty more
than three miles above timber line to the trail. It was the
roughest possible terrain. She was pretty well crippled for life.
I remember Mr. [William E. ] Colby telling me that. It took five
days in all to get her to the Owens Valley.

Then a woman had a heart attack when we were near Ralph
Merritt's camp. The woman knew she had a heart condition and
asked the packer if he thought she'd get along all right. Well,
how did he know? He wasn't any doctor. We had horses anyway.
I forget what it was — some form of heart failure. She got up to
Sphinx Pass and practically passed out from the attack. She was
six weeks in Ralph Merritt's camp, and finally the doctors came in
and said, "Well, I think we can take you out now." And it was a
two thousand foot climb back over Sphinx Pass. When she got there
(with less oxygen) she expired right on top of the pass.

V. Adams: You know what I remember about that is that all of these young
husky boys who were part of a rescue group, in groups of four
carrying the litter down the slope, and they'd change take-over
after a little while, carrying her down. She'd had six weeks or
four weeks or however long it was down at that camp in the flat-
lands, but those boys just worked like mad to get her there and
also to get her out. It was just so sad, because everybody tried
so hard, and then when the final thing happened, it wasn't any
good after all.

Adams: I don't want to give the impression that we had nothing but
disaster, but —

V. Adams: No. We had lots of wonderful things.

Adams: Always things may happen in an outing of one hundred or two
hundred people.

V. Adams: People have gone on long trips and nothing has happened.

Adams: But I think we — well, we had that case of old Mr. Padway, who
saved up for several years for this big vacation. He was some
kind of a specialist and couldn't get away from work, and finally

242

Adams: he did and this was a four-weeks vacation. We were up at Milestone
Camp, which is over eleven thousand feet, and he had this very bad
cold; it was freezing, and the camp doctor didn't like the way he
sounded. I think Dr. Alvarez came to see him, and they got
another doctor and they listened, and then they came over to see
us. They said, "He's got pneumonia, and if you don't get him out
of here, he'll be dead in twelve hours because of this altitude."
(Low oxygen.) They said, "It's very important. You'll have to
get him out some way." Of course, that was before helicopters.

So [Clair S.] Tappaan and I went to him and said, "Well, Mr.
Padway, we're really sorry, but the doctors have ordered you out
and we'll have to make arrangements right now to bundle you up and
get you on a horse."

"What! I've got nothing but a bad cold. I'll be over this
in a day or so." (Cough, cough)

"Well," we said, "the doctors don't say that. They said you
have pneumonia. "

He said, "I refuse to believe it, and you'll have to order me
out."

We said, "Well, we'll have to send you out."
He said, "If you do that, I'll sue you."

Tap was a lawyer, so I said, "Well?" We went back to the
doctors and told them. They said, "We'll give you an affidavit.
If you don't get him out of here, in eight hours he'll be dead."

So we got him to Fresno, and he just barely made it. And his
letter of apology was touching, because he felt that he caused all
this trouble. They did save his life, and our insistence was
important. But he never realized it at the time. He didn't want
to realize it. It would spoil his trip.

V. Adams: There was one treck — I wasn't on this trip — when you went across

country and it was very high and very cold, and a couple of people
nearly didn't make it. The altitude and the whole thing got them.
But outside of that, when you think one hundred people go every
summer on these trips for forty years and most of them do
beautifully.

Adams: Well, it's not a compensation, you see. Your oxygen supply goes
down. In Yosemite you have three-quarters normal, I think, and
you get up to Glacier Point — eight thousand or nine thousand,
somewhere in there — you only have about half. No, it's more
nearly ten thousand that you have half. And it diminishes as
altitude increases.

243

Adams: Well, I can compensate very quickly, because I'm always going from
high to low altitudes. But for some people it takes several days.
And this mountain sickness is just sort of a breakdown of body
functions, because there just isn't really enough oxygen for them.
Everything is knocked out of sync. The heart has an automatic
trigger device, and if it works too hard, it automatically just
slows up, or may temporarily fail. It doesn't mean there's
definite damage. But you can have some awful symptoms. People
have passed out absolutely cold and go into what appears to be a
deep faint. And only a doctor can tell whether it's a state of
shock or not.

Teiser: What was your position on those trips?

Adams: I was after 1930 the assistant manager. I went first in 1923 for
a week, and then didn't go again until 1927. And 1927 I was the
photographer, and I was taken along to make pictures. That was in
the Sequoia National Park area, the High Sierra back country. In
1928 we went to Canada. I was the photographer and helped, and
Mr. Colby was the leader. In 1929 I didn't go anywhere. They
went to Yellowstone, I think. In 1930 I was back assisting Clair
Tappaan as manager. I was in charge of personnel, mountain
climbing, and lost and found, and morals committee. [Laughter]

So, that was my job, and it really was something, because I'd
be up very early in the morning, and I'd try to make some
photographs, and I'd have to see that people got off and their
bags were ready to pack. Then I would have to go ahead, at a
rather fast rate, to pick out the campsites and the commissary
location and the latrines. And I'd always divide up the camps —
men, women, married couples — try to figure it out logically. I'd
get that done. Then I'd go off and try to make some photographs.
Of course, I did many on the trail, too. Then in the evening I
had to conduct the campfire and run the lost and found. And of
course the lost and found could be serious, because somebody would
leave something like his watch or a pill — you know, you don't have
much of un-importance when you're out in the wilderness. We'd
have a bag, and some of the things we'd find in it were surprising!
Glasses, prescription bottle, a toothbrush, etc., etc.

I can report now that the worst hike I ever had was when we
left Woods Creek and went to Rae Lake. We were going to camp at
Rae Lake and go over Glen Pass to Center Basin the next day. I
had a very nice Dagor lens. It was what we call a convertible —
symmetrical lens. In other words, you could unscrew the front
element or the back element and get one and a half or twice the
size of the full-lens image. It was really three lenses in one.
I'd taken a picture in Woods Creek Camp, leaving camp in the
morning in the usual hurry. When I got to Rae Lake, I realized

244

Adams: I'd left the back of the lens on a rock at Woods Creek, and I

could see in my mind's eye just where that lens was. Of course
animals could have nudged it off or got it — but my whole
photography depended on this lens (it was the only one I had on
the trip). So after dinner I said I had to go back the twelve
miles. So I hiked down there as fast as I could, with a flash
light, and by gosh, there was the rock and there was the lens.
And I ate some hardtack and a piece of chocolate, and I came back
the twelve miles to Rae Lake. That made it thirty-six miles for
that day.

But I got back in the morning after the camp was broken up —
gone. So I had this climb of nearly twelve thousand feet over
Glen Pass to Center Basin, which was about fourteen miles down.
So I had walked a total of about fifty miles!

And all I can say is I'm glad they didn't move camp the next
day. But those were the days when I could do such things. I
could have done another ten miles. I was just terribly tired and
footsore. But I used to time myself walking. Even with a pack,
on the level I could go almost five miles an hour. Usually on a
long trip, I used to keep to about four. Mr. Colby had a wonderful
system of starting in the morning at a very slow pace, and the
people with him would get exasperated because old Will would plod
along. Then he'd get plodding a little faster, you see. And he'd
never stop; he'd just go all day long. And all the guys would be
dashing ahead — the young squirts, you know, racing for the next
camp. And we'd pass them lying down on the ground, gasping. And
Colby, at sixty-something, was still plodding along, with a nice,
good-sized pack. [Laughter] It's a matter of just accommodating
and working into a pattern.

Yosemite, Continued

Adams: Well, I think now we've skipped away from Yosemite. Now, the
early days in Yosemite are associated for me with the LeConte
Memorial. They had just moved it from the Camp Curry area. It
used to be called the Lodge. Lodge was the wrong description.
I mean nobody ever slept in it. Well, they did, but it wasn't
supposed to be for that purpose. It was first in the Camp Curry
area, and when they expanded Curry they found that this building
would be right in the middle of it. So they offered to rebuild
the Memorial for the Sierra Club in a near location to the west.

Mr. Colby and a few others came up and picked the site, where
it is now, where you got a beautiful view up to Tenaya Canyon. The
trees in front were ten to fifteen feet high. They were young

245

Adams :

Teiser
Adams:

Teiser:
Adams:

Adams:

cedars and pines. You'd look over this very small growth and
see the whole vista of Washington Column, Tenaya Canyon and Half
Dome. It was a grand view.

Now the trees are nearly a hundred feet high, and you can't
see anything at all. It just shows how things grow and change
in time. They always had a "custodian." There were a few dried
plants and a few books and information available.

How old were you when you became custodian?

I'm always two years behind the century. That would be 1919 when
I was at the Lodge alone. I'd take people out on trips.

That was a lot of responsibility for a young man.

Yes, that's true. Then, after that, Aunt Beth and Uncle Frank
joined me. I climbed around a lot.

Did you always carry cameras with you?

Oh, almost all of my trips. Usually a 6 1/2 by 8 1/2 or a four
by five — fairly simple. But my pack would be about fifty pounds.
I also carried my tripod, and a good tripod weighs about ten
pounds. And then there were the lenses and the film holders and
the accessories, and lunch. A notebook and maybe a brass cylinder
for a mountain-top register, the Sierra Club register.

I remember bringing down the early records of Clarence King
from Mount Clark after putting up a new register. And somebody
stole that record that was priceless; the first notes of King.
I had them at the LeConte Lodge in an envelope, clearly indicating
that they were important records, and I was going to send them to
San Francisco. And one day I found they were gone!

[End Tape 9, Side 2]
[Begin Tape 10, Side 1]

Well, to go back to the Clarence King episode. Mount Clark used
to be called Gothic Peak, which is a better name for it. It's
a triple glacial cirque. It's unique, and a very handsome mountain.
Clarence King's description of his ascent of Mount Clark is very
harrowing. Nobody 'd been able to find the place he made his
famous "jump." I went all over the summit area, hanging down on
ropes and trying to find the place. We say now there was
probably a rock slide that's obliterated it. But everybody in
those days could really exaggerate their experiences. The
painters did and the writers did and the explorers did; it was
always a great wild wilderness — hard to check up on!

246

Adams: The place that he described, in considerable detail, where he
makes his "leap over the abyss" — it might have been big enough
to kill him if he fell. I mean, you don't have to fall very far
on granite. Well anyway, up at the top he had left this lead
container — in pretty bad shape — and in that were his original
geologic survey records with the altitude readings, his signature,
and date, time of day — all such stuff. And then some other
climbers left some notes after that. I replaced those with the
new Sierra Club register, which was a brass tube with a sealed
wing lock cap on it. In the scroll was the name of who placed it
there, the date, the time, notes of any predecessors, etc., and
then people sign it to record their climbs. I guess that's still
up there, although I suppose vandals might have taken it!

The register really has value only on a very remote,
difficult mountain. I imagine Mount Clark has been climbed
hundreds of times. But at that time, in the 1920s, relatively
few people had made the ascent.

The idea of true wilderness today is inconceivable. When
you were out there in the earlier days, you were completely out
of touch. Now you have search planes, radios, and helicopters.

Teiser: Those records were never returned?

Adams: No. Somebody who knew something about them took them, I'm sure.

I recognized how valuable they were; valuable in a mountaineering-
historical sense.

Then Hall McAllister gave the cableway on Half Dome. The
cableway was two posts set in the rock about every fifteen feet
with steel cables threaded through them. You just walked up
between the cables. I attached the Crosby clamps to the first
cables.

Photography Workshops and Aspiring Amateurs

Teiser: We wanted to ask you to discuss your workshops.

Adams: One of the most important things about a workshop, apart from its
location, is the fact that in my philosophy it is directed to the
individual photographer maintaining his individuality. Trying to
find out what he has to say about what he sees, so that he is not
dominated by any school or any instructor or any philosophy.

I think I described to you that in studying music, all my
really effective teachers never played a note for me. And there
was only this one teacher in Berkeley who taught with two pianos,

247

Adams:

Teiser:

Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :

and by illustrating phrases and saying, "No, it's this way," and
me echoing her. In a few weeks my father recognized the difference,
He said, "It doesn't sound like you." Now, that was a great
revelation. You suddenly realize that you must build something of
yourself. Then you can resist somebody coming along and saying,
"Now, this is the way you do it." Technically it may be another
thing; you may have to say: this is the way you expose and
develop to get a certain result. But the result is yours .

When it comes to saying, "You have to make a photograph with
this feeling," or we have to phrase something in music with a
particular style, that can be quite disastrous unless a person is
a strong individualist. And part of the success of the whole
"group" piano teachers, music teachers, was really developing
people on an imitative basis. I suppose they were honest about
it, with the hope that they'd develop the individuality later.
But there's something about the individual's development of style
and phrasing and touch that's so precious. You just can't
dominate it, you see. So I was extremely fortunate in the
opportunity to be myself.

And that's why I want to impart that same concept in
photography. I want to give students a basic technique which will
liberate them to the utmost degree to get what they "see," and get
what they want . What they see and what they want to photograph
and what they want the photograph to look like — that's their
business. But knowing something of the scientific, practical,
technically oriented approach will enhance their capacity to
understand and express themselves.

It must be difficult, when a group of students comes in, like the
other Sunday, and you really didn't know them.

Well, they were pretty bad. That was a very weak group.

But you didn't even know if the one who had what he presented as
beautiful sunsets really liked to photograph those. His
objectives had not narrowed down; you couldn't even perceive what
he was trying to do.

You can't do that. You either have to say, "I'm a psychiatrist,
and you'll come to my couch for so many dollars an hour over a
period of six months," or you admit, frankly, just an intuitive
reaction. And I usually tell them that.

I had a man here the other day who was an engineer and wanted
to get into photography. And, oh boy, he'd really worked out a
lot of good mechanics. But he absolutely didn't have any "eye."
All I could do was to say, "Look, you're seeing all this stuff.

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Adams :

Teiser

Adams:

It's like carrying rocks in a knapsack. You don't have to."
There was all this dead space. Then you bring the "L" cards in
and you show him how, when you bring a piece of grass in the
image up to the edge, the grass suddenly becomes significant in
relation to the whole thing. He says, "I never saw that. I
never thought of that." I say, "You have to look for it. I mean,
that's part of seeing and feeling." It's a very subtle and very
complicated thing!

Do you sometimes discourage people who you think really would be
hopeless?

Oh yes. I don't try to tell them they're no good and bums and
everything. Well, I just say to them, "You have a long ways to
go. And you haven't got your techniques, and you're really not
expressing anything. And you just better either get off the dime
and do something — " Sometimes it's that. But most of the time
it's some very gifted person who thinks he wants to go into
photography, and then you try to pick out for him all of the
pitfalls of the so-called professional world.

You may work five days a week in a professional studio and
get fed up with the most commonplace, dull assignments. At the
end of that week, believe me, you'd rather go bowling than work
further with the camera. You'd be tired. Whereas, if you're a
lawyer or an engineer or a bootblack or anything, you build up
this creative tension. Many of the great photographers in the
world have been amateurs.

I try to point out how difficult it is to break into
photography. "Well," they say, "but you sell prints."

"Yes," I say, "I've been doing it for forty years."

There.'s a little difference. I mean, I sell a great many
prints. But twenty-five years ago I didn't sell a great many
prints. I was scratching pretty hard. I say, "You just can't
go out and sell prints. You could get an agent. You could get
a publicity man. You might suddenly emerge as a shooting star
and it would be wonderful, but the chances are against that."
But the people that you see that you instinctively know have
absolutely no taste, no knowledge, no perception, sensitivity —
they might be fine people and really good in many other ways, but
not in photography.

Just like music. You've heard people play the piano and
you wish to gosh they'd go and start fishing or something. Yet
they may be playing accurately, but their whole tone construction,
their whole pattern of phrasing and shaping, is all off, and it's
an agonizing thing to hear. [Interruption]

249

Joseph N. LeConte in the Sierra

Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :

Up in Yosemite in the earlier days, I was not conscious of being
a photographer at all. I was just making photographs. But the
difference between someone like LeConte and myself was that I was
expressing my feelings. And while he had very intense feelings
about the mountains — he really loved them — he was content to
express the factual, scientific, topographic features. I mean,
as a scientist. These things are fully documented in his
photographs.

But photography, being a language, admits poetry. Th
no good grounds of comparison there; both are separate and
important .

There's

There were two or three years when you went on trips with the
LeConte family; was he an accomplished mountaineer?

Oh yes, in relation to the period. He was a climber, but he
never took chances. He wasn't a rock climber. They didn't
exist then.

We made many ascents. We climbed the Agassiz Needle, we
climbed the Goat Mountain — lots of peaks that are commonplace
climbing now, but we did them with excitement then. He was the
one that explored the Kings River Sierra. It seemed that quite
a number of years ago, the State employed a topographer — I forget
what you'd call them — a cartographer — a surveyor, I guess, to
prepare a map of the southern Sierra Nevada. It was about 1880,
I think. And this man got to the top of the Granite Divide and
took one look north into the middle fork of the Kings and beyond,
and just started sketching in. And the maps were quite wrong.
The sheepherders and the cattlemen knew this didn't jibe with
anything they had experienced .

So, LeConte and his friends who loved mountains went up and
down what is now the John Muir Trail I don't know how many times.
And they had to haul animals over cliffs with block and tackle.
People like the Duncan McDuffies, the Charlie Nobles (the
mathematics professor) — really a very elite group of people.
Theodore Solomons was sort of a "parallel" figure, but not one
of the group.

So LeConte decided he was really going to map this region
properly. And of course, being a scientist-surveyor, he had all
the techniques. So he produced the first functioning maps, which
were not really accurate, as he said — they might be off a half a
mile. But at least we know the North Fork of the Kings exists,

250

Adams: and we know that the Middle Fork of the Kings goes all the way
up LeConte Canyon to Mount Goddard, and Goddard Creek doesn't
flow north and so on. All kinds of terrible mistakes were made
on those earlier maps.

So he drew up the whole complex of the Kings-Kern region,
triangulated it, and did what remains an extremely creditable job,
although with no presumption of being really accurate, because he
didn't have the equipment. But he was within, I would say, half
a mile; that's what people who know told me. His maps were very
rewarding and useful.

I don't think his wife, Helen Gompertz, went on too many of
those big trips. I think they were married after most of them.
But they went to Yosemite. And of course the senior LeConte
[Joseph LeConte] was with them in 1901, and he died there. The
LeConte Memorial is dedicated to him.

And then later on, in the late twenties and early thirties,
Mrs. [Joseph N.] LeConte wasn't very well, and they would go to
Porcupine Flat. It was a place near the Tioga Road, a very
delightful campsite, and she'd rest. I remember in 1923 they
were at Porcupine Flat, because that's the time of the big
Berkeley fire. And I received word of this fire and went to
Porcupine Flat to let the LeContes know that the house had been
saved but the roof was slightly damaged.

I left the Memorial in Yosemite. In those days, for hikers
everything was "shortcuts." I remember climbing right out of
Indian Canyon and making a bee-line to Porcupine Flat. I was
wearing a straw hat, and I had gone through brush and forest —
not paying any attention to the trail. This was almost a straight
line. And when I arrived at the camp I had a baby robin in the
top of my straw hat I I think a few of the people thought I was
nuts and that I had done this on purpose, but I was the most
surprised person of all. [Laughter] Mrs. LeConte nourished this
bird for two or three weeks, and finally it flew off.* I'd gone
through a tree, you see, and knocked the bird out of its nest.

I told them about the fire, and that it was nothing to
worry about, but they should know about it. But it was something
to worry about. So they debated whether they should go home, and
I said, "Well, I didn't think so. The information was that the
house was all right. The roof had been burned a little and singed-
no damage."

*For another version of this story, see Helen M. LeConte,
Reminiscences , op. cit . , p. 69.

251

Adams: They gave me a message to telephone to somebody to go and look
at it. This was the house on Hillside Court in Berkeley. So I
stayed with them a day or so. They used to climb Mount Hoffman,
climb out on the top of Mount Watkins and look down on Yosemite.
It was a kind of an intimate life. They'd always give me a
little libation before dinner. Really, they were delightfully
drinking people. Never too much.

Teiser: This was during Prohibition —

Adams: Oh yes —

Teiser: Did they make their own wine?

Adams: Oh no, they just had bottles of booze, like everybody else did.

(The whole thing was a farce.) It was usually bourbon. And we'd
all get together before the campfire in the evening, before
dinner, and they'd give these toasts — these little Scotch or
Southern toasts. You know, like, "Here's tae [sic] us. Wha's
like us? Dahmn few. Thank God." (I can't pronounce it.) These
toasts would go back and forth. [Laughter] And the other one is,
"I lifts my glass. I has your eye. I winks accordin'. I likewise
bows." [Laughter]

And they'd always have this ceremony. And they'd have guests
all the time, and they'd have these wonderful campfire dinners to
gether. It was a really great experience!

And Joe always had the camera and was always making records .
And of course he just exposed and developed empirically. You do
the best you can under the circumstances. I later made albums
of prints for the Sierra Club of his Hetch-Hetchy pictures, and
while they don't say much emotionally, they are simply an
amazing survey of this country in the 1890s and early 1900s.
And now that there's seventy years in perspective, this documenta
tion becomes terribly important, you see. The forest people can
look at them and see the disposition of trees and meadows in
early days.

You see, very few people realize that Yosemite meadows are
not natural grass; they imported grass for cattle feed. Because
when people like the [John] Degnans were there in the seventies
or eighties, I think — Virginia can check the date — they raised
cattle for their milk. And they imported this very special grass.
It was ordinary feed grass, but the grass you see in the meadows
now has nothing to do with what was there first. The Kings
Canyon has bunch grass, which is a quite different thing and very
nourishing for donkeys, but it's not good for cows.

252

Adams: Well, to get back to Yosemite — the awful condition of the

concessions that were there — there were always conflicts. The Camp
Curry people and the Desmond Park [Service] Company and somebody
else's hotel and [A.C.] Pillsbury's studio and [David J.] Foley's
studio and [Julius] Boysen's studio and Best's studio. Everybody
just scratching for a living, you know. [Interruption]

Some of the early Yosemite people were remarkable. [Gabriel]
Sovulewski; you met Grace Ewing [Mrs. Frank B. Ewing], his daughter.
He was a man who was very prominent in the building of the trails.
He did very fine trail engineering, because some of the routing and
structure of those trails today are perfect. Some have just been
straightened.

The Half Dome Cable

Adams: McAllister gave the cable up Half Dome, and asked me if I would put

on the Crosby clamps. Now, a Crosby clamp is a U-shaped device which
secures the cable from slipping through the post rings. Well, they
weigh about five pounds apiece.

So the government brought in at least two mule-loads of Crosby
clamps and dumped them at the spring at the base of Half Dome,
about a half a mile away, and left me a couple of monkey wrenches
and a safety belt and said, "Good luck to you." [Laughter]

Well, you know, I had no idea of the weight. Here I have this
pile of metal, and I have to think, "Do I start the clamps at the
top or bottom?" Well, I started them at the top, logically, because
we have to "break in" on a job like this. So I took about ten
clamps — fifty or sixty pounds in my knapsack — and went up these
cables, which weren't really rightly set. I first had to climb up
to what they call the "neck" of the "Elephant," several hundred feet
of trail to the base of the Dome. Then I had to go up the seven
hundred feet to the top and attach the clamps as I came down. Let's
see, there 'd be one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,
ten — there 'd be five pairs of posts, and I could do them in one trip.
And I had to work at 45°, but I had a belt. They were very thoughtful
for that, but the hook was wrong. If I had fallen, it might have
pulled off. But I was supposed to clamp that into the post while I
set these clamps on and put the bolts together.

Let's see. That took me six days of dawn-to-dusk work. And
finally I got all the clamps on. I did this in the last part of
April and early May. So it served its purpose all summer. But
they had to be taken down every winter. They left the cables on
the Dome. If the posts were strong enough and were shaped a different
way, I think they could have left them up without damage from snow.
But I'm not an engineer, so I don't know.

253

Adams: Hence I have been up Half Dome probably more than anybody I can
think of. [Laughter]

In the first days, [George C.] Anderson climbed Half Dome
drilling holes in the rock and inserting little expansion bolts.
And the rope laid right on the surface of the Dome. It was quite a
hazardous climb because the Dome was an exfoliated mass. Contrary
to Muir, the glaciers never came to within seven hundred feet of the
top of it. But these great plates of granite overlap on the down
ward side, so you come across about a two-foot height of granite
ledge. Well, when you're climbing at 45° a two-foot step or a thirty-
inch step is really a pretty hazardous obstruction, especially when
you're going down. So today we can climb the Dome safely, but a lot
of climbers ascend the Dome outside the cable but only with ropes
and the most careful "friction" climbing.

But now they have cables with smaller clamps and a little
different system. They still take them down. But it wasn't the
cumbersome thing I had to work with.

But that was an interesting experience. There was a sleet
storm once, when everything was covered with ice. I didn't have any
gloves and, oh gosh, it was terrible. [Laughs] Especially me, as a
pianist, getting my fingers frozen.

So, that was a very nice experience.

When the LeContes were in Yosemite, we explored the Quarter
Domes which are in between Half Dome and Clouds Rest — actually
between Half Dome and the Pinnacles. And on one of the Quarter
Domes is an enormous erratic boulder, one of the best examples I
know of. I have a picture somewhere of Joe LeConte standing by this
boulder. LeConte was a tiny man (he was about five feet one) and
this boulder looks gigantic. We agreed that he should always be
around to be photographed in scenes of nature, because he made
nature look so much bigger. [Laughter]

Then I met Virginia. I used to go down to Best's studio, and
Harry Best had an old Chickering square. And I used to practice.
And of course the inevitable happened, but it was a very long
engagement. She had tremendous patience.

I would walk down from LeConte Memorial; it was about a mile.
Didn't think anything at all of the fact that we had no car. I did
have a car, a little old Ford laundry wagon. But I didn't have any
lights, so at night I had to walk down to the studio and practice
two or three hours .

Teiser: You were practicing and taking care of the lodge and photographing
all the time?

254

Adams: Oh yes. You see, I also was studying harmony and musicology that I
had to work on. So I was pretty busy.

Teiser: You certainly were.

Adams: On a nonacademic basis, but still...

Logic and Faith

Teiser: I'm amazed that you were such a responsible young man. You
apparently did everything you said you were going to do.

Adams: Yes, I did — tried, at least. I guess I was pretty good. My father
was a pretty good logician. I mean, he would say: if you have to
do it, you do it, and do it the best you can. That's all there is
to it. But I also was required to do a lot of literary work. And
a lot of writing.

Teiser: I wonder if your first published piece isn't a report in the Sierra
Club Bulletin of 1921, as custodian of the LeConte Lodge. It was
a report for 1920.

Adams: Yes, it probably is.

Teiser: About needed repairs. A short report.

Adams: Yes. I have completely forgotten it, but that probably would be it.
I think I told you the experience when I was studying Greek with
old Dr. Harriot in San Francisco. Did I tell you that? Was that on
the tape?

Teiser: Yes.

Adams: Yes. Dr. Harriot was a fundamentalist. He was a Canadian. He was
apparently a very fine Greek scholar — there was no question about
that. He really was an awfully good teacher, I must say that for
him. I read quite a little of the classic Greek and got a lot out
of it.

But he asked me one time, he asked, "What are you doing? What
are you reading? Do you go to church?" I said, "No."

"Oh, my God. You don't go to church!" I don't think he said
"my God," but he indicated it was terrible.

He asked, "What's your religion?" I said, "I guess it's
Episcopalian. I don't know."

255

Adams :

Teiser
Adams:

Well, that goggle-eyed him. And then he asked, "What are you
reading?" I said, "Poets. Of course I like the Romantic poets,"
and included Shelley.

"Oh, Shelley! Evil!" He blew his top. Dr. Harriot said,
"I suppose, young man, that you are one of those believers in
Darwin."

I said, "Yes, it makes a lot of sense."

He said, "Well, evolution is a very false thing, as the
Scriptures clearly show you. It's a matter of devolution."

I said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "Well, the world was created by God in 4004 B.C. And
we know that. That's been proven by — " (I forget the name,)* And he
said, "Ever since then, man has been de-volving instead of evolving,
and will until the Second Coming will come and will clear it all

up,

Those were about the exact words.

I said, "Well, Dr. Harriot, how do you account for the fossils
in the rocks? I mean, geological history — "

"Oh," he said, "that's a lot of nonsense. My dear young man,
God put the fossils in the rocks to tempt our faith." [Laughter]

Well, that got my innate scientific mind, or tendency, really
mad! I remember telling my father about it.

"Well," he said, "if Dr. Harriot can multiply a time factor by
maybe a million. The fossils, you know, are there like we are, and
tempting what fate?" He couldn't quite blast the old man — Papa was
very kind. But looking back at it, it's absolutely curious that
people have that degree of logic in modern times!

This image I had of God was of a bearded man in a white robe
with a knapsack full of fossils, poking them in the rocks to tempt
the faith of some serfs that would follow. So I think from that
time on I was really soured on conventional religion, because
felt it was pretty bad and weak.

Well, you were ready to be a pantheist, I suppose.

Yes, I guess I was, but I never got to the point of the pathetic
fallacy. And that's interesting that I didn't, because I very
easily could have. And a lot of people today, in this super-
conservation time, with movements and ideologies, approach pantheism
more than I ever did. That is, imputing individualistic qualities
to natural things. Who called it the pathetic fallacy? I can't
remember the — wasn't it Wordsworth?

*Bishop Ussher.

256

Teiser: It may have been Wordsworth.

Adams: Wordsworth was kind of a highly expressive John Muir. Well, I'll
try to find out, because it really is an important element of
philosophy.

Teiser: Well, maybe it was Ruskin.

Adams: I think maybe you're right. I think maybe it ±s^ Ruskin. Let's

look it up. [It was!] It means we attribute human qualities to the
inanimate or to the nonhuman.

Of course, remember, being born in San Francisco, being part of
the Golden Gate and the West and the Sierra Nevada, I have a
totally different concept of the world from the people born in the
Midwest and the East.

Although the early paintings of the Hudson River School are
really quite remarkable. There are some beautiful places, but
they're all on relatively small scale. You never have this over
powering impact of the West — but you have more thunderstorms, which
make up for it!

Panchromatic Plates

Teiser: Were you aware of Carle ton E. Watkins's photographs?

Adams: No. I'm very glad you brought that up, because I didn't know about
Watkins for decades. I saw a lot of old photographs and they didn't
mean anything to me. I'd see some and I'd say, "Oh, they're terrible.'
The only thrill I got in that domain was when I went in to see old
A.C. Pillsbury — and he was a rather remarkable man. He did the
first time-lapse movies of flowers opening. Great man. He'd
received some Wrattan & Wainright glass plates from England. And
they were panchromatic, and he used a red filter, and he showed these
pictures, and you never saw such glorious clouds and dark skies, and
oh gosh, it was just something!

Well then, the story should revert a little to a bit of
photographic history which is not very much known. George Eastman
had a terrific industry by the tail, and realizing that this thing
was just getting beyond him and beyond anybody on his staff, and
knowing that he had to have photo-scientists, he 'd heard that Dr.
C.E.K. Mees was the really top photographic scientist going. There
was somebody in Germany, but George didn't like the Germans, and he
went to England. And he saw Mees and said, "I want you to work for

257

Adams: me." He offered him a salary — very much more than Mees could even
dream of getting in England, and Mees said, "I'm under contract to
Wrattan & Wainright for ten years; I can't accept it." What did
Eastman do? He bought out Wrattan & Wainright [laughter] — to get
Mees.

So that was why you had for a while Kodak-Wrattan plates. My
"Monolith, the Face of Half Dome" is made on one, incidentally. And
the Wrattan filters, which still persist today are the world standard
of color filters. They're now all in gelatins, but they can be made
up in glass.

Mees was imported to Kodak in Rochester and became the
director of research. And Eastman was a very strange man — a
bachelor — had a great Momma complex. He was not a very easily
understood person, but completely honorable. Many great stories
were told me by Mees. I used to see Mees often after he'd retired
to Honolulu. I'd go to his home every other day or so while I was
there, and we'd sit down and have a drink by the sea and talk, and
he'd reminisce. Loved to see me, because it was a way of blowing
off steam. Boy, the stuff I got from him! If I'd had a tape
recorder, it would be invaluable! I mean the early part of Kodak,
and the struggles, and what was quality , and why they didn't take
up the Land projects. You see, Land had an option of a hundred
or two hundred thousand dollars with Kodak to buy his project.
They were just beginning. And "Nobby" [Walter] Clark said, "Oh,
it's just a toy. We can't do it."

Mees said, "I was inclined to favor us getting it, but of
course, we couldn't have brought it out until it had been perfected.
A young company could bring out something that isn't perfect, but an
established company cannot do that."

Well, of course Polaroid is second to Kodak now, thank God
[laughter], for that very reason, and has achieved perfection.

Mees told me this wonderful story of advertising. "I was at
my desk early one morning and a man comes down and gives me a
message. 'Mr. Eastman wishes to see you immediately, without delay.'"
And Mees thought, "What have I done now?" He'd never got a message
like this before! "So I went up to the office." [Imitates Eastman —
hearty tone:] "Come in, Mees. Sit down." And he pulled out an
advertisement that had been in the morning paper: 'Kodak makes the
best lenses in the world.' And he says, "Mees, is that true?" And
Mees said (he had a couple of fast thoughts, you see), "Well, I'm a
scientist. I can't do any sales or advertising." He said, "No,
Mr. Eastman. It isn't true. The Dahlmeyer, Zeiss, and Cooke and a
few others make, really, better lenses than we do." [Imitating
Eastman:] "That's what I thought. I know we're trying. Thank you
very much."

258

Adams: From that time on, every advertisement that came over the desk of
George Eastman had to be checked by Mees and one or another person
for accuracy and honesty.

And that's one of the best things I heard about Eastman. He
was that kind of a person.

I must say that of all the material I use, Eastman Kodak's the
most consistent. They're the least imaginative company, the least
innovative in one sense — the aesthetic sense. But they're really
a pretty fantastic outfit.

Teiser: You said that Pillsbury showed you a Wrattan & Wainright plate?

Adams: Yes. Wrattan and Wainright were the big English firm that made
plates and filters, maybe papers.

Teiser: Were they new?

Adams: Oh yes. He got some of the first ones. And then I got a box when
they came on the market. I got two boxes, in fact. I guess I had
three, all together. And that's what I did the Monolith and other
early pictures with. Then Kodak made them, and they were called
Wrattan plates.

Teiser: Were they very much better than the material you'd been getting?

Adams: Well, there was nothing like them that I knew of. They were the
first panchromatic emulsions of any consequence.

Then of course they moved on to panchromatic film — which is
today the principal emulsion. Basically, a photographic emulsion
is only sensitive to blue light. Plain silver halides react only
to blue light. Now you bring in a dye which is sensitive to or
absorbs the energy of green light and transfers that energy, as
quantum energy, to the silver. That means the emulsion is sensitive
to green as well as blue. Then you bring in the dyes that absorb
red and green light, and you have panchromatic emulsion.

They had three types of panchromatic — A, B, and C. A is only
partially panchromatic. A is red-sensitive, but of rather low
green sensitivity. Type B, which is the standard film we have today,
still has a deficiency in the green. The green part of the spectrum
is that area of the spectrum to which the eye responds most. In
other words, anything that is green comes through with a higher
energy to the eye. So if I see a green fabric or a green tree and
I say I want to place that on, say, Zone V of the scale, I really
have to place it on VI to get the "visual" effect. That fools a
lot of people. That's why you see so many black trees in mountain
pictures. They are of low color saturation to begin with, and
panchromatic film does further lower the green values.

259

Adams: The Panchromatic C was super red-sensitive, and therefore it was
very fast with tungsten light. (Tungsten light has a greater
proportion of red light to it than daylight.) One effect was that
it produced white lips . They had to develop two correcting green
filters to take care of the type C.

All these things are simple to understand, but very few people
know about them at all!

Verichrome pan is a film which is more sensitive to green than
the ordinary pan. Therefore, it is recommended for a lot of
landscape work. But it never caught on, because people liked to use
strong filters and get black skies, whereas in the daguerreotype
and wet plate days, you'd only get white skies. You could only use
blue light.

I would say you got a greater 'stylization of values in the
early days with emulsions sensitive to blue light only than you do
now with panchromatic materials. I can duplicate that effect by
using a strong blue filter; it cuts out all the other light.

We have a series of filters that partially withhold light of
various colors . And you have filters which are called tri-color —
say, the blue, green, and red, which transmit the respective colors.
Then you have the "minus" filters, which are very interesting, such
as the minus blue (number twelve) and the minus red and minus green.

Teiser: Does "minus blue" mean it doesn't let any blue through?

Adams: Yes, it completely cuts out the blue. There's more than a hundred
Wrattan filters. All of these are tools which the photographer can
use.

Teiser: This photograph, "Banner Peak and Thousand Island Lake," I wonder
what film you used for it. This is the one that's variously dated
1923 and 1927.

Adams: That's glass plate. That's the same as the Half Dome. I think it
was made in 1923 on that trip with Harold Saville. And it was made
on a Wrattan plate.

Teiser: Is that why you were able to get such splendid sky?

Adams: Oh yes. Ordinary orthochromatic (green-sensitive) plates couldn't
do that. The sky — you'd get the clouds and you'd get the clarity,
but you wouldn't get that level of richness. Strange things happen
when the sky drops in value below the clouds (because, you see, the
sky, say at that angle, would be around four hundred candles per
square foot, between three and four hundred), and the clouds would be
around eight hundred and a thousand. You'd have only a one to two or
a one to three ratio. And that isn't enough to be dramatic.

260

Adams: Now, with orthochromatic film, you could lower the sky value a lot.
I mean, I get a K2 or G filter. But you couldn't lower the sky
value as much as you could with a panchromatic plate or film. And
that's why in the early days using blue-sensitive plates you couldn't
photograph clouds, because the blue sky had the same photometric
value as the clouds. So they made separate negatives of clouds.

When they brought it down on the scale, giving one-eighth or
one-sixteenth the exposure, the clouds were obviously much brighter
than the sky. Then they'd use those cloud negatives and print them
in. Sometimes they'd get them upside down. [Laughter] Sometimes
they got them with light on the cloud from the right side and the
light on the mountain from the left. [More laughter] I'm telling
you!

One of the funniest ones was years ago. The prize-winning
picture of the Royal Photographic Society in London. It was a
picture of the Parthenon, and it was in beautiful late evening light.
The white columns glowed in the late sun. And behind was a thunder
cloud, you see. A very beautiful picture. Boy, that's something!
Then you look at the light on the columns, which is coming from
this side, and the light on the clouds, which is coming from that
side. [Laughter]

And I have a picture of Half Dome and the moon which is an
unintentional phony. This picture of the Dome was taken about two
in the afternoon. And I just kept the camera in the same place,
and the moon came up after the sun had completely gone. Here's the
full moon in the sky — the moon and Half Dome. It's a real moon —
not "printed in." I show that to people and I say, "What's wrong
with this picture?" They can't figure it out.

V. Adams: The moon would never be that high when the sun is still up?

Adams: If you had a perfect full moon there wouldn't be any sun. Because,
it's always at the same angle — opposite the sun. And you only get
the full moon when the sun is directly opposite and below the
horizon. So here's a full moon in the sky, and the sun was clearly
high, which is an absolute impossibility.

V. Adams: I think you took it at four in the afternoon.

Adams: Four, it might have been. Well, now the good one, the vertical one
(taken with the Hasselblad) , the one I use all the time, that's a
real moon in real time! That's about a little over three-quarters.
That's taken about three-thirty or four — maybe by daylight savings
time, five. And the shadows are falling on the Dome. But the moon
is in the right phase for that position of the sun.

Teiser: It's on the cover of this last Infinity, May 1972.

261

Adams: Yes. Also a special edition print which you've seen around a lot.
It's a very impressive picture. It's absolutely real. There's
nothing wrong there. That's the moon and the Dome, and they are
taken together. But you just can't bring the moon up into the
wrong phase, you see. Because anybody who knows the disposition
of the heavenly bodies is going to immediately blow .their top.
[Laughs ]

[End Tape 10, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 10, Side 2]

Dreams and Heavenly Bodies

— ~~- ~ •

Adams: As you know, I'm scientifically inclined, and I am not a professional
mystic. I cannot categorically deny such things as ESP or thought
transference, because I think those are domains we know nothing
about. But I can record for you an experience that when I was a
young boy in San Francisco, before I ever went to Yosemite, I had
an extremely vivid dream of waking up in a big building on a cot.
I can still remember the discomfort of the cot. And I looked up
to my right and here was a multipaned window — whatever you call
these window panes — and the moonlight was coming through, and it
gave me the feeling of being in some kind of a stone-cast building.
The dream was so extremely vivid that I've never forgotten it. And
I've been very sure now to remember that it happened long before I
went to Yosemite.

And in 1919 I was sleeping in the LeConte Memorial on a cot,
and I woke up and here was the same window, the same moon, the same
mood — the stone building — the complete reconstruction, if you want
to say it, of this dream, which had made such an impression that I
couldn't forget it. And the effect on me was of course a little
bit shattering. I remember getting up and turning on the lights
and dressing and sitting and wondering what it was all about.
Because this was a complete, detailed duplication of the dream.

Whether that is total coincidence or whether it's something
else, I don't know, but it's something that's very important. And
I just record it with the assumption that it is coincidence and
probably emotionally exaggerated and so on. But it is something
that for me was a real occurrence.

And of course I do have these dreams recurrently, every six
months or so, of getting in a taxi and driving to a music hall or an
opera house or a symphony hall, and seeing great placards screaming
that Ansel Adams is going to play the Brahms Second Concerto with

262

Adams: the Boston Symphony. It's all very real. I'm in a terrible state
because I don't know the Brahms Second Concerto at all. But I
nevertheless am disgorged at the stage entrance and go in. All the
musicians are there backstage, tuning up and talking, and the
conductor comes forward and says, "I'm so glad to see you. Our
rehearsal was encouraging." And I sit there, and a slight feeling
of perspiration — "What am I doing here?" I take a glimpse, and the
hall is completely packed with hundreds or thousands of people.
Finally the conductor invites the orchestra to go out on the stage,
and they go out and take their places. And I'm supposed to lead,
so I walk out and the conductor follows me, and I get as far as the
piano. And the conductor bows and we all bow, and he steps to the
podium.

And at that time I wake up from the situation with the screaming
heeby-jeebies because I don't know the work, I don't know anything
about it, even the first notes.' I'm absolutely incapable of doing
it.

I've sometimes gotten further when it's been really a very
traumatic business. And sometimes I just barely get out to the
piano. But with the idea of not knowing anything about the music
but being fully billed for it, advertised, announced. It is a scary
situation. The orchestra's good. And in some strange way, I have
had a rehearsal of which I remember nothing. And I keep getting
this dream over and over again. I must have had it a dozen times.

It's a very interesting frustration dream. I've had the same
thing in climbing — of climbing on an icy mountain; everything is
fine — and then I find myself stuck, and I don't know where to go.
I suppose that's motivated a little bit by Muir's description of
Mount Ritter, where he was spread-eagled on the cliff and couldn't
see up or down or sideways. Of course, he never should have been
there anyway. (I never should have been in many of the places I
was really in.) But the instinct takes over and he leaps and grabs
a ledge and gets out of his predicament.

Well, I have these dreams — getting into absolutely insoluble
problems — and then I wake up. Sometimes you wake up with a sense
of relief, and sometimes you wake up, really, with just shock.

Teiser: Ever dream photographs?

Adams: Yes. And I also dream in color, which is very interesting. I'm
very conscious of color.

Teiser: There are few people, I think, who do.

Adams: Yes, I think so. I do dream in color. Things are seen in colors.
So I can say that , truthfully .

263

Adams: But this other one is such an interesting experience — in Yosemite
in the LeConte Memorial. My father always recounted of having a
dream — he's sleeping out somewhere and he sees a star, and the star
begins to move toward him and becomes brighter and brighter and
brighter. And finally he wakes up.

And I had one experience — I was up, I guess, way up in
Tuolumne Meadow somewhere, where I saw a meteorite coming directly
at me, the first time I've ever seen that. The angle of approach
of the meteorite was right directly toward me, so that the object
became brighter and brighter and brighter and suddenly extinguished.
It was quite an experience. And of course I thought of my father's
dream. He might have seen something.

And then lately, in late years, we've gone to the high country,
and we see satellites. I remember seeing the first Sputnik from the
top of the Polaroid building in Boston. It was going south across
the sky. And many scientists were up there, and they were looking
at this with extraordinary interest! Some of us were just thinking,
"What a wonderful thing," and others were very glum: "They got
there first," they said. This little thing was traveling fast, and
it took quite a time to get down to the horizon. It had a strange,
illusionary flat trajectory, and it suddenly winked out when it got
in the earth's shadow.

I had a very interesting psychological experience in San
Francisco. I walked out of the house one night, going to my
darkroom, which was next door. And I looked up at the sky — just
looked up — a glance. (I always do, for some reason.) And then
after a few seconds I thought, "What is this?" My unconscious said,
"There's something going on." I looked up again and here was a
satellite moving. Now, the interesting thing was that I looked up
just as a glance, and yet my mental computers were able to tell me
that there was something moving among the stars.

The mind is so complex — what goes on is so remarkable — such as
the speed with which things are observed and computed. I just took
a quick glance at the sky, and then it took ten seconds or more for
my mind to tell me that there was something different up there.

Teiser: Your visual computers must be faster than most people's.

Adams: I don't know. They're probably more directed in some ways. They're
probably not any faster.

264

Concepts of Conservation and Wilderness

Teiser: I'll just ask you one question more about Yosemite. Did you think
in the early days, "This is a place to be preserved"?

Adams: Oh yes. But it was vaguely formed in my mind at that time. The
question of preservation — the whole conservation picture was
confused in the early days. It still is!! The Sierra Club, with
their outings, was trying to get people into the mountains to see
them so that they would support legislation for their protection.
I used to get a more interesting reaction going to Forest Service
country, like the mining country at the Minarets, because of the
evidence of human content. I think we always felt the wilderness
had to be preserved, but we had a very hazy idea what preservation
really meant. And we thought nothing of putting our donkey in a
meadow to pasture, and nothing of having camped at a riverbank.

Mr. Holman had some pretty advanced ideas. And in fact, he was
the one who promoted the idea of fire being an important element in
continuing the character of the forest. Then later on, people came
and talked about the fact that wilderness is an illusion — "What do
you call wilderness?" If nobody 'd been there ever, maybe that's
wilderness. But Yosemite was populated first with Indians, then
with sheepherders and cattle people. So, I always say wilderness is
a mystique. It's a state of mind, which we enjoy, in its so-called
pristine quality, because we have our wonderful equipment — the best
boots in the world, the best clothing, condensed food — all kinds of
things. It's like a man going to the moon and being completely
equipped with life-supporting units. We do the same thing in a way
in the wilderness.

I think if people in the club today went out and lived the way
Mr. Holman and I did in the twenties, they couldn't take it. We had
mush, bacon, egg powder, flour, salt, some pepper, beans, period.
You know, all cooked up over an open fire in tin cans. And my
digestion could take it! I used to eat the most colossal quantities
of mush, my God! Quarts! Just couldn't fill up. Weighed 120.
[Laughter]

Teiser: Any corn meal?

Adams: Well, sometimes corn meal, but that had its difficulties. We

usually had oats — Quaker oats — and that was before the quick cooking
kind too, and at a high altitutde you have to cook and cook. Oh,
we had some rice; then we had tomato sauce. We had a lot of simple
things — and we had honey. And then of course there was the eternal
biscuit and flapjack situation. The diet was very monotonous.

265

Yosemite Concessions

Adams: I think — well, there's so much more to say there. I think the

conflict of the early concessions in Yosemite is important. They
were all bad. Nobody had any feeling for the place at all. Well,
I think Virginia had a real reaction. Grace Ewing had. But people
who came in the main were a very low order of people as a rule. The
whole place was a big curio, and people as well as the operators had
no understanding and no respect. They sold these horrible curios
and pandered to the worst possible level of taste you can imagine.
A lot of the people got together and petitioned the government to
build a road up by Vernal and Nevada Falls so the public could "see"
it. Well, naturally it would ruin the place! I remember arguing
that; they laughed me down. "Well, if you had to do business here,
you'd want more people, wouldn't you?" Which is unfortunately the
concessioner's idea. Not really in Yosemite now.

But after the formation of the big company [Yosemite Park and
Curry Company] they've always given good service.

In many ways, when you compare it to all the other parks, there's
nothing anywhere as good. After all, you ask somebody to come in and
run a business — accommodations and food — and hopefully make a little
profit; it can't be done on an entirely idealistic basis. You have
to have all kinds of little things to sell and "entertainment" to
offer.

Teiser: Should the government be running the concessions?

Adams: The government should own all the plants and lease the operations.
But you see, when [Stephen T. ] Mather took over the directorship of
the Park Service under President Wilson — remember, it was a
Democratic administration, and Mather was a very prominent Republican
businessman (head of the Borax Company of America) but very
idealistic. He felt that everything could be operated on Republican
principles, and that private business should be invited into the park
to operate under government supervision. But there wasn't any
subsidy — it was just taken for granted that it would be automatically
profit-making. But what happened was that people did invest money,
but they didn't earn anything. In other words, they had no property;
they just had leases for the land. You could build a building on it,
but it belonged to the government. You have only a sort of prior
right to it, and you have to maintain it. The whole thing is subject
to review now, and it's a very important thing. The government should
take over the capital investment, and then lease operation on a
percentage basis under the most strict controls. But who's going to
define the "strict control"? Who's going to write the taste pattern?
That's a terribly difficult thing.

266

Adams: So we have the eternal flux of enterprise, idealism, profit, loss,
and tolerance. [Laughter]

Well, I'll see you again next weekend?
[End Tape 10, Side 2]

Sierra Club Photographers

[Interview IX — 2 June 1972]
[Begin Tape 11, Side 1]

Teiser: In 1923 you made an album of forty-five exhibit photographs for the
Sierra Club. What were they?

Adams: I went along for several years on the outings as the photographer,
as well as assistant manager, and I made countless pictures which
were available to the members at very low cost. We would get these
random orders one year, and I decided the next year I would take
this number of prints that I thought were good and do it all up as
a portfolio. It was very cheap, and they weren't very good prints.
They were as good as I could make them then. I wasn't planning to
cut corners, but it was just a selection of pictures on the trip; a
group of us got together and picked out which we thought were the
best ones. It was a personal club thing.

It's like, way back in 1925-1926, the LeConte family and I, we
met a big pack train with a lot of rich New York bankers — terribly
important people financially, and they had about six mules per
person. They were so anxious — Herbert Wykoff , a lawyer, had told
them about me, and they ordered several sets of pictures. I
remember, I got the largest fee I ever received from anybody, which
was $750. It probably cost me $710 to do it. [Laughs] These sets
were made for these five men; just a private order.
[Interruption]

Teiser: Were you the first official photographer of the Sierra Club? Did
they make that title up for you?

Adams: Well, that was an "apocryphal" title. There were photographers that
had worked for years with the club. One of them was Rodney Gleason.
Then there was Walter Huber. But I have no idea what their status
was — whether they went along for a free trip, or whether they just
photographed for pleasure. LeConte and Huber and Theodore Solomons,
all those people made photographs on an amateur basis and never made
anything out of it, and that's why I, when I did my set, I did it
practically at cost basis, because it was considered improper to
make money out of the club if you weren't a professional.

267

Adams: Then Cedric Wright followed me in that position. Got the free

outing for being both sanitary engineer and the photographer. He
made some very fine photographs, and he sold them. But at that
time he realized that he was a quasi-professional and could make
something on it.

Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail

Adams :

Teiser:

Adams:

The John Muir Trail]

Teiser:
Adams :

Now, the Sierra Nevada book [Sierra Nevada;

was done in '38, I think. In memory of Peter Starr, his father
[Walter A. Starr] sponsored it.

I see that it was done by the Archetype Press.
Bentley, was it?

That was Wilder

Yes, Wilder Bentley in Berkeley. And the engravings were done by
the Donnelley Company and tipped in. It's a very, very rare book.
We call it the "white elephant." There's some very poor pictures
in it and some of my best. And the reproductions (letterpress) as
a whole are very fine, but the tip- in, especially with calendared
or plated paper, is very bad because the corners break. If you
have a lithograph or a drawing on a sheet of rag paper, you can
bend the corner and it might not break, but the baryta coating on
smooth paper will crack. So there have been terrible disasters
with the book, where they folded the prints over and they have
broken. These reproductions are on a plate paper — very smooth
surface — and varnished.

I was talking the other day about the baryta coat, which is a
white clay filler which gives extremely smooth paper surface and
of course keeps the image away from contact with the paper fibers.
You take one of those engravings and bend it — the paper surface
plus the varnish or lacquer — you would have a break.

Same thing with the Making a Photograph book, which has tipped-
in illustrations, also reproduced by letterpress.

That was printed in large quantities, wasn't it?

Oh yes. It was printed in many editions. But the Sierra Nevada
book was printed in only one edition.

And a small one at that, wasn't it?
Yes. I forget how many.

268

Teiser: Did you initiate the idea, or did Mr. Starr initiate it?

Adams: Mr. Starr said he'd like to do a memorial for his son using

photographs, and asked me what did I have to suggest. So I said,
"Well, why don't we do the John Muir Trail?" (I had photographed
most of the area.) "We can put together something worthwhile."

Teiser: Was his son a mountaineer?

Adams: His son was a mountaineer — a loner, as they call it. He was killed
on the Minarets, climbing all alone, which was a very stupid thing
to do. I think he was psychologically rather strange in that idea
of personal isolation — immolation would be a good word. You can't
climb alone in that kind of crags without some day having something
happen to you. So he was found near the top of one of the Minarets
by Norman Clyde. He was buried there; they just cemented him in on
a ledge. The best thing to do.

Teiser: What a wonderful memorial to him.

Adams: Well, his father was a very prominent man — businessman, connected
with the Sierra Club, of course, intimately — president and so on.
Walter and I had been on trips. He lived to be eighty-seven or
something. A very fine person. Of course, he didn't have any
idea of books, and he was rather appalled at the cost. And I think
we sold the book for fifteen dollars. It says in the colophon in
the back that five hundred copies were printed.

When I have done a book, I can remember nothing about it.
I can't remember the sequence of pictures —

Teiser: Did you work with Wilder Bentley on it?

Adams: Oh yes, we worked very closely on it.

Teiser: What was he like?

Adams: Very fine man, very capable craftsman.

Teiser: There's an acknowledgement in the book. It says, "For permission

to use many of the pictures reproduced in this volume, I am indebted
to Alfred Stieglitz, the Studio Publications, the Sierra Club
Bulletin, Camera Craft magazine, and many other organizations and
individuals." What does that mean?

Adams: The acknowledgements are merely a courtesy to previous use of the
pictures. And it really isn't necessary.

Teiser: They didn't have rights?

269

Adams: They had no legal copyrights. But Stieglitz gave me an exhibit,
and the Sierra Club and these people that had used the pictures —
I just wanted to give them credit. These acknowledgements, which,
as I said, have no legal obligation, as they would if rights had
been secured.

For instance, the pictures in my Portfolios Five and Six are
strictly limited and under the control of the Parasol Press. So
if the Morgans, who are doing my monograph*, want to reproduce one,
they have to get permission of the Parasol Press and pay a use fee.
Otherwise I'd be in difficulty, because I'm never supposed to let
any of those things out. The Parasol Press bought the entire
edition and the rights of use.

The courtesy is sometimes based on economic necessity, but
most times it's based on ethical consideration — these people
encouraged me and showed my work.

Teiser: These photographs in the Sierra Nevada book had been made, then,
over quite a series of years?

Adams: Oh yes.

Teiser: We'd like to have on the record your comments on some of your

photographs, and since these are published, so that people could
see copies of them, could you just look at the book and discuss
them by title?

Adams: Well, the frontispiece, of the mountain climbers, was on the
Minarets, and one of those is Dave Brower.

Teiser: Which one?

Adams: I think it's this one [the one at the top].

Then, the "Yosemite Valley" shows many of the very first
negatives I made with an eight by ten camera. These negatives are
catalogued as I-Y-I et seq. "I" signifies eight by ten, "Y" is
Yosemite, and "I" is the serial number. I forget the dates, but
most were early, as is the "Bridalveil Fall," which is on a glass
plate. And "Half Dome, Yosemite Valley," with a thunder cloud,
is again one of my early good ones. I was always a little worried
about trimming, cropping it, but it has wonderful variation of
"feeling" depending on the cropping.

*Subsequently published.
Morgan & Morgan, 1972)

Ansel Adams (Hastings-on-Hudson, New York:

270

Teiser: Is this cropped to your satisfaction?

Adams: No, not entirely.

Teiser: Are these somewhat reduced from negative size?

Adams: Well, it depends: the largest negative size I use is eight by ten.
Now, "Vogelsang Peak" was made on a five by seven negative in the
late twenties. That's up near Tuolumne Pass.

Teiser: What time of day was that?

Adams: It could be late in the day, very late, perhaps an hour and a
half before sunset. "Mount Lyell," with Lyell Canyon and the
Tuolumne River, that was done early too, and on an eight by ten
negative.

Teiser: By "early" you mean in the twenties?

Adams: Well, around in that area. Maybe early 1930s. The "Grass and
Burned Stump," that's on a four by five. And was done near
Wawona. "Banner Peak and Thousand Island Lake" is a 6 1/2 by 8 1/2
glass plate done way back in the twenties.

Teiser: That's what Mrs. Newhall said is your first significant picture?

Adams: Well, I think the "Monolith, the Face of Half Dome" was, but
there's some discussion about the dates.

Teiser: Oh, you mean the discussion concerns the dates, not the significance?

Adams: Both! This "Shadow Lake" is one of the best ones. I took many on
that trip, but these were mostly on 6 1/2 by 8 1/2 glass plates,
whereas the other later ones are on eight by ten glass plates and,
of course, four by five film.

Teiser: That was well before your announced rejection of pictorialism, and
yet "Shadow Lake" is not pictorial in any way.

Adams: Yes. The first prints were made on goofy paper, but the negatives
were pretty good. Many were damaged in my Yosemite darkroom fire,
so in order to reproduce them now, we must have the prints
"retouched" by the engraver. This "Shadow Lake, Mount Ritter and
Banner Peak" was done on a five by four film. It's very interesting.
The Graflex people put out a roll film holder in which the image
proportions were full four by five. Now the standard four by five
film is a four by five sheet, but it has a small margin around it —
areas to secure it in the film holder. But these Graflex roll films
actually were full four- by five-inch images, which of course no
four by five enlarger will take. I have to use a bigger enlarger.

271

Adams: "The Pass" was made on 3 1/4- by 4 1/4-inch roll film.
Teiser: What pass is that?

Adams: Well [pause] — that's always a question. It's somewhere in the San
Joaquin Sierra. I've forgotten the name. It's near Isaac Walton
Lake — in that area.

"Upper Iceberg Lake." Well, this is a heavy snow year, you
see. This was five by four. This was taken the same time as the
other lake.

"Michael Minarets" is the same. I think that's the one that
Peter Starr was killed on.

Teiser: Is that in the original proportion? Isn't it narrower than — ?

Adams: Well, I don't follow strictly the film format. Negatives come in
certain sizes, and sometimes you follow them and sometimes you
"crop." And this has always been much better cropped narrower.
There's a lot of "disturbance" on the edge of the negative. So a
narrow crop is indicated.

This is a four by five, "Rock and Water," in the northern part
of Yosemite National Park, in the Virginia Canyon area. It was
done in gray light.

Teiser: These hold their full scale quite well, don't they — these
reproductions?

Adams: Yes, these reproductions are wonderful.

That is the Devil's Post Pile monument, which is east of
Yosemite, on the John Muir Trail.

"Red and White Mountain." We are now getting into the San
Joaquin (South Fork) Sierra. This drains into the Middle Fork.
Bear Creek Spire, Mount Starr (the mountain off Mono Pass).

This is just "Leaves," somewhere in the Sierra.
Teiser: What kind of lighting is that?
Adams: It's gray light. Sky light or late evening or clouds.

"Pilot Knob" — this has another name. It's an erroneous name
and I forget what it is. This is Evolution Creek, all right, but
it's not "Pilot Knob." "Emerald Peak and Cloud Shadows." That's
near Muir Pass.

272

Adams: Then here's "Lake Near Muir Pass." I think it's Wanda Lake. It's
interesting; was done before the time of polarizers. We are
looking down through clear water to submerged rocks. This shows
how pure that water was! It's very clear, and the sky was deep
blue. If there had been clouds in the sky, you would have had a
terrible time with the cloud reflections.

"Black Giant" near Muir Pass is a telephotograph. It is of
black slate which is accentuated by the cloud shadows here.

Then "Flowers and Rock." That's somewhere in the Kings River
Sierra. "Grouse Valley" is in the Middle Fork of the Kings. The
LeContes did a lot of exploration in there.

Teiser: What time of year do you get those big clouds?
Adams: Well, even in summer — July, August.

"Bishop Pass and the Inconsolable Range." That's a spur on
the east side, near Bishop Pass. It's a great thunderstorm area;
it's usually muttering with thunder. "Inconsolable" is a
marvelous name. Theodore Solomons gave many of the names during
his early travels, like Scylla and Charybdis, and the Gorge of
Despair and many names of classic derivation.

"Devil's Crags from Palisade Creek Canyon" — this is on the
Middle Fork of the Kings country. "Cascade, Palisade Creek Canyon."
I forget what mountain that is. And this is "The North Palisade;"
this is looking northeast — big thunderstorm is building up.

Teiser: Did you often have to work on very sloping ground?

Adams: Oh no. You'd come to the top of a ridge. Then maybe use a long
lens, which would avoid foreground.

"Rocks and Grass" — that's typical of almost anywhere in the
Sierra.

"Mount Winchell" is one of the Palisades — the northern area.
This is at sunset. It is a telephotograph taken from eight miles
away.

Teiser: How long a lens was that?

Adams: Well, it's what they call an adjustable telephoto, a Dallmeyer
Adon, which has a positive lens in the front which picks up the
image, and then a negative lens in the back which magnifies it in
relation to the extension. It's not optically very good, but I
have done some pretty good things with it .

273

Adams: Then "Mather Pass" — that's going over from the Middle Fork to the
South Fork, Kings.

And "Marion Lake" was up in Cartridge Creek. This is named
after Joe LeConte's first wife, Helen Marion Gompertz. And her
ashes are there, and a little plaque on a beautiful rock somewhere
over here. This was taken with a glass plate. Later we took the
Sierra Club outing party across this country, which is about the
roughest thing we've ever done, fifteen, twenty miles from Granite
Pass. And it was really a tough thing, and the packers were so
glad to see the pass down to the lake. But getting one hundred
animals over this rough stuff is really terrific.

And "Arrow Peak from Cartridge Pass" — Cartridge Pass goes over
into the upper South Fork of the Kings. And then when you cross
over beyond Arrow Peak you're going into the Kern River Sierra.

And "Pinchot Peak," which is really Mount Wynne: I misnamed
it. And again, the cloud shadows are marvelous. I remember working
very hard on that one. Obviously at timber line.

Here is "Mount Clarence King," and this is in the upper South
Fork of the Kings River, and there's a little non sequitur here.
I mean, if you're going in a given direction, these pictures
aren't in the right sequence.

Teiser: They're not entirely as you would go?
Adams: No. Then "Rae Lakes" and the Red Dragon.
Teiser: The water must have been extremely still there.

Adams: Well, there are little ripples, but sometimes the lakes are just
mirrors.

"The Mount Brewer Group from Glen Pass." And this is made
with a twelve-inch process lens on a four by five film. It is very
sharp.

Teiser:: Have you often used process lenses?

Adams: Well, I had one for years — still have it. One of the sharpest
lenses I've got. It's just a little thing. It's twelve inches
focal length and a maximum aperture of f/11, so the diameter of the
lens is only a little over an inch.

Teiser: I thought they did something strange optically.

Adams: Well, as you stop down you usually have to refocus; the process

lenses are corrected for near objects. If you don't remember that,
as you stop the lens down, you have to change the lens position,
because it's not corrected for infinity.

274

Adams: Then "Manzanita Twigs" could be anywhere in the Sierra.

"Peaks and Talus, Kings River Canyon" — this is the Grand
Sentinel. This is taken at the bottom of a huge rock pile, looking
up four thousand feet.

The "Kearsarge Pinnacles" are in the upper Kings, on the way
to Kearsarge Pass, and Forester Pass, which leads into the Kern
River Sierra. This is "Junction Peak," near Forester Pass. We were
there on a good juicy, icy year, because usually this is probably
all clear of ice even in July.

Teiser: About what time of year would this have been?
Adams: Oh, this was in July, late July.

Then when you're over in the Kern, you have the "Diamond Mesa,"
where the timber line is very high.

"Milestone Mountain," that's right, taken from a place just
a few feet above timber line. That is on the Kings-Kern divide.
It goes from the Kaweah Range north to Hamilton Pass.

Then there's "Mount Whitney" from the rear, above Crabtree
Meadow —

Teiser: What's the shadow —

Adams: Well, it's late in the day. These are all shadows of big gorges,
you see. It's very impressive — one of my best pictures, I think.
Quiet things are happening in the sky that are nice.

Then here's the "Whitney Pinnacles (East Face)" and that's
from a five by seven negative.

Then "Sky Parlor Meadow" is in the Kaweah group at the base
of the Kaweah Range. It is a big meadow on the Chagoopah Plateau.
Moraine Lake, Sky Parlor are all very high in that area. "Rock and
Water" (a typical Sierra scene). "Mount Kaweah, Moraine Lake"— the
Red Kaweah and the Black Kaweah in the distance.

Teiser: Red Kaweah is the —

Adams: The big rounded peak. And then here's the "Kaweah Peaks from Little
Five Lakes." The Red Kaweah 's way down to the right. In fact, up
in the Chagoopah Plateau is where I found my meteorite.

And this is the Black Kaweah, then the Middle and the Red.
That is a tree that's just fallen; we are looking over to the peaks
of the Kern Canyon.

275

Adams: And this is "Lake and Cliffs," known as Precipice Lake on the way
through Sequoia Park, over the Kaweah Gap, as they call it, which
leads you into the Kern River Sierra.

Teiser: Are these made before your Canyon de Chelly pictures?

Adams : Oh yes .

Teiser: Thank you so much for going through your book.

Adams: This is my own copy. You know, there are series of about five

or six copies of the ten copies that weren't numbered. [Reading]
"Five hundred copies." Well, there should have been, say, 510.
"The book was printed... by Wilder and Ellen Bentley." But it's
very funny — they say, "engravings and prints." Well, what they
mean — they tipped in engravings which came from the Lakeside Press,
Chicago. *

Teiser: Well, thank you!

Adams: Now, I don't think that was too much of an ordeal. Boy, this tape
is going to be priceless for all these verbal accidents! [Laughter]

I find it very difficult to remember dates. I can usually
remember places. I can't remember some of those rock pictures,
except that first one, which I know was up in the Virginia Canyon —
Cold Creek — in the northern part of Yosemite. But for the "Rock
and Grass" and the others, I just have a complete blank. I can
still see myself with the camera there, but I can't geographically
place them. Of course, the Sierra is so similar, in certain
geological belts, that you really can't tell. An expert could pick
out a different type of granite, or some other minute variations.

When you go up Cartridge Creek, you have a marvelous stone
that is crystalline, shiny, multicolored, and that will blend into
granite, and the granite yields to slate — metamorphic rock is the
real name for it. It may not be the true "slate" we know of.

Then there's traces of great volcanic action-
cap, and so on.

•the ancient lava

And then jointed granite and granite that's been glaciated and
formed the roche moutonnee that you find around Merced Lake, Tenaya
Lake, and in the Yosemite country in general. I know very well if
a subject is in the Rockies or in the Cascades. But I can't pin
point things in the Sierra.

*Part of R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company.

276

Skiing in the Mountains

Teiser: In the 1930 Sierra Club Bulletin you had an article on a ski trip.
Skiing was apparently quite new then in this country.

Adams: Yes, they'd been making experiments with skiing in Yosemite, and
the company was trying to promote ski activity in the winter.
They had a miserable little ski hill called "The Moraine" which
is in the east end of the valley. The Tenaya Glacier and the
Merced Glacier joined here and made a medial (I think it's called)
moraine. And I think the whole thing's about 110 feet high, and
when they have show on the north side you can ski down it. But
that was a pretty pitiful ski situation.

Then they built a little hut up on Mount Watkins and would
take animals up as far as they could get up the zigzags of the
Snow Creek Trail. The skiing up there is pretty wonderful. But
all I did was cross-country skiing — climb with seal skins, employ
telemark turns and sitzmarks and everything unorthodox you can
imagine .

In 1930 I took this trip to get photographs, with the group
that went around the High Sierra camps to fill the ice houses.
We'd go to Lake Tenaya, and would spend two or three days filling
the ice houses with snow, and I'd try to photograph as best I
could. The ski instructor, Jules Fritsch, and myself would go off
to the high places. We got into pretty tough scrapes sometimes
because we really didn't know too much about cross-country skiing
in the Sierra.

We went to Glen Aulin and then to Tuolumne Meadows, whereupon
everybody came down with some sort of food poisoning from a bad
can of food. I was the only one that escaped. And here I was all
alone, a storm was coming up, and all these four people were sick
as dogs. Should have been hospitalized. We were there for three
or four days .

Finally they recovered. The last day we got up at two in the
morning; it was six below zero (this is Tuolumne Meadows), and we
started out over Tuolumne Pass and down to Merced Lake. And there
was no place to stay. There was no food at the ranger camp, so we
went on to the Merced Lake Camp. And that was the most exhausting
thing I've ever done because I had a fifty-pound pack; had to climb
up to the top of the pass and then photograph and then go down, and
when we got down about fifteen hundred feet into the Merced Canyon
the snow would break through the manzanita. We'd collapse; we'd go
through the tangle and we'd take spills, one after the other.

277

Adams: We got down to the ranger cabin at the foot of the trail, and the
bears had gotten into it and there was nothing left. So we had to
ski further in mush, as they call it, to the Merced Lake camp, and
we were able to get something there. But we were absolutely so
tired we couldn't see straight.' We spent one day doing nothing.
While the others were filling the ice house, Jules and I went up to
Lake Washburn (I have quite a number of pictures), then returned
the final thirteen miles to the valley.

Teiser: How could you carry your equipment?
Adams: In a knapsack. It was all up in the pack.

I had one very amusing occurrence. I had my camera in my
knapsack, with my tripod sticking up and I was following Jules
Fritsch, who was a very accomplished skier. As we came down the
slopes from Tuolumne Pass we encountered a group of alders, and
Jules ducks and goes right through this group. I do exactly the
same thing but did not realize that my tripod was sticking up
above my head. The tripod catches in these alders, and my skis go
up and lace in the trees. They had to come to get me out and take
my skis off, and then unravel them from the alder branches. Of
course if I'd broken a ski, I'd have been in dire trouble, or worse
trouble if I'd broken a leg. But that was the most awful spot to
be in!! All I can remember is suddenly feeling the pull back and
seeing the skis go up with a loud whack. But I didn't break them.

Teiser: You mean to say that there were four of you out skiing that far
away without an extra pair of skis or a pair of snowshoes or
anything?

Adams: Yes. It was very foolish, extremely foolish. Well, there was a
pair of snowshoes in these various camps. Some of them had been
chewed up by animals. But that wouldn't do you any good if you
broke an ankle or a leg. I don't know what you'd do. I guess
they'd just cut down some trees and make a sled and haul you. You
have to figure that you have so many miles to go. If you're a fast
walker, you 'go between four and five an hour, and a fast skier
downhill can go very fast. But under different conditions you might
take two or three hours for a mile. If there's ten miles, there's
twenty or thirty hours. No way out of it; nothing else to do.

Teiser: Well, you must have been a pretty good skier.

Adams: Oh no. Pretty good cross country, in that I had a lot of

endurance. And I could make what they call a telemark turn, which
is the first thing we learned, where you bend the knee in the inner
part of the curve. It's quite a graceful turn. We didn't have the
Christiana at that time at all. Of course, it's as complicated as

278

Adams: golf is now. There's all kinds of wax for different things, and
different kinds of skis and different kinds of bindings. The old
bindings you would just latch on and the leg would come apart
before it would leave the ski. Now they have bindings that under
a certain stress will give way, you see, which saves lots of bones.
But still it's a very accident- infested sport.

Teiser: Did you go on skiing?

Adams: Oh, I did a little, but I never liked it. I liked the cross

country, but we did not have winter camping equipment. Now, you
know, they can go out for weeks with all this beautiful equipment.
I have a space blanket, for instance, which is aluminum foil, and
it's light as a feather. If you put the foil [surface on the
inside] around you, in ten minutes you're hot. And in hot weather,
you put the foil around you on the outside and you're cool. And
they have these two- or three-pound down sleeping bags, and the
way you do it now, you just dig a hole in the snow and sleep, and
keep out the moving air, because the chill factor can be very bad
in high altitudes with cold and wind.

Teiser: Well, did the Sierra Club interest continue interesting itself in
skiing?

Adams: Oh yes. They have important ski Sections now. Ski mountaineering-
cross country skiing — is very much in vogue now, which I think is a
wonderful way to really enjoy the wilderness. Skimobiles are
atrocious. They're just a horrible intrusion. And while they
don't do direct physical damage, because they are on snow, they do
create noise and aesthetic damage, and they disturb wildlife, of
which a surprising amount is out in winter. And they destroy any
sense of wilderness you have. But their tracks will melt. But
of course some of them want to clear routes. They want an open
forest so they can go through these like you do with a ski lift.
But that's only a short distance. The average snowmobile track
will be many miles long, which I'm very much against.

Teiser: I read somewhere that you moved your main residence to Yosemite
Valley— was it in 1937?

Adams: Yes. My wife's father [Harry C. Best] died in 1936 in San

Francisco. And then we negotiated; in fact, her father had formed
a little family corporation, which allowed continuity. The general
idea had been that when the individual concessioner died, that was
the end. We applied to take it on, and the National Park Service
agreed, and we moved up there in '37. We were there for quite a
few years as our basic home, and rented the San Francisco place.
Well, it was impossible for me to do professional work in Yosemite;
it's illegal for an individual to do any private work. So I had to

279

Adams: come back to San Francisco and set up my headquarters. And then the
kids were in school in Yosemite and Mariposa. So we commuted.
After getting a good manager in Yosemite we moved to San Francisco.

The Sierra and Other Ranges

Adams: I never missed a year in Yosemite since 1916. Never a minimum of
less than five or six trips — well, except in the first five years,
when my trips were just in the summer. But I think about 1926 or
'27 I was there three or four times; in '28 only twice; '29 very
much. So in a sense it's always been a second home.

Teiser: Twenty-eight was the year you were married, wasn't it?

Adams: Yes. And I went to Canada with the Sierra Club.

Teiser: You were on that high mountain trip in Canada?

Adams: Yes.

Teiser: Jasper —

Adams: Jasper and Mount Robson, but I did not go to Yellowstone in 1929.

Teiser: Did you publish any of the Jasper pictures?

Adams: A few in the Sierra Club Bulletin.

Teiser: Did you enjoy photographing there?

Adams: Well, some of it's pretty good, but it's not like the Sierra.

Sedimentary rocks do not have the shapes and the strength. The
Canadian Rockies have a wonderful mood, but it's one of the most
infested areas you can possibly imagine — mosquitoes, horseflies;
bad trails and very erratic weather. Of course it's quite far
north, so you're always up at two in the morning to start climbing.
And climbing was very dangerous because it's friable rock.

It's another world, and it's very spectacular. Something like
Glacier Park. In fact, Glacier and Waterman Park are much the same.
As far as I can make out from pictures, the Selkirks probably give
more the feeling of the Sierra, being more craggy and pointed. But
whenever you get into lava or sedimentary rock, you do not have the
clean-cut form that you get with crystalline rocks.

Now, I don't know what the Matterhorn is — I think that is a
hard metamorphic, and that's all right. I guess — well, a geologist
might scold me — I refer to a very hard, flinty rock. In Hawaii

280

Adams: everything is lava. The Rocky Mountains is largely rolling country
and of sedimentary rock. It's extremely dangerous to climb on.
You're climbing up what amounts to a rock pile that just slides
under you. Well, the top of Rogers Peak in Yosemite Park is
something like that. In fact, one day we got up to within two
hundred feet of the summit, and it was just too dangerous.

Teiser: The Grand Canyon —
Adams: That's all sedimentary.

Teiser: I think I read somewhere that when you first saw it you were kind
of unimpressed.

Adams: Well, it's a totally different experience, you see. You get into
the granite gorge in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. But
practically all of the Southwest is layer after layer after layer
of sedimentary and colorful rock which has been elevated.

I'm conscious of the fact that there are tremendous mountain
ranges all over the world. I've seen thousands of photographs.
And I'm convinced that the Sierra is unique in structure. At
least the Sierra seems to be the most livable range. I mean, most
of the other mountains have terrible climates.

Alaska weather can be excruciating! For instance, I spent
twenty-five days in the Glacier Bay area in 1948. There were only
five clear days the whole time. I had six fine days at Mount
McKinley in 1947, which was absolutely unusual if you saw the
mountain for that long a time. The Himalayas must be terrible —
sudden disastrous weather conditions. And the Alps — a storm can
come up within half an hour. A sudden shift of air, and then you
have some serious condition. I don't know about the Caucasus —
they're probably fairly tough too, the way they look. Much of the
Rockies and the Tetons are beautiful, but there's nothing that
has the particular intimacy of the Sierra. Which I don't think
of as much as mountains as natural sculpture.

Teiser: And the vegetation?

Adams: The vegetation's extraordinary, but we don't have these rock and
ice challenges like they do on the great Alpine peaks. Thousands
of feet of ice and snow.

And the Cascades are very beautiful, and have a great rise
above base, but they have terrible weather problems. The north
slope of Mount Rainier has a wonderful forest. But there's just
something about the Sierra that is extraordinary. We're intimately
connected with it, but I think it's probably the most subtle and in
exhaustible mountain range. It certainly is infested with more
people than any other equivalent area now.

281

Teiser: Is it? More than Yellowstone even?
Adams: Well, Yellowstone isn't a mountain range.
Teiser: That's right.

Adams: There are a few small ranges in it, like the Ibex Peak area.

Glacier Park is quite beautiful, but again, it's of sedimentary,
stratified rock.

[End Tape 11, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 11, Side 2]

Adams: I must say for the record that I've traveled very little. I've

been in the Tetons and in the southern Rockies, and a little of the
Sangre de Cristo, very little in the San Juan Range. Just one
excursion into the Uintas near Salt Lake. And in the White
Mountains, which are east of the Sierra. And then a little in the
Southern California Sierras, which are rather dreadful. I mean,
barren. And in the Sierra Nevada— and Cascades.

Teiser: British Columbia?

Adams: Yes, British Columbia, Robson and Tonquin in Jasper, the Rockies.

And then in Alaska. But never climbing mountains. I never climbed
anything in Alaska.

Alaska

Teiser: You were in Alaska in the forties —
Adams: Two trips, 1947 and 1948.
Teiser: How did you happen to go there?

Adams: Part of the national park project. Glacier Bay National Monument,
and Mount McKinley National Park.

Oh yes, my greatest experience of all, I guess, was flying
from Ketchikan over the coast range at Sunset. We came up to
Juneau, leaving Ketchikan at 10:30 p.m.

We left in the Fish and Wildlife plane. We got off at four
in the morning, my son Mike* and I. (He was just a kid.) The
governor had arranged for us to go on the first flight of the Fish
and Wildlife plane, which was the survey flight to see if a lot of

*Michael Adams.

282

Adams: fishermen in these bays and inlets were really behaving. And this
was a Grumman Amphibian. It was the first time Mike had ever been
in a plane. And the takeoff, with the two big motors right over
head, is extremely noisy, and Mike — maybe that started him out on
his flying career — his eyes nearly popped out of his head.

We took off from Juneau and went over, within a few hundred
feet of the mountain range to the east, looked down and could see
bear and other game in the meadows. Well, it got very rough and
the wind gusty, and we kept on making landings in all these little
sounds and bays and taxiing up to people in boats and asking for
their fishing licenses. This is the first day of the season; did
they have it? And when they didn't have it they got a citation.
Then we'd take off for more victims.

Starting at four in the morning, remember the sun was quite
high. So we got all the way down to Ketchikan about two in the
afternoon. Had lunch, and then the crew disappeared for two or
three hours on business. As we landed at Ketchikan, which was the
first time we landed on the ground, the pilot discovered that the
maintenance man had forgotten to put any hydraulic fluid in the
left wheel plunger. Now, if you've been in a Grumman, there's
only about two or three feet distance between the ground and the
fuselage, and these little wheels come down without much space to
spare!

Our pilot was extremely good, and as soon as he landed he knew
something was wrong, so he gunned the plane up, and he said, "Will
you all get over on the right side and keep your weight on that
side? I have plunger trouble, and we'll make a landing on one
wheel," which we did. And finally came down, and the pontoons on
the wings on the right side bounced. Then he tried to get it fixed
there and couldn't; they didn't have the right equipment to get the
fluid into the cylinder. So we had to take off on one wheel, and we
all had to stay over on the right side. I really was a little
worried there, because at a high speed you can get a ground loop.
But we took off; it was very late in the day — ten o'clock. We flew
up the coast range at evening — sunset, right along the crest. It
was just like the Sierra during the Ice Age. You'd see things like
Half Dome emerging from the ice and many beautiful peaks and the
incredible color of sunset and all these big glaciers, you know,
flowing down to the sea.

We landed at Juneau at about 11:30 p.m. That was really a
day.

I had another flight with an exploration party. This was the
supply plane, and these people were surveying and traveling all
around some of these very high peaks of the coast range. The
function of this plane was to drop supplies at certain locations.

283

Adams: The explorers had put out a red-orange cloth on the snow. You'd
see this little speck. Then we'd fly over and drop the load of
supplies.

I was in one of the compartments with a big sliding floor over
it, roped in, trying to get pictures. We went around these big
peaks, and all of a sudden it grayed over.

When you're in snow country and the sky goes gray, you don't
know whether you're at six hundred feet or six feet or six thousand'.
In such conditions the rule is to get out as quick as you can.

The same thing happens in very still water. If the amphibian
plane comes down in still water, you can't tell how far up you are.
We had to throw wads of newspaper around in Glacier Bay a couple of
times, to know what the elevation was.

Teiser: To make the water ripple?

Adams: No, to give an object that you can focus on. In that case, they

put the nose of the plane up and just drift in, and the tail of the
plane hits first and you hear a hissing sound. But you can't tell
much. You're going too fast to see anything if your paper goes by.

So that was quite a flight. And then we had several flights
into Glacier Bay and several places where we had to go up and down
and taxi on the water and see if there was no ice. Because a
relatively small piece of ice can do an awful lot of damage to the
plane's fuselage.

But flying in Alaska is just like taking a taxi. There's no
other way. Well, I suppose there is, but to walk in the tundra
and the wet stuff or go by boat — oh, terrific! It's a long way.

Aerial Photography

Teiser:

Adams :

Teiser:

Have you done much aerial photography?

Well, no, I can't say much. I've done some, and the two things I
did in Fiat Lux were the rice fields in the northern Sacramento
Valley and the freeway in Los Angeles. I'm very happy about those;
they're very good.

You must have been low over the freeway.

284

Adams: I was, illegally, two thousand feet down, and we were flying with a
good pilot, and when 1 told him what I wanted, he said, "Well,
these regulations; okay if they don't watch you too closely." The
police helicopter passed under us about 150 feet below, enough to
rock the plane, and he said, "Well there's no point in immediately
going up now. They've got me if they're going to get me, so just
go ahead and do this job."

So we were going right over the crowded freeway. I kept
thinking, "A single-engine plane!" If that motor had conked out,
where would we have landed? I was very glad to get back to Santa
Monica. He never got a citation. [Laughter]

Teiser: Do you use ordinary equipment or aerial — ?

Adams: I have Louise Boyd's Fairchild aerial camera, which she used in
Greenland. She used it mostly for five by seven stills on the
ground. With a complete set of magnificent filters (optical-flat
filters). But now with cameras like the Hasselblad, and the
beautiful lenses and filters and a little high-wing plane, you can
do awfully well. Of course now, photogrammetry surveying and really
accurate mapping stuff — that requires very precise equipment and
materials. The slit photography is terrific. There's electronic
sensors that pick up patterns of objects, a difference of light and
shade on the ground, compute them, and establish the speed of the
plane, and that controls the speed of the film moving by the slit.
And at sixty thousand feet you can see gravel between railroad ties.
But that takes special ultra-thin emulsions and extreme precision of
operation.

I can't call myself an aerial photographer at all. I think I
would like it, but you see, when you're working that way you have
to have a high-wing plane and you usually take the door off. And
you have to keep the camera out of the slip stream. The novices
would go up with, say, something like a Speed Graphic, and they'd
just get so excited they'd lean out, and the slip stream hits the
camera and WOW — away goes the bellows! [Laughter] But in a certain
space you don't feel the air at all, you see. But if you put your
hand out too far you may break your wrist, even at ordinary speeds.

Ever put your hand out driving a car on the highway on a hot
day? Well, that's nothing, but if you were going 150 miles per
hour and more, you can break your arm.

Teiser: Do you know the photographer who's been taking aerial pictures of
the Bay Area? He lives in the East Bay.

Adams: Well, there's a Sunder land.
Teiser: Yes, Clyde Sunder land.

285

Adams: He is a very factual, an extremely competent record photographer.
The greatest aerial artist is Bill Garnett. Nobody can touch
Garnett. He doesn't do the ordinary kind of work, you see.
Sunderland is a person that will make you a completely accurate
aerial survey or photograph. Then there's a man named Bob [Robert]
Campbell who has done some perfectly beautiful things of salt flats
and other subjects. Creative photography in the air is a terribly
important phase of the medium.

In fact, Bill Garnett is somebody who is worthy of an
autobiographic approach, because there's nobody who can touch him
anywhere. There's never been any aerial pictures made that are as
beautiful and as convincing. What he does with the natural forms!
He pilots his own plane. He's a very fine flyer.

You see, when I'm photographing, I'm sitting with the pilot,
and I'll say, "Now, I think it's coming! Now, you turn a little
to the left and then bank." Well, if he's sympathetic, he knows.
But you know you don't drive a plane like an automobile. By the
time you say those things you're quite a little ways off. So
getting a few pictures may mean a four-hour flight. The pilot
would bank, but you wouldn't get it right. And then he'd go a
little further back, bank again, and you were too close!

Now Bill Garnett can sit in there and he can control the plane
with his knees and make his photographs. Because, under good
conditions, the plane can drift and float along — if you're a good
enough pilot to pull it out of a spin, etc.

The plane becomes part of the creative instrument, and that's
the important thing about Bill. In all my experience, and I've
seen thousands of pictures, there's nobody that can come anywhere
near him in the aesthetic command of his subject.

Teiser: Does he work in black and white?

Adams: Yes, and in color. Beautiful stuff. Lives up in Napa; Congress

Valley Road. Teaches design at the University of California. Doing
a wonderful job. I'd really recommend him as somebody to be
interviewed.

There are some other aerial photographers, but for some reason
or other they don't "click;" I guess it's a matter of anticipation,
because things happen pretty fast. Garnett has a picture of an
estuary that looks just like the branching of a tree. A most
beautiful thing. My friend [David H.] McAlpin has got one. It's a
print about twenty-four by thirty-six inches — all black and white,
on a black block. Something like that monument in 2001! And all it
is is just these lines, and the estuary, the light shining on the

286

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams:

water, just like a great branching tree. It was an absolutely
honest photograph; there's no retouching. And then he did the
one of the birds flying against the water. It's in [This Is] The
American Earth. And the great picture of Los Angeles — that
terrifying perspective.

Oh yes. In the same book.

But I can't begin to tell you how great I think he is.
one of the great living artists .

I think he's

But you can't count me as an aerial photographer at all. I've
written a little chapter on some of the technical elements, which
are very simple. I think the technical point is very simple to
manage, but the aesthetic — getting the moment and the point of
view. .. .You're moving at a fairly high speed and the closer you
are to the object, the shorter the exposure must be. You have to
use filters to cut your blue atmospheric haze. You have to use
rather high speed film, with a four times filter, and you have to
develop for more than normal contrast because contrast lessens as
you go higher. You can get poor image quality in black and white,
and lots of grain.

Now, in color you don't have high speeds, but the aerial
lenses, the lenses that are corrected for infinity, work best at
very large apertures — say up to f/2 or 2.8 — and that permits you
to make short-exposure photographs. I have this new Hasselblad
with a 100 millimeter lens, which is corrected for extreme
definition. Al Weber uses it, and he said there's nothing like it
at all. Use the lens wide open, at f/4, and it's absolutely
diamond sharp; the lens is designed for infinity function. There's
no focussing. Everything has to be very accurate at infinity. But
if you use a monochromatic filter, like a red, green, or blue,
you'll get an extremely sharp image, with single-component lenses
which are not corrected for chromatic aberration.

I have a picture taken in Tuolumne Meadows of a skier coming
down Lembert Dome; it's done on orthochromatic film with a Graphic
camera and a Kodak Zeiss Tessar lens. It is incredibly sharp.
When I tried to use that lens on panchromatic film it was terrible,
because it wasn't corrected in the red area of the spectrum. In
other words, it focussed the reds at a different plane, so every
thing was fuzzy, you see. So with panchromatic film I'd have to
use with it a minus-red filter, keeping the transmission
orthochromatic (blue and green), and I'd get a very sharp image.

There's all these little things that a lot of people don't
realize.

287

and the Sit

Teiser: This is our copy of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada that, you see,
has been well used. Would you go over it with us?

Adams: Yes. [Looking at book] Well, what I did with this book was to
consider the whole Sierra Nevada system. But the fact is that
when we think about our boundaries of the national parks, they
don't have any reality in nature. You know, the system is: here's
the ocean, and the rivers go back into the mountains. So the
pictures are in order of John Muir's experience — he came in to San
Francisco from the sea. This first one is taken before the Bridge
was built — 1932 or '33.* And that's one of the worst reproductions
ever made of "The Golden Gate."

And the second one is a foothill in the coast range, not too
far from here. ["In the Mount Diablo Range, near Pacheco Pass"]
It's not near Pacheco Pass, that's a mistake. It's about fifty
miles south, but it's in the same country.

And then, here's the great San Joaquin Valley, with these
storm clouds ["Rain Clouds Over the San Joaquin Valley"]. And John
Muir went through that when it was a garden of wild flowers.

Teiser: Did you just happen upon that?

Adams: We were driving, and I suddenly saw it; I get out and make a

photograph. This is a very rich image, but these are, might I say,
lousy reproductions I The Land of Little Rain is much better.

But you see, here, I've seen the Golden Gate, now I'm crossing
the coast range, then into the San Joaquin Valley, then into the
foothills of the Sierra. And these statements [quotations printed
on the pages opposite the photographs] of course are from Muir.
And this ["Slate Outcroppings , Sierra Foothills"] is on the way to
Yosemite. He probably passed this way with his sheep. And here are
sheep ["Flock of Sheep, Sierra Foothills"]. This happens to be a
little further north; it may be fifty miles north of Yosemite, but
it's — you know — exactly the same kind of country. And this again
["Dead Oak Tree, Sierra Foothills, Above Snelling"] is very typical
of the country near Hornitos, above Snelling.

*It is dated 1932 in the book.

288

Adams: Then the first view of Yosemite; this is taken from a point about
a thousand feet west of the tunnel, in a thunderstorm ["Yosemite
Valley"].

And then you come into the detail of the valley, in autumn
["Cathedral Rocks, Autumn Tree, Yosemite Valley"], and the Merced
River cascades ["River Cascade, Yosemite Valley"]. And a very
tranquil scene, of which I have several variations ["Late Autumn
Evening, Merced Canyon West of Ribbon Creek, Below Yosemite Valley"].
This isn't the best one. Down in the Merced Canyon in autumn. All
these are supposed to glow, you know, showing separate leaves and
details.

And "El Capitan;" "Three Brothers;" "Cascade Fall;" floor of
the valley ["On the Floor of Yosemite Valley"]. The lower valley
in winter ["Winter, Yosemite Valley"], a horrible reproduction; just
unbelievably bad.

Teiser: How does the original differ from that?

Adams: Well, the original is a very rich, subtle photograph, with all the
whites separated. All this snow gleams. All this snow white is
different from the clouds. This is just one of the worst repro
ductions you can imagine.

"Nevada Fall" is fair, but perfectly flat light. Even in the
print it's very difficult to get water texture, because it's
absolutely "flat." And you see the rainbow — it's 40° in angle to
the sun, so the shadow of your head would be down about here. And
I have to tell you about an experience — something that has to be
seen, because it's hard to describe. But, if you put your left
thumb to your nose and make a gesture which is considered rather
vulgar, then take the thumb of the right hand and put it to the
little finger of the left and stretch it at right angles to your
left hand, it will describe a 40° arc. Now, if your hands are
small or big, as long as they're the same size, it doesn't make
any difference. But you can find out where a rainbow is going to
be. Because if you point this finger at the shadow of your head,
here is the rainbow area at 40° plus or minus. [Laughter]

Well, we had an experience when I was doing that one time at
Bridalveil Falls, all alone. And I thought, "I have two or three
hours to wait." I could see that, because it would take quite a
time to get the rainbow anywhere near the falls. I was describing
the arc (I think it's 42.3°, something like that. I'm not that
accurate). I turned around, and here are two elderly ladies
looking at me in amazement. And I said, "I'm just trying to find a
rainbow." Whereupon they stepped back two or three paces. I said,
"No, really. I'll give you the technique." So they both came over.
And I said, "Now you see the shadow of your head. Now you put your

289

Adams: finger up here, right along the eye, and your little finger is right
on the shadow of your head, and now do this, and right where the
little finger is, is the arc of the rainbow." Well, that was
interesting. They were doing it. Then we turned around, and a
whole busload of people had arrived, and they were all looking at
us with their mouths open, you know, and I said to them, "We're
just trying to find rainbows," whereupon they all got back in the
bus and went off. [Laughter] That's a true story; it was one of
the funniest things.

Well, number seventeen ["Crags on the South Wall, Yosemite
Valley"] is just crags on the south side of Yosemite Valley. This
is Glacier Point. Then the Mariposa Grove in winter. More Yosemite
in the spring ["Yosemite Fall, Orchard in Blossom"]. Back to
Yosemite in winter ["North Dome, Winter"], with a detail ["Winter
Forest"]; sunset clouds ["Storm Clouds"].

I guess we decided on sequence on an aesthetic basis. Dogwood
["Dogwood Blossoms"]; top of Yosemite Fall ["Yosemite Fall"]. These
are all Yosemite, and it goes on for quite a little while until you
begin to get in the High Sierra —

V. Adams: [Comes in] This is Liliane De Cock.

Adams: She's worked with me more than nine years, you know. She married
Douglas Morgan, my publisher. She's doing a wonderful job. She's
been working on my monograph.

[Back to book] Well, "Merced River Below Merced Lake,"
different forests, Half Dome in a storm. Then there's just a few
of the High Sierra, which we feel, if we do it again, must be in
better balance.

Teiser: You'd put more of the High Sierra in?

Adams: I think I would. Lyell Fork of the Merced. Tenaya Lake again;

Big Trees, Merced Lake — I look at it now and I don't see why I made
this particular sequence.

That's the most beautiful juniper I guess there is, up in
Triple Peak Canyon ["Juniper, Upper Merced Canyon"]. Nobody ever
sees it. I'd like to go up again. Tuolumne Meadows, and then it
goes on into higher country. Now it goes over the Tuolumne Pass,
which is to the south, and Merced Canyon. This is typical ["Grove
of Lodgepole Pine"].

Here comes "Banner Peak and Thousand Island Lake," a hideous
reproduction again! And Mono Lake on the east side. Then we go
way down south, you see. Mount Williamson on the east side. Moro
Rock in Sequoia.

290

Telser: How did that book get started? Did the publishers ask you for it?

Adams: Yes. Well, it was done with Hough ton Mifflin —

Teiser: There's a review of it here from the San Francisco Chronicle .

Adams: Oh, I didn't see that. Let me see.

Teiser: Joseph Henry Jackson wrote it. I think he must have reviewed all
your work.

Adams: Yes, he was very good to me.

Incidentally, you see how this clipping yellows. That's
because of the sulphur content of the pulp paper. [After reading
it] Yes, that's a nice review. Can you make me a copy of that
some time, because I really don't think I have one.

Teiser: Sure.

Adams: Well, I think the books in the main have been successful, but it

wasn't until considerably later years when we really began to think
of fine reproductions. That's when the "My Camera" series came,
My Camera in Yosemite Valley, then My Camera in Point Lobos by
Edward Weston, then My Camera in the National Parks. These were
done by the H.S. Crocker Company — beautiful press work, and the
engravings were done by Walter Mann, with Mr. Raymond Peterson in
charge. Now, I think we've mentioned this before, but these were
really milestones, because I still think they're the best letter
press engravings ever made.

But letterpress is now passe and hardly anybody knows how to
use it, and the two-plate offset is far superior as far as tone
control. So these books, if they're republished, would be done in
offset. By somebody of George Waters 's quality.

Teiser: Do various people do press work for George Waters?

Adams: No, he is a producer. In other words, he makes the plates and does
the actual printing. Now, we did a big advertising campaign for the
Wolverine people [Wolverine World Wide Inc.], and he made negatives
for them.

Teiser: Oh yes. I sent in a dollar for a poster-size reproduction of one.

Adams: Wolverine had four thousand orders on that first advertisement —

extremely satisfying, you know. Waters didn't do that. He did the
catalogue. (I have to give you one of the catalogues.) He did the
plates for that, but they had to be printed in the East. Very

291

Adams: complicated. He did the negatives from the prints. Then the
negatives go off and are "separated" and printed by whatever
printer does the job. This one was printed in Michigan. Then
Waters made the negatives for the advertisement, which they would
take and enlarge to any size they want. So he was trying to
capture my photograph — the quality — which he could do better than
a person who didn't understand it. But the reproduction in [the
advertisement in] Life and so on was lousy anyway, so it really
doesn't make much difference, you know.

And those plates go out as paper matrices, usually, and of
course, Life is printed in quite a few places simultaneously. And
you know, when you get Time and Life out here, you get advertise
ments relating to the West Coast, and if you're in the Midwest, you
get advertisements relating to the Midwest, and so on in the East
and Europe.

It's a very complicated thing. The pattern is set up and
there's so many pages of ads, which are made up in the particular
area, which fit into the main plates which come from the main
editorial office.

Teiser: I think the reproduction that I saw was in the Examiner Sunday
gravure section recently.

Adams: Oh, was it there?

Teiser: And I thought it came out quite well.

Adams: I've only seen the one in Life. But they spent a fantastic amount
of money on these advertising campaigns. I guess that one page in
Life was probably $45,000, just for that issue.

Teiser: But what a wonderful way to advertise!

Adams: They're very good. And then that little column off to one side.
We're hoping we can continue.

Yosemite Photography Workshops

Teiser: Back to Yosemite — do you want to start now or do you want to leave
this for tomorrow or the next day? We'd like to ask you about the
history of the workshops — when they started and how they've gone,
and so forth; who's been involved.

Adams: [Somewhat tentatively] I think I can do that.

292

Teiser: The brochure says this is the twenty-sixth year, which would make it
1946—

Adams: Well, no; before the war [World War II], I think, several times we
had what was called the "U.S. Camera, Ansel Adams, Yosemite
Photographic Forum." Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston, Rex Hardy
and myself. We had quite a group.

Teiser: What's happened to Rex Hardy?

Adams: He was here the other day. Lives in England. Is going to move
back here.

We had a big enrollment. And then Hitler invaded something,
and that put on a war scare, so the enrollment was cut down by half;
yet it was satisfactory. Nothing further happened until after the
war. Then we revised it, which I would say was in — when was the
war over?

Harroun: Forty- five.

Adams: I think we had the first one in '46. It's been a continuous

enterprise since, plus several others in the year. Now we have
this June one coming, and Al Weber has a print one in August, and I
have another one in the end of September. But I'm going to have to
back out of it soon and let other people do it more and more. But
the main June workshop is very closely associated with me.

Liliane [De Cock] came out all the way from Scarsdale; she's
going to teach. And Barbara Morgan's coming — her mother-in-law
and a great photographer.

Teiser: Originally, then, it was cosponsored by U.S. Camera?

Adams: The first one was U.S. Camera, with a very elaborate folder. They
had, you know, a magazine.

Teiser: Did you have a big turnout then?

Adams: Well, we had sixty-plus enrolled. Then, as I said, the war had
started in Europe, and it cut down enrollment to less than half.
Eastern people were too scared. Because it was pretty precarious
when Hitler started invading Sudetenland and Austria, etc.

Teiser: Did Edward Weston start teaching again after the war, then?

Adams: No.

Teiser: Was he a good teacher for groups of that sort?

293

Adams: No. He was a very bad teacher, but a wonderful person for an

example. You see, he was like Brett [Weston], his son. Now, Brett
doesn't impart any detailed information. He has no technical
knowledge; he just has his own extraordinary intuitive way. He
goes out with a camera and he sees things the way he sees them, and
lets people look through the ground glass of the big camera — it's
quite a thrilling experience. But technically — he prides himself
on not being able to add five and four, you know. Many artists do
that. But he's perfectly capable of doing it.

Teiser: Did Dorothea Lange have the same sort of individual approach?

Adams: No, her approach was "seeing" and people — the social, human meaning
of photographs. Extremely important. Barbara Morgan — I don't
suggest her as a teacher in the technical sense, but she inspires
people; she comments on their work. She speaks of feeling; she
talks about the intangibles. And those people are just as important
[as those who discuss technical matters.]

Teiser: What did Rex Hardy do?

Adams: Well, Rex was sort of a journalist type.

Teiser: Did he teach classes, or did he work with individuals?

Adams: Well, you see, we don't work that way. We have groups, seminars —
we play it by ear. And the most important thing is to be in the
field. A person has a problem, so you help him out with it. Then
the instructor gives some talks. He can talk about artificial
light, and the small camera, or anything in his field. This year,
we have quite a variety of very good people. We have Dorr Bothwell,
the painter. She's very stimulating.

Teiser: Has she been participating for many years?

Adams : Yes , quite a few years .

Teiser: Your assistant, Gerry Sharpe — ?

Adams: Yes, unfortunately for us all, she died.

Teiser: Could you speak a little about her?

Adams: Gerry was an extremely gifted gal. She had psychological troubles
in adjusting the creative world to the real world. But she was an
extraordinary, fine photographer. She had a little more technical
knowledge than people give her credit for having. She knew. Her
negatives and pictures were always pretty much "there." There
wasn't a lot of trial and error in her work. And she had this very

294

Adams: important, rather impressive emotional feeling about things. Her
greatest ability was to sit down with an individual and talk about
their work. And they'd go away just simply inspired, because she
could really dig into them, if you want to use the term. "Why did
you do this?" she'd say. "Why did you see it this way?" You know,
talk back and forth, instead of being didactic. She got a
Guggenheim, and she went to Ghana, and was starting in on really a
very important program, and made some beautiful photographs, and
then was involved in a tragic accident. A doctor was driving out
to some village in a Volkswagen, and they hit a truck, and she
nearly lost her leg, and was laid up in a hospital there for weeks.
Then she came home and almost died; tropical injuries are bad.
That sort of knocked everything out of her. I mean, she never
really regained the impulse to create. Finally, she had a job in
the Winterthur Museum [Wilmington, Delaware], but I think the
bottle got the best of her and she just couldn't stand being
restricted to a job. She was born in New Jersey, but came west with
the idea of spending her life photographing early Americana. Her
disability really got her down, and then the decline started, and
she just kept drinking, and that was the end of it.

It's typical of very gifted people who can't relate to the
realities of life. Her photographs are quite remarkable. We were
very fond of her, and her passing was a great loss.

Teiser: You've had some very talented people —

Adams: Well, Liliane is just marvelous. She has a Guggenheim fellowship

now, you know. Right after she was married she got that. That was
too much. Her husband figured it out that she'd worked for me nine
years, three months, two weeks and three days. She knew where
everything was. But she's quite a creative person — easily one of
the best of the younger people.

And Don Worth worked for me for several years. He's a very
fine photographer. He teaches art at San Francisco State University.

Teiser: I remember a picture of his of your lighted studio window, from
outside.

Adams: I happen to have a very fine personal collection of photographs.

Never realized what I had. But the Lands very kindly gave us some
Clarence Kennedy portfolios. That in itself is very important. And
then I have all the portfolios of Weston, Minor White, Don Worth,
Dick Julian. Then all kinds of individual prints. [Charles]
Sheeler et al. And I have early Brady images — my prints, though.
I have daguerreotypes. I don't know what to do with them.

295

Adams: I should get an interne, a young person from a college who's
studying photography, and have him come and analyze them and
catalogue them and document them, because you know, a thing like
that is an awful job. Then the next step is the evaluation; then
the next step is what to do with them.

Teiser: I trust they're all dated.'

Adams: Not too many. I'm not the only one that fails on datingl [Laughter]

Well, let's see — the workshops — at first we had only the June
one. Then we decided that when we put in the new darkroom. .. .The
government gave us the renewed fifteen-year contract, and they
always require improvements. We have spent quite a little money
improving the studio and putting in a darkroom, which is a very
good darkroom, especially as a teaching and demonstration one.

There's no reason why we couldn't have workshops and groups
the whole year, but I myself have to withdraw from that because it's
just too much. To get good photographers to come up and conduct
workshops is our present plan. All I can say is I'm the general
director and I'm not going to let some inferior operation go on.
Al Weber, who lives here, is one of our staff members, and he's a
very good photographer. He's having a workshop in August, and
we're going to develop him more. And we're getting in the fall
workshops. We're getting a great variety of photographers, like
Wynn Bullock, and Jerry Uelsman, and top names to come.

And then the Friends of Photography — of course that's another
subject. Maybe you'd better put that down as a separate subject,
because that ties into the theory of the f/64; really it's the
latter-day f/64 group, but with a modern slant, as far as I'm
concerned.

So let me see — what would be logical? Oh, I might say that I
have given workshops in the Museum of Modern Art, and the museum
in Memphis, and Rochester, and many other places. Workshops last
sometimes a week, sometimes they're just two days. I hate the term
"workshop," but there's no other term in the language that seems to
cover exactly what that means. Because a seminar's something where
a whole group of people get together and exchange ideas. In the
Friends of Photography we say we're having an "event," but that's
very ambiguous too.

Teiser: The word has become so closely associated with these workshops,
you'd have a hard time changing it now, I should think.

Adams: Yes — there are so many hundreds of workshops given, and there's

such a fantastic interest in photography. It's a whole new world.
It's really a tremendous thing, and relates to thousands of people.

296

Adams: Of course, the basic idea is that photography is a language; you
have the aesthetic approach, and the documentary, and the
journalistic, and the scientific, and many other categories. We
use the English language to depict the world in the written word.
We have also the photographic language to express the visual
world. And the audio-visual world — well, all colleges, schools,
institutions, companies, all have what is usually called the
audio-visual department. It's a fantastic growth. I mean it's
an industry, something that represents untold millions of dollars
and hundreds of thousands of people working, making slides,
documentary records, etc.

I'm not plugging anybody, but the Bell & Howell people have
just come out with this new copy machine, which happens to cost
seven hundred and something dollars, but it is fantastic in the
sense that it makes copies of anything in just a few seconds. It
makes transparencies for what they call "overhead projection work."
You can make a transparency, and in about two or three minutes have
a hundred or two hundred ditto copies, which you can put in the
hands of the audience while you're projecting images on the screen.
It's one of the great, I think, steps forward, because it's not
litho reproduction, but it is a quick means of communicating type
written pages, copies, letters, even pictures in a crude sense.
Many advanced duplicating systems are being developed.

[End Tape 11, Side 2]

Skill in Music and Photography

[Interview X — 3 June 1972]
[Begin Tape 12, Side 1]

Teiser: ...then your career in music and your career in photography have
been related?

Adams: Yes. Well, I think it was Wilenski who said that all art is the
expression of the same thing. But actually, I don't necessarily
subscribe to — what would you call it? — a two-dimensional, mystical
relationship because when we start reading qualities of one art
into another, we get in trouble. It's like when we try to talk
about pictures, or when people give literary titles to music, like
the Moonlight Sonata.

I think I mentioned once that Huneker criticism of the B flat
minor Sonata of Chopin, which contains the Funeral March (the
"Marche Funebre") , which is really the stylistic interpretation in
the Adagio, but which is used as a funeral march. It was not Chopin's
intention that it be played with a brass band and used in a procession

297

Adams:

Teiser:

Adams :

Teiser:

Adams:

Teiser:

Adams:

Hunneker accepted that Romantic interpretation, and then said the
last movement, which is Presto Furioso, I think, is the "night
winds rushing over the graves." Well, that kind of relationship
to me is completely nauseating. I mean [laughs] it's a concept to
which I can't possibly relate. What happened is that the expressive
capacities of the music were undoubtedly damaged by literary
interpretation. But the best thing, the thing that probably saved
me, was the strict discipline involved in music that automatically
carried over into the photography. There was no such thing as
"schools" in photography at that time. It was a very sloppy art,
and only a very few people gave it any critical or technical
dignity. There was no training in photography to speak of.

So I could have been a real "sloppy Joe" photographically, if
it hadn't been for the discipline which is absolutely required for
music.

When you first started taking photographs and doing your own
printing, did you print and print and print from the same negative
to teach yourself how to do it?

Oh yes. Well, in the first period, it was empirical — trial and
error, over and over and over, until I got some results. Then
later on, when I established the technical basis of the Zone
System, then I knew much better what I was doing. But I still
have to print quite a number of times to get the expressive result,
because you can't put that on a slide rule. The fact is that it is
so completely subtle, you can't really physically describe it.

You said yesterday that Mr. Mazzeo was a good photographer and not
a very good painter.

Well, I'll put it this way: his prints in no way come up to what
he sees. Now, this "seeing" is used in quotes. As Edward Weston.
would say, the "seeing" is not adequate, or the "seeing" is great.
As I've mentioned before, the internal event and the external event
are so terribly important. And with people like Mazzeo being
interested in birds and things — the external event is really what
interests him. He does pictures because the subject interests him,
and he conveys the subject. But he doesn't have the design sense
that Brett Weston has or Edward Weston had, for whom the photograph
becomes an object and not just a record of a subject. It becomes
something in itself. But Mazzeo is a great musician! I

Are there people who can make a good negative but can't print it,
and people who can print but not make a good negative?

Well, put it this way: there are many people who could make
absolutely adequate negatives with no expressive intention. And it
comes down to a complicated thing: your visualization is in relation

298

Adams: to the final Image, and it usually works out that the person doesn't
make a good negative because he's failed in some way to visualize.
Then in some way, by hook or crook, he does the best he can in the
darkroom, you see.

I have many very bad negatives that I can take to the darkroom
and really do a lot to bring up some expressive quality. But I can
have an absolutely perfect negative, and if I didn't have the
feeling or the sensitivity, simply nothing would happen. In many
cases I've taken other people's photographs, like some of the early
photographs, and have made prints which were, frankly, much better
than anything they made technically, because I have better materials
and controls than they had.

When I say better, I mean the print had more impact. And I
know that Bill Webb has done the same thing with the [Adam Clark]
Vroman negatives. He's made really wonderful images; much better
images than Vroman ever made. And in my case, the two examples are
the San Francisco fire and the Chinatown street of Arnold Genthe.
Genthe's prints are notoriously weak and fuzzy and (quote) "artistic"
(unquote). And it's the same thing with his records of the fire.
They're pretty tough; some of those negatives are very, very bad.

Teiser: How about O'Sullivan? Did you improve — ?

Adams: I never worked with any O'Sullivan negative. I certainly improved
on the Bradys, but I never printed any O'Sullivan or Jackson. I
printed some Wittick, Brady [pause] — well, when we say Brady, we
don't know who — it could be any one of his photographers.

You see, Brady was a promoter, not a photographer. He had a
business called Matthew Brady, and he employed photographers. And
on the envelopes of all these negatives that were put in the
National Archives were written the name of the photographer. But
he never gave them credit in the published work. Only more recent
historians have done that.

But Roy Stryker, when he took on the farm resettlement project —
you know, the big "dust bowl" job — always gave the photographers
leading credit. It would be a photograph of such and such "by
Walker Evans, Farm Security Administration Historical Project, Roy
Stryker, director." That was the way it would be documented — the
photographer always got the leading line.

Teiser: I'm sorry, I took you away from —
Adams: The music —

Teiser: You were telling us yesterday, after we were taping, about the kind
of pianist you were and are, and how your technique differs from —

299

Adams: Well, probably that sounded a little too pompous. The fact remains
that I have a very light hand. I have an ideal violin hand. And
my very good friend, Cedric Wright, who was a violinist, had an
ideal piano hand — we should have grafted them. [Laughs]

In any event , my technique was based largely on the dynamic
finger action. I think it would be called the Leschetizky method.
Now that goes back to the turn of the century, and the fundamental
technical pattern is that you lift, strike, and relax. You
practice hours: you lift, strike, and relax, until it becomes
absolutely free. If you lift, strike, and hold down, you
immediately tighten; then you have no flexibility.

Then the same thing would apply to the wrist for certain
things. Now, there's a difference in the relaxing — it would be
legato (because the key is held down), or it would be a portamento,
or it would be a staccato. Then to reinforce the sound, I would
bring in some weight. But, there are whole schools of weight
playing in which you sort of "pour in" your weight. You see people
using shoulder or arm, and that almost invariably results in less
brilliance of tone. The ideal situation is that you balance them
out — your weight and your dynamics — depending on your hand structure.

Now, Victor Babin, the late pianist, he was really marvelous.
He had very large hands. And he had complete control — magnificent
finger action and complete weight control. And he could produce
the most incredible sounds!

Harold Bauer, when he was playing a concerto with an orchestra,
could actually imitate the quality of an instrument. If a flute
or string passage was to come, say with a Schumann concerto, his
piano would take on that quality. Now it's all illusionary,
because it really can't imitate; it still is a percussion instrument.
But it isn't the way you hit one key; it's the time, the dynamics,
in which you hit the next key.

You see, there's no real way in which you can change the sound
of the piano at all. Now, the harpsichord is different; you strike
it and you can vibrate, and you can get a little pulse in the sound.
But the piano — the hammer strikes the key and retracts. So there's
no control but volume and the relationship to the next note.
Intuitively, it probably could be explained. I think even [H.L.F.
von] Helmholtz touched on that. He explained that when you strike
a note — and this depends not only on the fact that it's a piano or
an organ, but say that it's a piano, upright, square, or grand —
when you strike that note, you have produced the fundamental tone,
and then you have a whole series of harmonics , and those harmonics
are not necessarily the same that you get with the open strings.
But they're there. They're even within the part of the strings that

300

Adams: are dampened. There's a very subtle resolution. And then you
anticipate this resolution, and you play the next note; and in
anticipating it, you also have to bring in this psychophysical law.

So a beautiful touch is something that makes the sounds seem to
flow with absolute completion. You don't worry about them at all.
And a poor touch — we all know what that is. It drives you up the
wall. Because here's people playing precisely — everything that's
written, playing everything in time, in unison — but they have not
got this sense of the connecting sequence, which can't be called
just simply "legato." It is legato, but that's too simple a term.

And in photography, when you're photographing actions — I think
I mentioned Cartier-Bresson as anticipatory. There's a girl who's
walking toward us, toward the camera, and I anticipate her; I want
her at a certain place. If I wait until she's there, she's caught
beyond! So I have to see this possibility and feel all the
relationships. There is about one-tenth second delay between
"seeing" and operating the shutter.

But now getting to the music-photography relationship. I don't
see anything except certain standards of discipline, which are
obvious, and then standards of taste or aesthetics. It's impossible
for me to think of people spending their lives in music and not
having good taste in the other arts. But that is not the case,
because I have been in music studios — in New York, some of my good
friends , very fine musicians — with the worst possible furniture and
the worst possible things on the wall you could imagine. I mean,
absolutely no sensitivity for the visual.

So there's nothing cut and dried in this relationship!
Teiser: What about the very simple thing of manual dexterity?

Adams: Finger dexterity is something which is very important — well, unless
you're crippled, as I partially am with arthritis now — nobody has
any trouble with a camera. It's rather a gross instrument in a way.
Some people are very rough with cameras and mistreat a delicate
instrument. That's something else. But I can still set the shutter
with accuracy, and I can still operate the camera. I may have
difficulty lifting it onto the tripod. The dexterity is really
partly when you're developing films in the tray that you get a very
sensitive feeling of the finger in handling these things. But I
don't think being a pianist or not would have any effect on that.

Now, if you were a watchmaker or putting a shutter together or
something, that's another world. But I really don't think dexterity
in general is so important .

301

The Friends of Photography

Teiser: We spoke yesterday about the Friends of Photography. Do you want
to go into that now?

Adams: Yes. Well, that's a continuation of my attitude towards the f/64

group. In other words, not exactly the same motivation. But, there
was no place, anywhere in the West, where a group of creative people
got together. And I thought about it, and we talked about it. And
one day Cole Weston came out; he was managing the Sunset Center [in
Carmel]. He said, "Well, if you want to do something in photography,
there's a space available for a gallery." And that sort of triggered
it off, and I got ahold of Wynn Bullock and Mazzeo and a few others.
"Let's do something about this." [Interruption]

We saw the space, and then we got very busy and raised a
little money, and then organized the Friends of Photography. It
was a pro tern committee which secured the place. Our lawyer then
drew up the articles of incorporation, which we signed, and this
committee then became secondary to the fundamental bylaws and the
election of officers and so on, as a charitable, tax-deductible
institution. So we're tax-deductible. If you wish to give us ten
thousand dollars, we'd accept it with the greatest of joy, and you
could take it off your income tax. If you can make it more, why
we'd much appreciate it. [Laughter]

We've had phenomenal success with shows; we haven't any money.
We've brought some beautiful work to the area — have produced publi
cations and two portfolios. Bill Turnage came, primarily to work
for me, and he had several other things to manage. He acted as
the director and really did a fantastic job in waking us up — made
a lot of us very mad because he told the truth. You know that
usually happens. He's a mover and a shaker, and he did his job of
organizing and telling us the truth — analyzing the full situation.
And then on Turnage 's advice we appointed Fred Parker as the
regular executive director. He's a curator and a museum man and an
expert in photography, and there were very, very few trained
curators, art historians, or gallery persons in the world of
photography to draw upon. That's one thing that we now have to
stress.

I think that the Princeton center, which David McAlpin has just
initiated, will start developing such people. You see, it's not
necessary for them to be photographers. The curator of painting or
the museum director is not necessarily a painter. But we've had
few of these for photographers to call on, and their opinion is
usually biased; it can't be anything else. I've tried it; I've
run things. But it's just incredibly hard for a photographer to be
objective.

302

Teiser: What is the center that McAlpin's given?

Adams: The Princeton University Art Museum photography center. He's

founded a chair of photography. Peter Bunnell is running it. And
it's primarily related to the history of photography. He gave one
million dollars, which it costs to set up a chair. People never
think about a million dollars. What can one do with a million?
Well, normally you have to put it in securities, and out of that,
you get 50 percent — fifty thousand a year.

That's an irrevocable trust, and that pays Bunnell's salary
and the space charges, and operating cost, and a secretary. You
can't do very much with fifty thousand a year in a big institutional
way. But you can train people who come and work through Princeton
in the various departments. Now, of course, the term "museology"
is really related to the physical care or the restoration or the
analysis of paintings and works of art. A curator is somebody who
has an art historian's knowledge in the field, you see, and cares
for and controls the prints in relation to this knowledge. The
museum director is somebody who just says what's going to be done.
The curator, by the way, usually has to prepare and hang the
exhibits.

But the director — he has to know a lot, or should know a lot —
but he also has the administration and politics and finance on his
neck, you see.

Teiser: And your director of the Friends is up to all those things.

Adams: Well — we're very small. He was curator of photography at the

Pasadena Museum. Now he could move into a position like this chair
at Princeton. I don't think he would like it too much. His ideal
would be the curator of photography in some big institution, say
the Metropolitan. That would be an objective goal. But here he is
running the exhibits, he's running the workshops and the
publications. But it's all subject to the approval of committees
on the board, which it should be for saving his own neck. We
haven't disagreed yet.* But it's very important for the trustees
to keep control.

Some directors will say, "Well, I don't want to be subject to
anybody. I want to run the whole thing." That's one of the worst
things you could let anyone do. Because why not share your mistakes
[laughs] — psychologically and otherwise? But we've had a very good
board. Liliane De Cock is on the board, for example.

Teiser: Are most of the members on the board photographers?

*We did later. [A. A.]

303

Adams: Too many. We were practically all photographers at one time. Now
we're stretching it more, because again, a complete board of just
photographers is biased. And we have some members who just can't
see any other work but their own. I mean it's very difficult for
an exhibitor to criticize exhibits, because it doesn't look like
the kind of photography that they believe in. Well, that's not
our function. And Fred Parker, with his very big knowledge of
photography, can get us exhibits of the photography of our time.
Now, I would say that half the shows that we've had there I don't
like, from the personal point of view. But I have no right to pass
that judgment. I don't like Rubens, and I don't like Picasso, but
I'm very fond of Rouault. So you wouldn't expect me, if I ran a
museum, to concentrate on Rouault. I'd have to admit the existence
of Picasso. [Interruption]

Well, so the Friends are a growing institution, and of course

I want to withdraw when it's reasonable to do so and concentrate

on my own work. I think it's terrible for people to stay on and on
and on and on in any institution.

Teiser: I imagine that it wouldn't have become a real organization without
your leadership , however —

Adams: Well, I think probably I'd have to accept that fact. Not from the
point of view of conceit, but because of experience with the
Museum of Modern Art and many other things of its type. The Sierra
Club — thirty-four years on the board there — I learned something
about management at the board level.' And then I'm very well known.
So you put all these things together on a purely objective level,
and of course I would be useful to some degree.

Teiser: What is the geographical area of this' group? Is it really national?

Adams: We want to make it national. We've had exhibits from all over. One
of the things we wanted to avoid is being a camera club. Camera
clubs are really social clubs, like little men's chowder and
marching societies [laughter] — and are not interested in photography
as an advanced art but more as a hobby. The Photographic Society
of America represents the camera club and hobbyist and practically
nobody else. It's another world. It's a very difficult thing to
explain, but you just go and look at a photographic salon by the
pictorial group and you see a totally different thing than when you
see a serious, creative, dedicated work.

Teiser: There's a man in San Francisco who I think you must have known, who
I think was a photography club man. Francis Brugiere —

Adams: Brugiere. Well now, he was rather unusual. He was quite an artist.
But there was no outlet for photographic art, so he did function
through the only thing that existed to function in photography — the

304

Adams: camera club. But he did many things with light — photograms,

reflections, abstract things that are really quite extraordinary.

But I don't know enough about him to give you any authentic
information. It would be like Ann Brigman, you see, who did some
remarkable images which Stieglitz liked. But the only place she
could show was at the camera clubs .

Teiser: I rather suspected that Brugiere was better than most.
Adams: Oh yes, he was very much ahead.

Then, I forget the man that ran Camera Craft for so long. He
was a nice man, but boy I He had what you call "Kodak taste." He
was right down the pictorial line.

The Friends are a going organization, we hope. I think we've
accomplished a lot, and now photography is becoming a very big
factor in the art world. Scores, even hundreds of college depart
ments, hundreds of workshops — some are bad, some are good, but it's
now being recognized.

And a museum will have a photography show. Heretofore, you'd
have Stieglitz and Strand and Weston — that would be about it. Then
[Eliot] Porter and I got in, and some of the Europeans — Cartier-
Bresson, Andre Kertesz, a few others, but it still was always
played pretty much on the safe side.

Now they're really showing much younger people. Liliane's
had some fine shows. She's got one coming up at the Amon Carter
Museum, and I think at the Art Institute in Chicago — I'm not sure.
She's had some very good exhibits — at this level of an artist, which
is the thing that we have to maintain in photography. It's a very
difficult point.

You see, it's up to the photographer to maintain his work at
the level of the artist. The painter and the sculptor automatically
assume that they do. "I'm a sculptor — I'm in the fine arts." Of
course I might be a lousy sculptor, but still, I'm automatically
there. A photographer never has quite that conviction. That's one
of the reasons — the insecurity — why so many photographers talk so
much. You know, to justify their own work and try to mystically
explain the inner unmeanings.

Teiser: .1 know the Friends of Photography is not like the Eastman House,
but —

Adams: The Friends of The Bancroft Library would be people who'd go out to
raise money for the library. Well, we might have the "Friends of
the Friends of Photography" some day. It's what we need. [Laughter]
But there are friends of almost anything — friends of the sea otter.
It's a vague term — it means supporters.

305

Teiser: Well, do I remember that the Eastman House group has published and
shown exhibits and sent exhibits around —

Adams: It's not got a big membership. It is a nonprofit membership

institution. But they never went out after many members. They
were very generous to their members . We were too generous in
giving each of ours the portfolios. We had about twelve thousand
dollars tied up in portfolios that haven't sold yet. Every member
got a free copy. And they're beautifully reproduced.

But you'll always find that there's something wrong with
whatever you do. "Why did you make this selection?" "I didn't
think that picture was any good." And the next person will say,
"Well, I think that's one of the best things in it." When I did my
Portfolio V it was extraordinary because there were two or three
images which most people liked. But every one was liked by a
number of people. And that's kind of lucky, because sometimes
there'll be one or two that will be by-passed entirely.

Museums and Critics

Teiser: To go back in time — to other exhibits of photographs — in 1931 you
had an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution called "Pictorial
Photographs of the Sierra Nevada Mountains" —

Adams: Everything is wrong: "pictorial" is wrong, "Sierra Nevada" is
wrong, "Mountains" is wrong. [Laughs] We all use that, but
Francis Farquhar — oh, he used to go wild over that.

Teiser: But that was what they called it.

Adams: Well, that was just like the name they gave Parmelian Prints , I
guess.

Teiser: Was that your first major exhibit?

Adams: I wouldn't consider the Smithsonian at that time as having any

status as an exhibit place. They showed curiosities and scenes and
such things, but I don't think they had museum status. It even
doesn't have what you'd call really museum status, although of late
it's getting there.

Teiser: How did they happen to know about you?

Adams: Well, word of mouth. Francis Farquhar, somebody. Bradford

Washburn of course had shown a lot of his Mount McKinley pictures.
But the Smithsonian has always related more or less to science,

306

Adams: travel, invention. And boy, when Beaumont [Newhall] and I went

there, they had their exhibit of photographs of early Fox Talbots
[photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot] up in the top floor
under the skylight, completely unprotected. And these things
were literally fading. And I blew my top. I said, "Beaumont,
can't you do something about it?" He said, "You don't understand
the museum world. I could no more go down there and criticize
this curator!" He said, "You could," you see, because I wasn't
in the museum world. And I wrote a very strong letter, first
thing. I said, "As a photographer, subjecting these invaluable
photographs, some of the most important things ever done —
subjecting them to this unfiltered light is — well, it's incompre
hensible." There were other people who were upset too. They did
finally cover these cases with a yellow glass filter. Still it
was a poor job.

So then I went to Dearborn to see the Ford collection [at the
Henry Ford Museum] of [William Henry] Jackson photographs. We were
trying to get something for the "Brady and the American Frontier"
exhibit. They had fourteen thousand glass plates in a loft of one
of their big buildings, and the temperature was about 110°.
Fortunately, it was dry. But collodion won't take too much
temperature. And I blew my top there. . I told this man, I said,
"I think keeping these plates here is absolutely disastrous. I'm
no chemist, but this heat is such a hazard" — the sun beating on the
roof. He said, "I think we know what we're doing, Mr. Adams." I
said, "Well, I guess perhaps you don't. I would say this could
lead to a most serious deterioration." Well, I wrote a letter to
Henry Ford II about it. But you see, I'm not in the museum world;
I was clear. I could do this. But if Beaumont [Newhall] had done
that, he'd have been immediately blacklisted in the profession.
Because you never criticize another curator — like a doctor, you
see. A doctor can't go and say anything negative about any other
doctor — unless he is a downright fake. But even then you have to
be very careful.

And when one doctor criticizes another, it's always by
innuendo. They say, "Well, some people will go to anybody." Never
really say that Dr. Jones is an impostor I

But photographers — among the good ones — as soon as a photogra
pher knows another one is sincere, he usually is very supportive.
But he also can get hideously jealous. That happens in music too;
I suppose all the arts. I know some very unfortunate high-level
jealousy among some of the very top people. And it's purely
psychological, because they have nothing to be jealous about.

A lot of people are jealous of me because of my apparent
success in selling prints. I'm not conservative in spirit. My
work is fairly "set" — you know, it's me, and it belongs to another

307

Adams: and earlier period. The criticism I get quite often is that — well,
I'm dead, I'm finished. I've had people tell me that to my face.
"Why don't you go and retire. You're through; you haven't done
anything new for years." I say, "You're perfectly right. But I
may." [Laughter]

It's very hard to judge things such as methods of photography
or any art at its own level. Another thing that's been very
serious in the museum world is that the dealer world has been one
of the extraordinary merchandising machines of the times. These
people like Warhol and others will have an exhibit, and an agent
will take them on. Now, the agent promotes them, and within a
short time this man is the "greatest artist of our time." And
people are like sheep. They get a page in Time. You'll see very
often Newsweek and Time will have the same story. Now, that comes
right out of the publicity offices. It's all very well engineered.
And they like to come out at the same time because one doesn't want
to follow the other.

Then I've heard a museum man say, "Veil, I was considering
Harry, but you know, he's about six months passe now." [Laughter]
It's the truth. And I said to one curator, "Well, does that in any
way influence Harry's quality?" He said, "No, but he's just dead.
He's not up with the times, he's not with it." Well, in six months
time, you know —

Goya is still with it. [Laughter] And El Greco is still with
it. And I'd say that the early period of Picasso is to me
extremely moving. And I never can accept the later period. I
think he had his tongue in cheek in a lot of it, and I know a lot
of contemporary art which is far more abstract and far out than
Picasso, which moves me deeply. But again, not being a museum man,
not being a trained art historian, I have no right to say that as
anything more than a strictly personal reaction.

Some say, "I don't like Joe, and I think Harry's a good guy,
and what's the matter with Jim?" It has nothing to do with the
real value of the people as artists. It's just their own reaction.
And the critics! We are trying to train now in photography
knowledgeable critics , because there are very few of them — and
many are needed. A painter cannot criticize a photograph.

Teiser: There's Mrs. Mann?

Adams: Oh yes, Marjorie Mann. Well, she's a psychological case. She

writes sometimes brilliantly, but she has just decided that some
thing's wrong in photography and she's going to set it right. I
would say that Mann is inclined to be rather brutal and inconsiderate
When she's writing about something she knows, she's fine, but she
immediately tied onto the Friends of Photography as being nothing

308

Adams: but an old fogey organization perpetuating the West Coast school.
Well, she came to the first opening. We told her what we were
going to do. And immediately she decides we show only the classics.

Well, then she hit a couple of other shows that were of
somewhat conservative type, and she missed all the ones that were
highly contemporary and experimental. I think she missed the
platinum show, which was history, and she missed the — oh gosh, I
just can't begin to tell you. So she has a total misconception.
Now, her influence is considerable. So before Fred Parker knew
about us, he had that impression through her writing. And then
when he came and looked at the series of exhibits that we had, he
said, "I want to apologize for my previous opinion. Why didn't
somebody tell me?"

We had Van Deren Coke class work from the University of New
Mexico. We had the Institute of Design, we had Todd Walker — we
went all over the map; a very fine cross section of what's going
on in photography. We had the Visual Dialogue show, with photo
sculpture — things in the round and in plastic. So one of our big
problems is to show to the world that we have a very catholic
approach.

But you see if you can be a belligerant critic, if you can be
a showoff, if you can make everybody feel that you're right out
there crusading — you can get a lot of attention.

Her [Mann's] own photographs are simply terrible — the weakest
things. I think she never should photograph. A critic should be
absolutely objective. Most art critics are not painters — they've
studied art, they're art historians. Beaumont is a superb critic
in photography, about the only one that really exists.

Teiser: Does he write that analytically?

Adams: Well, I'm trying to get him to do it, but Beaumont's a rather mild,
kindly person, and he's interested in the history of photography,
and for him there's no difference between the past and the present.
It's a continuous flow. He can pick up from my work things that
happened a hundred years ago and vice versa. Not that we're
imitating, but it's just a broad approach to the world, you see.

Now, a typical happening is — somebody wrote me a letter: "How
did Stieglitz get these rich qualities?" I wrote a letter back
saying as best I could that the chances were that the rich qualities
he saw were a psychological effect due to his wonderful sense of
values. And I sent that letter on to Beaumont, and he was able to
say, well, the values are a little extreme in some cases, in lantern
slides, for example, because Stieglitz intensified them with
mercury. But mercury isn't permanent. He didn't know it at the
time, so all those slides are gone.

309

Adams: I have some intensified in mercury and chromium that have gone too!
It isn't permanent. It's very complex. You add mercuric salts to
the silver, and the result is a kind of mutual deterioration. The
negative just turns a ghastly yellow, and I don't know of any way
to get it back.

Teiser: I was impressed that someone writing so seriously in a popular
photographic magazine would get as much space as Mrs. Mann has.

Adams: Well, she approached it as a profession.

There's [A.D.] Coleman, who writes for the New York Times, and
he seems pretty erudite. I think he's been pretty good.

Now, Jacob Deschin, who wrote for the [New York] Times first,
is a very nice man, but he really knows nothing about photography.
He really started writing about photo products. And people used to
look at that column like we look at Herb Caen, and believe it, you
know. A lot of people never enjoy a concert until they've read
the paper the next morning. But of course Deschin wasn't really
in that critical class at all.

There's a very interesting story about Beaumont. You see,
Nancy [Newhall] designed my big show in San Francisco [the 1963
exhibit at the de Young Museum]. And one of the photographic
magazines asked would Beaumont write a criticism of it. And
Beaumont, being a professional and not having enough money, said,
"Yes, but it must be professional." They said, "We'll pay your
way to San Francisco as an honorarium." Which is all right. He
said, "Now, there are my wife and one of my close friends there
who could do it." They said, "No, no, we trust you." So he came
out.

Well, Beaumont wrote a perfectly beautiful analysis of the
show and of my different periods of work and was very objective.
He took the text to the editor, and the editor said, "Gee, this is
pretty good writing, but can't you find anything wrong with it?"
And Beaumont said, "Well, the function of criticism is not to find
something wrong. It's to interpret. But," he said, "no, I can't
find anything wrong with it. There's a few prints — quite a few
prints that I wouldn't have put in myself, but there's nothing
wrong with it in the total sense."

But then, it makes people feel very superior to have somebody
say, "Well, it's obvious that Paul Strand has done some very bad
things," or "This picture doesn't hold a candle to that" — you know,
some needling remarks. It's like the old Roman arena and the
gladiators, I guess. They just like to see people taken apart.
And most of the photographic criticism has been that way.

310

Adams: The art criticism has been much better because the critics have
been much more erudite — and the same with music. There was a
famous music critic at the Examiner many, many years ago. Or
maybe it was the Chronicle. I think it was Rosenthal who played,
and after the intermission the manager came out and said there had
been a mistake in the program, and Mr. Rosenthal is not going to
play this, he's going to play this and this and this. What do
you think — the next morning in the newspaper here's a glowing de
scription of what Mr. Rosenthal didn't play. And the critic heard
him. I saw him there. Then he left to write and meet the deadline.
He maybe, after all, had heard Rosenthal do the "Fantasy" of Liszt,
you know, or the "Don Juan Suite," or whatever was on the program,
so he just wrote about them.

Imagine the embarrassment of writing a critique about something
that wasn't played. [Laughs] He was a very kindly man, and he was
terribly embarrassed. The next week he wrote a letter of apology
and explained why — that he'd heard Rosenthal many times and knew
how he would perform. But still, it was an inexcusable breach.
But everybody thought it was a good joke. [Laughter]

[End Tape 12, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 12, Side 2]

Teiser: To get back to your exhibits — the one you would perhaps consider
your first real exhibit. It was a one-man show in 1932 at the
de Young. It was before the f/64 show.

Adams: I think that would be fairly important. [Lloyd] Rollins, the
director, was way ahead of his time; he did a great service to
photography in the fact that he did show it. He showed Weston, he
showed Brett [Weston], and he showed me, and he showed others, and
he showed f/64, and he had the museum trustees down on him for
wasting space on photographs.

The whole Art Association in San Francisco has had a vendetta
against photography as long as I can remember. They resent any
space [used for it] because to them photography is not art. And
my dearest friends, people like Colonel [C.E.S.] Wood and Sara
Bard Field, would take me aside: "You could go anywhere in music.
Why did you choose photography? The camera cannot express the
human soul."

I told Stieglitz that. Stieglitz said, "Oh, so?" [Laughs]
I mean, making this romantic failure, I guess you'd call it, to see
what you saw and feel it was just as spiritual an accomplishment as
what a painter could do. But to them (they were a generation before
me, you see), it was a mechanical process. You click and then you

311

Adams: develop and then you print, that's it. But they don't realize all
the magical visualization and controls that go into it. And this
is terribly important. [Interruption]

Teiser: Your show at the de Young, then, in '32, was of prints that you
had recently made?

Adams: Yes, most of the early better things.

You see, I have a big problem now, that I'm probably the most
disorganized photographer that ever lived, and probably the one
who has the greatest number of things to fight with and combat, in
items and early pictures. And for my show in San Francisco that's
coming up, I have to go out to that darkroom and I have to start
in from the beginning.

Proper Disposition of Photographs

Adams: I have hundreds of prints, and twenty-five, thirty thousand

negatives, and of course some are useless and some are of purely
historic value. I should take my early pictures of Yosemite —
negatives — and give them to some historical [organization], like
the Yosemite Natural History Association, because there's
thousands of pictures that are just "Ridge No. 3," "Peak X," etc.
Well, they'd take them and look at them over a period of forty or
fifty years — watch for the changes. That's very important
scientifically.

And I've had a little struggle over what to do in relation to
The Bancroft [Library] because — where do the prints go? Well, in
fact we're having a discussion with some good friends this summer
about what's going to happen to this place.

Teiser: The Bancroft has new space being planned —

Adams: Well, if any architect at all knows his salt, he would make purely
archival conditions for collections. But the point is, The
Bancroft is historical and I sent up all the Sierra Club papers —
I just sent up all kinds of things. Now, when you come to a
photographic collection of prints, if it's purely art items it
should go to a different place, I think — an art repository. The
Bancroft have a lot of early California things, but that's not
necessarily art.

Now, Edward Weston's pictures were given to the library at
Santa Cruz by a friend, anonymously. He's given eight hundred of
them, and this could be the nucleus of a photographic collection.

312

Adams: But there were forty prints of Edward Weston over at Monterey

Peninsula College, and nobody recognized what they had. They were
in drawers without slipsheets on them, and the students would take
them out and prop them up carelessly. Finally we got terribly sore
over that and we had them all overmatted, and really — when we told
them they were worth five hundred dollars apiece on the market,
they immediately made a flip. They are very nice people, but they
were absolutely opaque to the quality of these prints.

And this is the kind of thing that we really have to consider
in disposition of creative work.

Now, the pictures I have of Yosemite and of the California of
my time, and so on — they are history. If they're fine photographs,
that's good too. But I have many photographs that have nothing to
do with the subjects of history. How is The Bancroft going to
handle it? It belongs in a different category. It belongs with a
photography collection in a photography department. And once you
give a thing, you have no control over it.

The Huntington Library has a magnificent collection of Edward
Weston photographs, and I think they're taking care of it. But
they are isolated.

Teiser: They have a very good group of yours, too.

Adams: Yes, I've heard that. I don't know. But in Edward Weston 's [case],
some donor gave five hundred prints I think valued at twelve dollars
apiece. Paid Edward that, and Edward made six thousand dollars.
These photographs are now worth a fortune — forty thousand dollars.
They're scarce as hen's teeth. An original good condition Weston
print is worth at least eight hundred dollars today.

Well, now, I'm getting two hundred dollars for the 16 by 20s.*
If I were to die tomorrow, those things would immediately go to
one thousand dollars or more, like Stieglitz. You couldn't buy a
Stieglitz today. I have one that should come back pretty soon.
It's loaned out on a museum tour. I insured it for six thousand
dollars. I know two people who'd give me ten thousand dollars for
that picture. And that is ridiculous, you see, because Stieglitz
is dead. There's only two of these in existence. So it has
nothing to do with the art value. So what do I do? Do I
capitalize on these things?

*Five hundred dollars after July 1974. [A. A.]

313

Financial Practicalities

Adams: There's a terrible thing that happened with the estate of David
Smith, the sculptor; the IRS has come in to his studio, with all
these things, and has put a death tax on the dealer's value, which
goes into millions. And the estate can't possibly pay it.

And what happened with Stieglitz — he never took a cent out of
the gallery. And Marin and [Arthur] Dove and O'Keeffe, they'd
bring their paintings and leave them there — a good, safe depository,
Well, he died, and in comes the IRS, and they say, "Oh, there's an
O'Keeffe — twelve thousand dollars," which is what it would have
sold for. And here were a hundred Marins at twelve thousand
dollars apiece, and so on. And they went up into fantastic sums.
The estate said, "We don't own these. It was just that they were
on consignment." "Well, show us the papers." Well, there were no
papers. He never gave anybody a receipt; they were all "family."
So it took the combined effort of two top New York lawyers and
McAlpin and somebody else to go down to Washington and state the
situation, that these paintings belonged to the artists.

So you see you're in a very difficult situation in any
artistic value. On the other hand, I could take one of my two-
hundred-dollar prints and give it to the Institute of Foreign
Studies for an auction, and the only thing is that they can't sell
it for less than the going price, because that wouldn't be fair to
the clients. But I want nothing for it at all. I give it to them.
All I can take off of my income tax is ten dollars.

Teiser: Why?

Adams: Because the artist can only take off his material costs. That's
the new reading. Now you can buy that print for ten dollars from
me and give it to the Institute. Then its value is two hundred
dollars, and you can take that off your income tax.

Teiser: You mentioned the other day that prints were not, earlier,
collected or bought. When did it start?

Adams: No. Well, Stieglitz sold a few. God knows how few. Strand —
Teiser: How did Strand make a living?

Adams: Strand inherited quite a fortune. Stieglitz had a very nice

living. Julia Margaret Cameron had a nice living. Edward Weston
was broke all his life, except when he was a portrait photographer
in Glendale; then he was doing very well. Then he threw that all
over — it wasn't creative. And he nearly starved to death on a
couple of occasions.

314

Teiser: Could Edward Western have sold more prints?

Adams: Edward Weston needed a manager. If Edward Weston had had a really
sympathetic, good manager, Edward could have done very well,
because he was a superb photographer. But he just philosophically —
he just pulled away from all that. You couldn't talk to Edward
about anything. 1 used to plead with him on insurance. I used to
plead with him on making out a will, for the sake of his family.
[He'd say,] "Oh, I'm not interested."

Robinson Jeffers came here in 1924 or before and got all that
land at Carmel Point. And finally friends used to say, "Well,
look, Robin — " Of course, he had an income too, you see. Taxes
were getting a little high. They'd say, "You have to remember,
this land is tremendously valuable and you ought to do something
about it or your children are going to have tax trouble." Jeffers
would say, "Oh, they'll have to take care of themselves. I can't
be bothered." Well, when he died the property was worth over a
million dollars — and the death tax duties [were so high that]
within a year they didn't have any money at all. They had to
immediately start borrowing, selling, subdividing. That whole
point should have been a Robinson Jeffers memorial area, you see.
And he could have very easily made a corporation — a trust — and put
everything in it. There'd be some taxes, but so little!

So as I say, many of the greatest creative photographers have
had private incomes and were really amateurs. Eliot Porter is very
well off. I know of several others.

Original Prints

Teiser: In Stieglitz's time, then, very few prints were sold?

Adams: Oh, very few photographs. He just put impossible [prices on them] —
thousand dollars, seven hundred fifty; Strand, five hundred. Mrs.
Liebman would buy a Strand. But the prints were sold. Most of it
was done in portrait commissions, or sold [for reproduction in]
books. But the actual purchase of a print as an art was very
little known.

Teiser: When did people start buying them?

Adams: I'd say it really started probably before the 1929 crash. Then
after the Great Depression, and shows were given in galleries,
people started acquiring prints. But never at more than a personal
level. And then, you see, as the galleries developed, people got
aware of the fact that a print had value.

315

Adams: Now, my Portfolio V is strictly limited to one hundred copies for
sale, and everything's destroyed — negatives and all other prints.
And the collector will say, "You don't number this edition of
other prints." I say, "No." To me a photograph can be reproduced
a thousand times, but it has no value to a collector, because he's
just buying something anybody else can have. Etchers have done
that. Weston did it. He used to have, say, fifty prints, so he'd
make a few prints. They might be number 5/50. Well, he very
seldom sold more than five or six, except for just a handful [of
photographs]. And I'd say the same thing. I can think of ten or
twelve photographs which have sold very considerable quantities,
way beyond any normal edition. And the rest — seven, five, ten,
none. So in theory I should set a limit; that I will make no more
than fifty prints, a hundred prints. And then every one bears the
number of the print and the edition.

Teiser: Then after you make those, you should discard the negative?

Adams: I should discard the negative. Now, fundamentally that is wrong,
but also, I couldn't charge what I charge if I didn't. In other
words — well, suppose you had a photograph you knew was going to
sell a thousand copies, and you put those out, say, for fifteen
dollars, the edition. You get fifteen thousand dollars, which is
more than you'd get from all but a few photographs. We've sold
nearly twenty-five thousand dollars of special edition prints in
Yosemite.

Teiser: But how long does it take you to make a thousand prints?

Adams: Well, that's another point. I'm one of the few photographers that
has a plant where we can do it well. You should see the darkroom
of most of the photographers! Absolute little holes in the wall.
Wynn Bullock's darkroom looks like a back room in a basement
somewhere. Imogen Cunningham's darkroom is a shambles. Eliot
Porter's is very fine. He does color work, and he has a lot of
money to put in it. Weston's darkroom was one-quarter the size of
this alcove, and the only thing he had of any value was a dry
mounting press. He put the negative in a printing frame and turned
on a light overhead to make a print — no enlarging!! I mean, almost
a mannerism of simplicity. But I have a room in which I make my
big prints. I have some beautiful electronic equipment. I've got
a new digital clock. I've got a timer, a metronome, which is
regulated in intervals by voltage change, so I'm always getting the
right amount of light. When I'm counting ten seconds, or ten units
of light, if the voltage drops, the interval will increase. Those
things are very simple. The average color processing darkroom
costs ten times what I've got.

Teiser:

Would you make a thousand prints? Could you stand it?

316

Adams: I've made two hundred 16 by 20s in one day, from one or two
negatives.

Teiser: My word!

Adams: Oh yes. I can make special edition prints. I can do 250 a day
without any trouble at all. Well, with assistance. I have to
have somebody assisting with fixing and washing. If I had to go
through the whole thing alone, it would be too much. But if I
sign the prints, I have to make them.

I'm going to get Ted Organ to help out with special editions.
He's a fine photographer. I'll turn him loose. Now, if all his
prints are what I approve of, I'll initial them. And most of the
painters — great painters — always had assistants. Diego Rivera's
murals — I mean, many of these — oh, probably 70 percent — was done
by somebody else, but of course under his direction. It's a
ticklish thing. A negative can give you more reproductions than
any other medium. A copper plate will wear out, a lithograph stone
will wear out, but a film will last forever because there's nothing
going through it but light .

Teiser: Who are the people who buy prints?

Adams: Well, you have a few individuals who just like a photograph, and
want it. Then you have a few people that like a big photograph
in the house. I make these big ones, you know, 30 by 40. They
want them "over a mantel." Then there are business firms that
want to use big photographs for general decor. There is a law
firm [in Los Angeles] that has eighty-plus prints, my biggest
single installation.

Teiser: Where is this?

Adams: McElviny & Myers, the big law firm. Then the Fremont Indemnity
has three floors of prints. IBM has got thirty-two pictures in
the roomssin the Homestead at San Jose. They're all fine prints.
You give them a discount when they say they want to buy fifty
prints. They don't pay a gallery rate, obviously. I make ten of
each, twelve of each — ten of each in this case. I have another
job coming up for them.

Then there are simply collectors . Some do it for financial
reasons. I know one man that's bought something like ten thousand
dollars worth of photographs and sold them for forty thousand
dollars — just like you do paintings or stocks and bonds!

Teiser: That's a speculator. But are there any great private collections
of photographs in the country?

317

Adams: Oh yes, there are some very good ones. Lane has got the biggest
one, William Lane in Luninberg, Massachusetts. He has a
tremendous collection — Sheeler's and Weston's and mine. Witkin and
Harry Lunn are the best men in the gallery world, and they have
people that are buying. 1 think most important collections are in
museums. People buy and give to museums.

Teiser: I was thinking for instance the way people put together book
collections .

Adams: [David] McAlpin had a very fine collection. But he's giving it

away — to the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, and to Princeton,
He's probably our great patron — he's the one that really started
[buying]. When I had that show at Stieglitz's, he came in, and he
wanted the "White Gravestone." He asked, "What is it?" Stieglitz
said, "Seven hundred fifty dollars." McAlpin sort of blinks,
because even that was high. But Stieglitz said, "If you get that,
you can have this one, this one, and this one." That was the begin
ning. So McAlpin has bought untold thousands of dollars of prints —
the most generous [buyer]. Of course, he's one of the Rockefellers
on William Rockefeller's side, and he must have a tremendous amount
of money, but he used it in the most marvelous ways — supporting
music, the Philharmonic, the opera, the Princeton choral society,
the Alexander Hamilton papers; different art museums. Oh gosh,
there's no end to his munificence. And he lives in a nice house in
Princeton, very unostentatious. (All these people that really do
these fine things never live [lavishly.]) The Lands have a very fine
photographic collection. They're thinking of what they're going to
do with it.

Teiser: I think of the many people who collect fine editions of books,
whether they ever read them or not . And very often they go to
libraries or institutions.

Adams: Well, the fine book — a collection of fine printing, and the buying
of books — well, it's a little closer to photography than is the
collection of paintings. Because, first the original cost is less.
Albert Bender used to buy any number of fine press books. But then
you're talking about ten, twenty dollars, a relatively low field.
Well, somebody comes along with a very expensive book, like the
Kelmscott Chaucer. A dealer in New York called Bender up one day —
this is back in the thirties — and said, "I have a Kelmscott Chaucer
for $3200." Bender says, "Hold it. I'll let you know today."
What does he do? He picks up the phone. "Rosalie Stern, top of
the morning to you. We can get a Kelmscott Chaucer for Mills for
$3200. I'll put in five hundred dollars." [Mrs. Stern says,] "Put
me down for five hundred dollars, Albert." He writes this down,
calls up Cora Koshland, "Top of the morning to you, Cora. How's
the sunshine off Washington Street?" "Well," she says, "it's very

318

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams :

gray, Albert. But I know you're after something. What is it?"
He says, "Well, the Kelmscott Chaucer for Mills College — we can get
it for $3200. I've put in five hundred dollars, Rosalie's put in
five hundred dollars." [She says,] "Put me down for $750." Well,
you know, in about two hours time he had all the money raised for
this thing, and he calls up New York, and he says, "Send it out.
I'll send my check today." That's the way Albert Bender operated,
you see. And that Kelmscott Chaucer, one of the rarest books in
the world, is in the Mills College Library!

Same thing for Stanford. But that's like buying a Rembrandt,
you see. Virginia and I are a little bit disappointed in each
other because I had most of the keepsakes of the Roxburghe Club
and we gave them to somebody, some institution. And now I
understand they're worth $2500. [Laughs] We thought they were
just a lot of old folders and things. They were Grabhorn and Nash,
and Jonck & Seeger and Lawton Kennedy — fine examples of printing.
And we had the greatest printers out here; there were a few in the
East, but nothing as extraordinary.

So what are values? As a creative artist, I shouldn't be
worrying about that. I should sell my prints for the most I can
get for them and do the best prints I can, and then let the
historians and the dealers reap the harvest.

But as the owner of negatives, you must, mustn't you?

Well, the negatives have no meaning unless I print them. Now, the
great architectural picture I have — Piranesi. Now, that is an
original Piranesi. It was given to us by Robert Farquhar, the
architect. The Italian state made a special edition of all of his
remaining engravings and ruined them; they didn't give them to the
right technician. They didn't look like the originals; they weren't
the real thing. This is the maddening thing, because with some
superb technician and artist, they could have done it. But
somebody sold them on the idea, and didn't do a good job.

Well, now, I think I'm missing out on a couple of things you
asked me.

One-Man Shows

Harroun: We were talking about the '32 exhibit.

Teiser: That's right. At the de Young. What I read about it recently was

that, in it, you said that you had changed your method and your view
of photography, and these were new prints that you had made, not the
kind that you had made previous to that.

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Adams: The criticism could be that the new prints of many of the old

negatives were poor because the negatives weren't made for that
kind of technique, for that kind of printing. And it was interest
ing, in my big show in the de Young in 1963, there were two small
rooms of early originals made before 1930, and most of those had
gone to Lane; he owns those, and they're some day going to museums.

Teiser: But in the 1932 show —

Adams: As I say, most of those that were made from negatives that I had
before 1930 were probably on Dassonville papers, and I can't
remember that show as to whether the prints were all up-to-date.

I can't remember much about other shows. I had one at the
University of California [in 1939]. When I made the prints for it,
I thought I'd do a new thing; I made them very rich and dark.
Everybody said, "Your prints are awfully dark." I said, "No, I
want to get this richness." A year later, I saw them, and I
wondered how in the world I had ever made such prints! They were
terribly dark, they were heavy, they were over-toned. But I was
going through a "thing," as they call it, in which these "qualities"
symbolized something that I felt. And they're very depressing. I
got a lot of bad reviews, which they deserved. But it's a fact that
the photographer shouldn't judge his own work and shouldn't plan his
shows, because he's too close to them.

Teiser: You had your own gallery in San Francisco for about a year, was it?
Adams: That was a headache.

Teiser: Was it? You gave some shows, though, that were pretty good,
weren't they?

Adams: I had a Zorach show — painting, sculpture. I had a Bufano show —
sculpture. I had f/64. I had my own. I had Weston. Virginia
probably has the list. It was all so unreal and impractical. But
I never forget what the manager at the Wittell building told me
when I had to close up. He said, "You can put me down for this —
you're the only artist I ever knew that ever paid all your bills
right on time." [Laughs] I didn't say I used to go and beg advances
from Albert Bender. [Laughter]

Now, there's many other shows. The first show in New York was
at Alma Reed's [Delphic Studios] in 1933. And that was the kind of
a person who made you put up cash money to pay for the announcement .
I sold about six prints. Stieglitz was very mad at me. But my
prime story is, in 1933 — the first trip east — we went to Yale, and
I had a letter to Dean Meeks, who was the head of the art department,
I showed him the photographs. He was very excited, called in a

320

Adams: curator. Looked at them all over again, and when he came to the

one I have of leaves at Mills College, he said, "Mr. Adams, I find
this absolutely extraordinary. What is it?" I said, "Well, it's
a leaf pattern." "But," he says, "What is it?" I said, "What do
you mean, what is it?" "Is it a tapestry? Is it an engraving?"
I said, "It's a picture from nature." And [at first] he didn't
understand.

Well, then I had a show there, I think in '33, '34, '35,* at
Yale, and that was pretty good. That created a lot of excitement.
That was probably the first time that photographs of this type ever
came to that part of the country. But Dean Meeks was so unknowledge-
able in photography that he couldn't believe that this was a
photograph from nature.

Teiser: Had many pictures of that sort been taken by then?

Adams: [Albert] Renger-Patzsch was beginning it in Europe, and Paul Strand
had done some. Edward Weston had done some. But nothing that I
know of of that particular approach.

The Creative Intention

Adams: Is it Wordsworth or Gray who made the poetic statement, "How many

a rustic Milton may have passed this way"?** All of the ability, but
none of the realization. And that realization depends so much on
luck, fortuitous — oh my, it's really a profound thing.

But a person like Newhall, who's a great researcher, will find
that maybe people in 1860 did things like that. The first
daguerreotype was a still life. I think there's several of Fox
Talbot that are of little natural things. But again, it was just
the miracle of the process there. "I'm going to photograph this."
You imagine yourself getting suddenly a new process, "My gosh, I
can do this." And you look around, and you look at that table, and
you go "click," you know. Then of course, in history, somebody
begins to build that up and read in "significance." It's very
important.

So probably one of the main criteria to judge a great
photograph is, was there a creative intention? And lots of these
historical photographs have absolutely no creative intention at
all other than being a very good record of the scene. Perfectly
honest and capable. But the creative intention is really back of
the element of art. A great deal" of my early work, to my best

*In 1936.

**"Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest" (Thomas Gray's "Elegy")

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Adams: knowledge and belief, had really no creative intention except to

record a lot of beautiful things I saw. But then once in a while —
this is talking now of the early twenties — every once in a while
something would appear before me in which I added the other
dimension. I don't know if I'm making sense. It's a very
difficult thing to discuss, because the dividing line is so thin
between the unconscious and the conscious thing. The difference
is between creativity and observation.

Teiser: When you had these early exhibits, did you make selections
arbitrarily for them? Were they your choices?

Adams: Well, I'd talk to Virginia about it, and lay them out in the room,
and the museum director would come over and [we'd] give him a drink
and he'd look at them. And he'd say, "Sure, that's fine, but
maybe you could use this one better here," and that was it. It
was very naive, the whole thing.

Teiser : Were they big exhibits?

Adams: Never very big, no; and very small prints — five by seven, or eight
by ten.

Teiser: I mean, were there a very large number of prints?
Adams: No, thirty or forty.

Exhibit Prints and Archival Factors

Teiser: Were you making prints smaller in size then, than you do — ?
Adams: I did mostly contact printing.
Teiser: Eight by tens?

Adams: Yes, and less. And if I enlarged them, I very seldom enlarged more
than that. I had an eight by ten darkroom; then I got an eleven
by fourteen darkroom; then I got the sixteen by twenty darkroom.
Then I got a forty by seventy darkroom.' [Laughter]

But, as Land points out, the basic fact of the big print — it's
a conceptual thing. I mean, the print is done for a situation of
viewing. You just don't go through the files and say, "Gee, this is
a nice negative. I'll make a big print of it." I've been guilty of
that too. But you have to be sure that you're making a picture
which will stand a big enlargement. I've seen many pictures which

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Adams: would be twenty by thirty feet in certain architectural situations.
But by the time you get to that, the photographic quality is so bad
that everybody has to be roped off thirty feet away. [Laughter]
You see, the angle subtended from the point of view is what
controls your sense of definition and of grain!

I was so mad at The Family of Man, the exhibit and the
Steichen book, that they wanted my negative of Mount Williamson.
And I said, "I cannot send you a negative. I just can't let this
out to anybody. I'll make it here." They said, "Can't afford
that. We'll make a copy from the print in the museum." I thought
there were good people in New York. Well, by gosh, they made a
terrible copy, and then when they cut the prints, they trimmed off
so the sections didn't match. There was an inch lost between each
one. And here was this thing on display!

And you know what the publicity picture was? A little girl
was trying to span one of the big rocks in the foreground,* and
that's publicity! That's the kind of thing that Steichen would do.
The print quality, the whole feeling of this image was debased. The
Family of Man is, I think I told you once before, one of the worst
catastrophes that ever happened to creative photography. Terribly
important from the social point of view, but hideous in its effect
on the whole idea of what is creative image quality and so on.

Teiser: Also sentimental.

Adams: Stickily sentimental. Advertising level sentimentality. So I

would say now, again, I think that was a catastrophe. Dr. Land had
the same idea. He said it was a very interesting show if you wanted
to get sentimental about the human kind, but it didn't do any good
for photography. He's an extremely astute man.

But am I unpopular in many circles for that opinion! Because
50 percent of the contemporary photographers sort of fall back on
that as the bible of justification for what they do.

Teiser: It seemed to me to reduce man to about the level of a guinea pig.

Adams: Well, that's a long story. I don't think I should get into it,
except to express my antagonism of the whole idea, and I'm sorry
I was even included.

*In the museum exhibit, "The Family of Man." This photograph is
reproduced on p. 202 of the volume, The Family of Man. New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1955.

323

Teiser: I wondered why —

Adams: Well, one wants to cooperate.

Teiser: You didn't know what it was going to be.

Adams: No; they wanted the picture. But I don't like to send my negatives
out and have something happen to them.

I know a man in San Francisco, Irwin Welcher at General
Graphic, I can trust him. He'd do the best he could. But it won't
be my print. It' can't be; he doesn't have the same equipment and
the same point of view. But it will be a decent, craf tsmanlike job,
and it will be accurate.

Teiser: He once told me that he handled your prints the way that was as
close as he could get to yours.

Adams: He did some for the visitors' center at Yosemite, and of course, he
has to use condenser enlargers, and that doesn't give the quality
of my negative. I have to use diffused light. But maybe there
isn't a strong enough diffused light to do it. But I can't criticize
him, because he's a very fine craftsman — and I trust him. If the
Museum of Modern Art had said, "Send the negative to Welcher," I
would have sent it right up. I wouldn't have worried at all. I
might not get a print that I'd really like, from the creative point
of view for myself, but at least it would be technically clean. It
wouldn't be overlapped; it wouldn't be all full of wrinkles.

You know, these commercial photography processors use this
single weight mural paper, and they sell it by the square inch.
And you cannot process single weight paper properly. I mean, if
you put it through all the necessary washing solutions, it won't
stand it. It'll crack and wrinkle.

Most of these people make blowups for an occasion. If you had
a technical exhibit to last for six months, well, they'd make a
great big blowup; after that it goes out in the junk pile. But all
my prints are supposed to last! That one of Half Dome was made in
'63, and it's going to last until 2063. I don't see why not. All
prints go through selenium toner.

Teiser: The mounting board that you use is chemically inert, isn't it?

Adams: Well, it should be, but of course most everything is done with dry
mounting tissue, so I'm not so much worried about it — except the
edges, if it's a bad board. We use Strathmore and a few other
things, now the Schoeller board. They have their problems. It's
very difficult. I'm using the Schoeller board now and get it
direct from Europe, and it's quite fine; it is a five-ply rag paper.

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Adams: Now, Strathmore illustration board is one-ply on each side of a
pulp core. Well, the pulp core is the one that may have the
destructive effluvia or emission. Now, if you cut a mat out of
that, then the edges of the overmat, you see, are not very far from
the edge of the print. So under humid conditions, the sulphur can
migrate. But the Strathmore drawing board is fine.

On the other hand, if a print has really been fixed in two
hypos and toned in selenium, it will resist that. So I say my
work is done on a practical archival basis. I can't guarantee it's
going to last for three thousand years, and I don't think you could
do that with anything. I could do it better than I do it—fix in
two regular hypos and take each print and hang it up to dry and
mount it with a big wide margin, under an overmat of super rag, and
all that. What's the use. That would exceed all of the archival
procedures in the whole history of art. [Laughter] I don't see the
sense of it.

[End Tape 12, Side 2]

Printing Earlier Photographers' Negatives

[Interview XI — 4 June 1972]
[Begin Tape 13, Side 1]

Teiser: Mrs. Adams was just mentioning your printing the Brady negatives —
the difficulties in handling them.

Adams: What happened was I was working with the Newhalls in the Museum of
Modern Art. We thought up an exhibit called "Brady and the
American Frontier." Of course, at that time, Beaumont hadn't done
all the research, but he had a pretty good idea that Brady never
made a picture himself but directed his associates. Well, as for
the entire exhibition, we looked all around, and I traveled east and
west; I stopped off at places like the Ford collection [in the
Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan] of Jackson's photographs. I
found quite a few things. Francis Farquhar had some fine things.
We got a very good collection together.

Then it seemed, if my chronology is right, there 'd been a big
gift to the National Archives of about five thousand Brady negatives.
And Beaumont was asked to come and evaluate them. So, what a
wonderful chance — we went together, and we looked through them.
That's a lot of negatives, but we noted some that were outstanding
in quality. And it's interesting that all these negatives were in
ordinary manila envelopes and had written on the face thereof the
name of the photographer — [Alexander] Gardner, [F.H.] Bell, or whoever
did the actual picture for Brady.

325

Adams: So we picked out some. There's a strange rule at the Archives. In
the first place, we had to pull a lot of strings even to get into
the place! But you couldn't touch anything. They're glass
negatives, and they had to be carefully watched, because it's
government property. Now, making a print means you have to put a
negative in a printing frame and put the paper on it and turn it
around, and turn the light on it. But I couldn't touch the
negative, so I would designate one and the young fellow whom they
had assigned to me would take the negative out of the envelope and
dust it off and put it in the holder. Then I would put the paper
on it, close it up and make a print, you see. And we worked that
way, without disobeying the law. [Laughter] The Archives are not
like the Library of Congress. It's a very special collection — a
terrible lot of junk and I suppose some priceless things.

Teiser: Imagine anyone thinking that archives could handle negatives better
than you.' When you've worked with material in the Library of
Congress, how have you — ?

Adams: I've never made prints in there, but I think they might let me do
them. I don't think they'd be as strict as the Archives. If they
didn't know me or I had no reputation or no real introduction, they
would be very tight, because after all, they have to watch and care
for everything. But I don't think they would be as tough as the
Archives.

Well, these old negatives, of course, were made by the wet
collodion process, and they were made for the printing-out process,
and they're extremely contrasty. Now, the difference between the
printing-out process and our modern developing-out process is that
the paper is placed back of the negative and is exposed to sunlight
or a very powerful arc. The effect of the strong light reduces the
silver directly. The silver halide is reduced directly to metallic
visual silver. There's a complicated step in the process — I can't
fully understand it myself. But in theory what happens is that as
the print density builds up, it automatically reduces the amount of
light that can reach the remaining exposed silver. So it becomes
an "auto-masking" process. You finally get the silver to the point
where no more light can get through — and there would be no more
silver affected.

In the meantime the high values are building up, and the middle
tones are getting grayer, and the whites are beginning to show
values and textures. The trick is to print so that you keep a clean
white and still retain a rich black. That means, of course, that
the negative has to have a large density range.

Now, we didn't have that kind of P.O. P. paper, so I had to use
Azo #0, that's the softest grade of Azo. And I used a developer,
Amidol, diluted one to fifteen normal solution with water, which

326

Adams: meant the developer had a very low energy. At the same time it gave
a pretty good print "color," and I could get a fairly good tone.
The idea was to tone the prints in selenium. And after the week or
so of work, we put these prints through an alkalizing bath and toned
them. Then the young fellow said, "I'm going to be here tonight;
I'll wash them for you, and you can pick them up in the morning."
Well, he washed them, but the water temperature was running about
10° higher than the toning solution had been, and that took out the
selenium tone. They were all just black and white again! So
nothing to do about it there. I took them back with me to Yosemite
and toned them in my Yosemite darkroom. The secret is, always wash
your prints in cooler water than you toned them in. Chemically, the
toning process is somewhat an adsorption as well as an absorption.
Absorption is when the material actually gathers things unto itself;
enters the structure. Adsorption is when it is attracted to the
surface. A lot of this selenium sulphide is attracted just to the
surface of the silver. As the gelatin expands under warmer water,
it releases it.

In Yosemite I mounted them and I was careful to make a few for
myself and the Museum of Modern Art too. They turned out very well.

Then we had another exhibit called "Sixty Photographs." And
they were supposed to be highly and carefully selected pictures.
Sixty images from the beginning to the most contemporary!

Teiser: Of all photography?

Adams: Of all photography. Sixty images that we thought adequate.

Teiser: Where was that?

Adams: The Museum of Modern Art.

Well, we wanted to include Genthe, but his prints were so
lousy, on a kind of rough greenish paper, or brown-green, and his
textures were awful, as with most "pictorial" prints. We couldn't
find anything original and good. And he was an old, old man. And
he had a couple of old, old ladies helping him to put his stuff in
order in his little apartment in New York. He was a very fine
gentleman, you know. He was a Ph.D. — Dr. Genthe. He was really
quite a handsome man, and very erudite.

So I explained to him the problem. I said, "We want to
represent you, but we can't find any print that does you justice."
And he said, "I guess there aren't any." I said, "Well, would it
be possible — could I, under your direction, make a couple of
prints?" He said, "Why, just take the negatives. I trust you."

327

Adams: So I took these negatives of the San Francisco fire and of a

street in Chinatown in 1904, and made the prints. And of course he
was flabbergasted, because he'd never seen a print of that kind.
It was on smooth paper. It didn't have that green tonality. And
it was sharp. I printed them on smooth paper, and we toned them
in selenium, and they came out absolutely magnificent. He could
have done it — there's no trick in it — but he just wasn't in that
mode or mood.

Teiser: How did some of his negatives get to the California Palace of the
Legion of Honor?

Adams: Well, he either left them, or his estate gave them some. Well,

they're not really — Genthe is of historic value — the San Francisco
fire picture, looking east on Clay Street, was great. But as a
rule, he's a very romantic portraitist. He was kind of the Cecil
Beaton of his time — a great name-dropper. [Laughter] And a great
ladies' man; a perfectly charming man; a superior person. But he
wasn't, in the whole perspective, very important. But he just did
a few extraordinary things — and they are extraordinary.

So that's for history of printing. And then I went to the
museum of anthropology [the Laboratory of Anthropology] in Santa Fe,
and they had some Ben Wittick negatives. I printed some of those in
the same way as I did the Bradys. And that was part of the American
frontier exhibit.

Teiser: Did you print them down there?

Adams: At the Laboratory of Anthropology. Then we had the big show. Of
course, we had a lot of beautiful old original prints, and there
was one of a cart at Laguna Pueblo — about twenty by twenty-four
inches. Well, William Henry Jackson was living then, and painting
away in water color, remembering scenes of the Wild West. He lived
in an old New York hotel, and I would go down and see him.

When we had the opening of the show, he was the guest of honor.
And he was ninety-eight. I said, "I will come and get you in a cab."
So out of his hotel he comes, all dressed up with spats and a cane —
runs down the steps, gets in the cab, and we go to the museum. The
only impediment , the only trouble from his age was that he had a
very cracked voice. And he looked at the photograph of Laguna Pueblo
saying [imitates the voice], "Well, that's a mighty fine photograph.
Who did that?" I said, "Well, Mr. Jackson, that's one of yours —
1870." (This was seventy-something years earlier.) And Mr. Jackson
said, "Well, by cracky, it is.'" [Laughter] The old boy had several
martinis, and then I said, "Any time you want to go home, I'll be
glad to take you." He said, "I'm not going home. I'm going to a
cocktail party on East 57th Street, and you're coming with me." So

328

Adams: I had to take him over to the east side to this nice little

apartment, where there were many almost equally old people, all
having their martinis. They were writers and painters — old buddies,
you know. Very kind. So I was beginning to get worried. I said,
"Mr. Jackson. You know, any time now, I'll get you down to the
hotel."

He said, "I can't go home. I have to go to a dinner party.
Now, I don't know these people, so I can't ask you to that, but I'll
thank you if you'll leave me there." So we went over to the west
side again, and up to the seventies to an old town house, and I got
out and helped him to the door. I saw him a week later and he was
fine. But he couldn't recognize his own photograph at first, and
then I realized it was seventy years, more than my whole lifetime
span, between the time he took that picture and looked at it! It
was a great personal experience.

We had the titles wrong on a lot of things. They had been
written on the back of the prints, and that's all we had to go on.
He looked at them. "No, that's not Zuni. That's over at Acoma or
somewhere." Or, "That's not" — a certain place on the Union Pacific,
or "The title's wrong." I said, "We took the titles from what was
on the photographs." "Well," he said, "you'd better correct them."
So we did, as best we could, and we had to make the note on the
back of the photograph that according to first-hand observation by
Mr. Jackson, "this is it." This then stood as the correct title.
And it's very difficult to do this archivally, because maybe he was
making a mistake. You see, who is the final authority?

Teiser: You have, in your own acquaintance, spanned a great period of

American photography. You've known people whose work went way back.

Adams: Oh yes. Jackson and Genthe, Dassonville, Stieglitz, Strand — who
else? There's another old character in there somewhere.

Eastern Visit. 1933

Teiser: When we talked yesterday, we said we were going to start this
afternoon with your trip to New York in 1933.

Adams: Well, that was the first trip we had east.
V. Adams: [From next room] That was the spring of 1933.

Adams: Spring of 1933. Well, there was a Depression on, you know, and

Virginia was fairly well along with Dr. Adams [Michael]. [Laughs]
(He was born in Yosemite on the first of August, 1933.)

329

Adams: The banks closed, you see, while we were on the way [east], so we
stayed with the Applegates in Santa Fe for, what was it? — six
weeks?

V. Adams: No, not really.

Adams: [To Mrs. Adams] Well, you'd better tell it. You know more about it
than I do .

V. Adams: Well, we stayed about a week or so, but we kept getting telegrams

and letters from Albert Bender, and they said, "Go ahead, go ahead."
We didn't know whether we could or not. But the head of the bank
there was kind enough to cash our travelers checks , so we went on
east.

Adams: Well, there was one lady who got hung up for weeks and weeks and
weeks in Santa Fe. A limousine chauff cured iier from Wilmington,
Delaware. She was living in La Fonda [Santa Fe] and had no "cash"
money at all. It was a very serious occasion.

Well, anyway, we went on to Detroit and Chicago. Had letters
to various people. I made many booboos on the way. I remember one
dinner party we were invited to in Chicago, and they were quite
surprised to hear we'd never been to Europe. And one lady said,
"Well, Mr. Adams, what do you think you would really like most if
you went to Europe? Have you any idea?" And I said, "I think it
would be the Gothic architecture." "Oh," she said, "it's very
interesting, the whole Gothic civilization. But what part of the
architecture really interests you the most?" I said, "The flying
buttocks." [Laughter] I was persona non grata after that in that
place.

And then we crawled on to New York, arriving on a terrible
dull, gray, misty April morning, with ash cans out on the street.
Somebody had recommended to us a little hotel, the Pickwick Arms,
which was a hangout for tired radio and theatrical people. A very
decent place but, boy, it was grim! Unbelievable. This was
Depression time, and here, everything was just as sour as it could
possibly be. Rooms were dark and dank. Service lousy. Food worse!

So I went out — sailed up Madison Avenue to see Stieglitz, who
had just moved into 509 Madison Avenue. Then we went on to Yale —
I think I told you about going there and seeing Dean Meeks .

Teiser: Yes.

Adams: Oh, we went to Boston too, of course,

Teiser: Did you meet other people in New York?

330

Adams: Oh, Alma Reed, and some of Stieglitz's friends, but not many.
Teiser: Did you learn anything in New York that you wanted to know?

Adams: Not much. Never have, except in a few isolated places. Well, it's
hard to say that because, after all, there are the Cloisters. New
York is pretty much the center, but I couldn't possibly live there.
In fact, I even resent going there now.

Teiser: You had already met Marin and Georgia O'Keeffe.

Adams: Yes, I'd met them.

Teiser: Did you see them there at that time?

Adams: No, O'Keeffe was away. Strand was away. But I met Marsden
Hartley, Paul Rosenberg, a critic, and a young writer named
Einstein. (I haven't heard of him much.) And of course John Marin.
It was all right, but I just don't look back at it too much. It
should have had an awful lot of glamor about it which it didn't
have for me, let's face it.

Then we saw our friend in conservation, Horace Albright.
Teiser: At that time what was he doing?

Adams: He was the president of the U.S. Potash Company. And of course he
was always very closely associated with the Rockefellers. He
practically raised the boys — one of their counselors. Very close
to John D. , Jr. A delightful person.

Teiser Had you known him before?

Adams: We knew him in National Parks as superintendent at Yosemite and
later as director of the National Park Service. He was very
prominent .

And then we went to Washington and met Eugene Meyer. I can't
remember the other people. Virginia might remember some, but I
can't.

Have you anything to say, Virginia? You can't say it from
there?

V. Adams: [From next room] I'm not listening to you. I don't know.

Adams: Well, we're trying to say what happened on that trip. They want to
get the facts straight, and you know me and facts. Are you against
being recorded?

331

V. Adams: No, but I just didn't want to intrude.

Teiser: Oh no, come in.

V. Adams: It was Mrs. Stern's brother.

Adams: Eugene Meyer.

V. Adams: Not Eugene.

Adams: Oh yes, the other Meyer, Walter Meyer.

Teiser: Was he interested in your photographs?

V. Adams: No, he was being nice, I think, to some young people that his
sister knew.

Teiser: Did they all represent a kind of luxury that we didn't have in the
West at that time?

Adams: Well, it's hard to say, because New York is the East — they have

great wealth, but they seldom show it. Everybody still keeps it;
everybody lives more "elegantly" in the West. I guess Mrs. Meyer's
estate in Mount Kisco was probably something like Mrs. Stern's
Atherton home.

V. Adams: Well, we went to the little farm that Walter Meyer had, somewhere
around Mount Kisco.

Adams: A nice little place, but nothing pretentious.

And then these apartments — Mrs. [Charles] Lehmann[?] had a duplex
on Fifth Avenue. Very big place —

V. Adams: You and I went to Doris Ulmann's apartment on Park Avenue.

Adams: Oh yes, then we saw Doris Ulmann, the photographer. That's
important. I've forgotten that.

Teiser: Who was she?

Adams: She was the one that did a lot of photography in Appalachia, and of
the Negroes in the South. A very wealthy woman with an old Mercedes
car and a German chauffeur. Took pictures of everybody who came to
see her. Had this great eight by ten camera and a flimsy tripod.
And while her exposure of me was going on, I could see the camera
swaying. [Laughter] So I said, "You know, Doris, really, your
tripod's terrible." [She said,] "You know, I just can't get sharp
pictures. I thought it was the lens." I said, "It's the tripod."

332

Adams :

V . Adams :

Adams:
Teiser:
Adams :
Teiser:

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams:
V. Adams:

Adams :

Teiser:

Adams:

"Well, will you help me pick one out?" So the next day I was
picked up in the car and we went down to Willoughby's and all the
other big photography stores; finally got her a tripod that would
hold her eight by ten monstrosity up. And then she'd go to the
lens case in the store and say, "I want that one and that one and
that one." God knows how many lenses that woman had. She just
would buy lenses like Virginia would buy "Cool and Creamy" at the
Safeway. [Laughter] But she had a very fine feeling and did many
fine things. She had a book published; I don't know whether we
have it or not. [Added:] We do — several books.

I know somebody else we saw when we were in New York that time, and
that was those people whose pictures we have downstairs —

Oh, the Zorachs. Yes, well, we'd known them in Yosemite.

You had climbed with Zorach?

Yes.

What was it like for one person to paint or sketch and one to
photograph on the same theme?

Oh, we had a fine time. He didn't know anything about climbing.
He nearly got killed coming down Grizzly Peak Gulch. Didn't follow
my reasonable advice, which was not to get out on that slick
gravelly granite. But he wanted to see if he'd get a view, and away
he went , throwing all his new sketches up in the air , which showered
down out of sight. He caught onto a little tree and just hung there;
we had no ropes or anything. I had quite a time crawling out to
him and getting him back, but he was chastened. I was scared to
death, because he could have gone about three or four hundred feet,
right down.

He lived in New York, did he?
In Brooklyn.

There must have been some connection with his wife's family in
Fresno, because she visited Fresno. But that was before — that was
early — '24 or something.

Yes, in '23 or '24 we were climbing around the valley. And his
wife was a very fine artist — painting and textiles were her main
fields. They were both excellent.

So you were glad to come home again?

Oh yes, very glad to come home again. [To Virginia:]
off at Detroit on the way home or on the way east?

Did we stop

333

V. Adams: No, on the way east.

Adams :
Teiser:
Adams:
V. Adams:
Adams:
Adams :

V. Adams:
Adams:

We saw Diego Rivera painting something for the Rockefellers,
in New York City, which was later destroyed because they didn't
approve of it.

Of course we'd seen him before, in San Francisco.

The Rockefeller Center murals — was that what he was working on?

Yes, they were in Rockefeller Center.

Was Radio City already started?

Oh yes. He was working in the big building.

And it was a very interesting thing, because the Rockefellers were
very fair. But he gave them the "cartoon," which was approved by
them; it was an historic perspective on America. Then he brought
in Lenin and Mooney and had it all political! They said it was
not according to the original agreement. If it had been in the
original cartoon, they might not have bothered about it, because
it was part of the history of the labor movement, and so on. But
they didn't like being put upon.

Albright told me that. They were just furious. "Why should
he put something over on us?" He didn't have to do that. He could
have talked it over, and they could have listened. And what
happened was they simply paid him off and painted the walls over
and got [Jose M.] Sert to do the job. It wasn't a very good mural
job. But Rivera could be an awful potboiler. The one in Detroit now
at the big Museum of Art is fantastic.

You saw it again recently, didn't you?

Yes, while I was at an architectural convention. It was done before
1933. And every little wall space is filled with tight images and
designs. It will take a couple of hundred years for that to really
get back into appreciation because it's so corny compared to modern
art. Well, maybe they thought that about the frescoes at Pompeii!
[Laughter]

But there's one big central design, men working, the great
machinery (automobile workers mostly), that was very impressive.
But all those little spaces! The whole room is like a great mosaic;
little narrow spaces between doors all filled up. Pipes and people
and hammers and expressions and clenched fists — [laughter]

Teiser: How long was that trip all together? How many months were you gone?

334

Adams: Oh, it wasn't months.

V. Adams: Whenever the Bank Holiday began was when we went east, and we came
back when it got hot in Washington. We cut short going to the
University of Virginia that we were to visit, because it was so
hot we decided we were ready to come home.

Adams: Six weeks, I guess.

Teiser: Well, did you then keep in touch with Stieglitz after that?

Adams: Oh yes — constantly.

Teiser: Did you see him often?

Adams: Saw him a lot every time I was in New York; got many letters from
him.

Teiser: Were you back and forth frequently in the thirties?

Adams: Well, I was there in '34, '36. Then with McAlpin, we went on a
trip to the Southwest, went on a trip to the Sierras, went on a
trip down the inland waterway, Norfolk to Savannah, and to New
England. So I've seen a lot of the East of that character. Some
of it's really beautiful.

V. Adams: When did you meet the Charles Sheelers?

Adams: I met the Sheelers at the Newhalls'. And then Barbara and Willard

("Herk") Morgan had their studio in New York, a big studio — I remember
that it was a loft apartment. But again, I can't remember the exact
date.

And Gjon Mili. I saw Mili on a recent trip.

I don't know — you meet all these people and you just can't
remember. It just comes to mind by association, so if I think of
something, I'll just have to interject it.

Teiser: In any case, in those years, you met a lot of people of significance
and interest.

Adams: Yes. Robert Flaherty, the movie man — he was rather important. And
Henwar Rodakiewicz, whom I'd known in New Mexico.

335

The Stieglitz Exhibit and the Adams Gallery

Teiser:

Adams:
V . Adams :

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser!

Adams:

Teiser:

Then in '36 you had the show at Stieglitz gallery,
one in a series of exhibits?

Oh no, that was a very special one.

Was that just

He hadn't been doing anything with photographers or taking anybody
new on until he took you.

Then he showed Eliot Porter (perhaps before my show) . But my
exhibit there was a big event for me. Other things might have
happened that were of practical importance. But this is sort of a
papal audience!

Was it a large show? Did you show many photographs?

No, thirty-five, thirty-six. The place was too small for a lot of
stuff, which was really an advantage, as work is boiled down to the
essence.

The 1963 show in San Francisco had over five hundred items,
you see, which is ridiculously large. Big shows should not have
more than two hundred prints. Strand had over five hundred, and
you can't possibly take it all in at one visit. You have to go
back and back again. You can put up shows at different times. But
there isn't that much variety in a person's work.

Minor White had a big show, but it was too much also. So I'm
trying to cut down. There's something about just a small exhibit —
well, fifty or sixty prints is an ideal show. If they're all
really your top stuff. Then people can look at them and they don't
get fatigued. A lot of people were very mad at the San Francisco
show. They had to come back several times to see it! They couldn't
possibly go through it thoughtfully in a day or two days. They
resented this.

The Stieglitz show — at his gallery — did you show some portraits?
By then you had taken quite a few portraits.

Oh yes, I had a few portraits. Stieglitz didn't like my portraits
very much. He had a different philosophy. I don't like the
"candid" as a rule. But I'd get a person's face in repose. And
Stieglitz would say you have to sit for a one- or two-minute
exposure! Then things happen, a combination of tension and relax
ation.

Did it advance you in prestige? You said it was perhaps more
psychological than practical. But wouldn't it also have meant much
for you so far as the whole art world was concerned...

336

Adams: I wouldn't know. I think that it's probable. I came back all
fired up to have a nice little gallery of my own. I remember
Stieglitz asking, "What's that group I've been hearing about out
there?" I said, "Oh, you mean Group f/64?" He said, "Yes. Well,
I'm f/128." [Laughter]

I tried running a gallery [the Ansel Adams Gallery, 166 Geary
Street]. I tried to get some ideas in doing it, because I realized
what Stieglitz was doing was very wonderful for young people, but
it was at a totally unrealistic level. He had a private income.
So did Strand and Dorothy Norman, who came from a very well-to-do
family. In so much of the art of the East that I saw, people were
unrealistic in the sense that they had money. When you don't have
money, it's awfully hard to keep up with a noncommercial approach.

Teiser: The gallery was at one time called the Adams-Danysh Galleries. Who
was Danysh?

Adams: Joseph Danysh.

Teiser: At the gallery did you do some photographic work too?

Adams: Not in the gallery, never had a studio as such. Oh, I did a couple
of things, but nothing important. I used to do that in my home.
But I never was really a commercial photographer, a professional.
I would do things, but I never had a sign out. Most of the work
was outside — project work.

Teiser: I think I read somewhere that you also gave some talks on photography
and did you teach?

Adams: Oh yes, I did an awful lot of talking and yakking and print
criticism. Yes —

Teiser: Do you still know any of the people who came to you then for
instruction?

Adams: Some I faintly remember; some remember me. You just meet people,
and people talk, and you talk and show prints, exchange ideas, and
hope it's helpful. It takes a great deal out of you; much more so
than people realize.

I notice that now especially, say at the end of the day.
People come with a set of prints. It's comfortable sitting here
talking, but when I should look at a bunch of prints critically — if
you don't look at it critically, it's not fair. It's superficial.
And you have to stand back of what you say, and make it clear.

Teiser: I was looking at a list of people whose work you showed at that San
Francisco gallery, and Peter Stackpole was one.

337

Adams: Oh yes, Peter was quite remarkable. His father was Ralph Stackpole,
the sculptor. I think he [Ralph] was one of our very best artists —
a wonderful person. He spent his last years in France.

His son, Peter, got interested in photography and worked hard
to develop a 35-millimeter technique. And he would come around with
his prints and look at various prints I had and compare definition;
he was always trying to perfect definition.

Then Tim Pflueger, who was a great friend of Stackpole's, an
architect and a big man around town, got Peter the job of document
ing the building of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. It's a monumental
series of pictures. He was right up there with the men, on the
slings and on the cables and on the towers, and had a few close calls
I was told. But that series of pictures that he made is really a
very impressive set. And I don't know whether they really have been
brought together as they should be.

35 Millimeter and 2 1/4 Cameras

Teiser: Was that the first time you had carefully studied 35-millimeter work?

Adams: When I was in New York — I think in '34 — I went to see the Zeiss

people — a Dr. Bauer, Karl Bauer, a very fine gentleman, who was the
Zeiss American representative. He liked what he saw, and he wanted
to know if I wanted to try the Contax. Now, the Contax was the only
35-millimeter camera that really worked, other than the Leica, and
there was a very interesting psychology back of it. They made
twenty-five prototypes, by hand, of a miniature camera, and gave
them to twenty-five leading photographers in Germany.

They said, "We want you to find out everything that's wrong.
Just comment — what's good, what's bad, what you'd like to have, etc.,
and send us your report. When the camera comes out, you will get one
with your name engraved on it." The result is that it's the only
camera made (I have a new one) that when it came out had no "bugs."
It was practically perfect. It still is — that first Contax — and
always has been the most perfect camera. I've had several. They've
sent me different ones to try, different lenses to try. Now I have
the Contarex, which is the last camera of that line made. But now,
of course, the company is all mixed up, changed — now called Zeiss
Ikon. The original Zeiss was appropriated by the Russians.

They made the best lenses, I guess, along with the Nikon people
in Japan. The Zeiss Ikon establishment are phased out now. Zeiss
Ikon was a big combination of German camera makers. They all got

338

Adams:

together and put out the Zeiss Ikon line,
conglomerate name.

Zeiss Ikon was a

Teiser:

Adams:
Teiser:

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams:

But the Japanese have gone ahead. A lot of the cameras you
think of — the Pentax and the Minolta and the Konica — those are all
Japanese. The Nikon of course is Japanese. The Canon is a
Japanese Leica. So there's only three important small format
European cameras today. That's the Hasselblad of Sweden, and I
guess the Rolleiflex — I have to say that, but that's going to be
made in Hong Kong or Singapore. And the Leitz, and the Zeiss
Contarex, the only one left. And it's an incredible machine, a
beautiful machine. I hope they keep it going.

When you first used the 35-millimeter camera, did you take many
pictures with it?

Oh yes, I did a lot of 35 work in the thirties and forties.

Were they the kind of pictures you would have taken with other
cameras?

No, no. Thirty-five millimeter is a language all its own, you know.
You don't set up a tripod and try eight by ten quality pictures with
it. It's more an immediate "extension" of the eye, you see. And I
will be very happy to get back to it again some day.

Oh, that would be interesting.

Liliane [De Cock] has put some 35s in the monograph.* But it was
always a conflict between the mechanical perfection of the eight by
ten image and the limits of the 35 millimeter, because in the old
days, with the thick emulsion film, it was very hard to get away
from grain, and it was very hard to get definition from corner to
corner because of the negative thickness. The film was actually
thick, and light impinging on it at an angle, in any density level
of importance, enters the surface at one point, and emerges further
away from the axis of the lens. So when you look at that directly
in the normal position, you see diffused areas near the edges.
With ordinary short-focus enlarging lenses it was very difficult to
get an all-over crisp negative.

And then they worked with thinner and thinner emulsions — now
the problem is quite minor. But a lot of people become very
careless with the 35, sloppy and get harsh values in black and white.
Of course, the Europeans use it almost exclusively. Maybe that's an

*Ansel Adams . Hastings-on-Hudson, New York: Morgan & Morgan, 1972.

339

Adams: exaggeration. But most journalists and most people who travel do,
and they have their work done for them. Not too many European
people print. I don't think Cartier-Bresson prints his own. So
print quality as we know it as being part of the expression, it
doesn't exist. It would be like a composer never hearing his
works done, you see, or having someone else finish it without his
control. But there ±s^ something about the inherent quality of the
35 millimeter.

Of course, the Hasselblad is betwixt and between. I can get
incredibly sharp things now with 2 1/4 by 2 1/4 film.

[End Tape 13, Side 1]

[Begin Tape 13, Side 2]

Teiser: We were talking this morning to Mr. Richard Garrod.
Adams: Oh, nice man, yes.

Teiser: And he was saying that Brett Weston had recently been given a
single-lens Rolleiflex and it was opening a new world to him.

Adams: That's quite true. It wasn't recently; I think it was two years
ago. And of course he was always a large-format man, and then he
tried the Rolleiflex, and he's used very sharp film, like Adox, and
a point-source light, and he gets extremely sharp, brilliant images.
(It's interesting that the Rolleiflex uses exactly the same lenses
as the Hasselblad made by Zeiss.) But what it's done is to open up
for him another world. But it is a very abstract world. It's
about the same point of view that he would have with his eight by
ten, except that he can do more on a physical basis. The 2 1/4 by
2 1/4 and the four by five — those formats — really relate more to
the larger format now. The 35 millimeter still is something of
particular function and quality.

Teiser: When the Rolleiflex first became popular, the twin-lens Rolleiflex,
wasn't that thought to be a journalist's camera, and no serious
photographer —

Adams: Oh yes. But it was a beautiful camera. The trouble with the twin-
lens — it has parallax which you can't overcome. The correction of
parallax that you hear about is merely that as you focus near
objects, the mirror tilts, so that you center the object in the
field. But the taking lens still doesn't see it as the other lens,
so you have to elevate the camera the same distance as the difference
of the axis of the taking and the viewing lens in order to get the
correct reference in near /far images.

340

Teiser: But wasn't the size even considered a great limitation when it
first came out?

Adams: Oh yes. Well, one of the problems was one of getting negatives
of good quality. But many, many people used it, and people like
Dorothea Lange and most people in the Farm Security group would
prefer that to 35 on the basis of quality. But you remember that
all of those cameras have no adjustments, and when you tilt the
camera you get convergence; you have no way of correcting it in
the field. So it had certain limitations.

Now the Rolleiflex and a couple of other new ones have tilt
fronts, which give you a little better definition, near and far.
But the Zeiss lenses are designed for maximum coverage of the
2 1/4 by 2 1/4 on axis. So they don't have much "covering" power;
they're not designed to have it. Now, you take a Goerz Dagor or
you take the wonderful Super Angulon lens — the 121 millimeter lens
covers an eight by ten on axis, which was unheard of until it
appeared. [It] is a computerized lens. So that means you can
take a four by five area and move all around in an eight by ten
field. And that gives you an idea of the amount of adjustments
you have — how much you can move the image, you see, and still keep
a sharp field.

But these other lenses, especially the Tessar type, if you
move them half an inch or so you may get into trouble. Brett has
done extremely fine work with the Rolleiflex. I don't like the
camera as much as the Hasselblad. I think it's very bulky. It has
the focal plane shutter, which Hasselblad got away from. (Because
it seems to be impossible to make a focal plane shutter that really
works.) The Hasselblad system has got a shutter for each lens.
Well, the difficulty there is that the shutters are not all the
same, so you have to have them all calibrated. But at least, once
they're calibrated, they're consistent.

But the thing that a lot of people forget is that the old
Graf lex, the reflex type, which is like the old Mirroflex of
Zeiss, and several English cameras — is the first single-lens reflex
in which you saw exactly what the lens was seeing, and the mirror
moved up out of the way when the shutter was released. But of
course it was a reversed image on the mirror. And the cameras you
have now use the pentaprism; the "roof prism," as they call it, not
only puts the image right side up but also makes it "right side"
too. It's a very complicated cross-over. It's called a "roof"
because the image meets the roof and folds around, laterally. And
it's quite an amazing optical device. One can't see that dividing
line'.

Teiser: The Hasselblad has that, doesn't it?

341

Adams: Several have that now. It's a rather massive thing. The

Hasselblad has it, the Rolleiflex has it, as well as the 35
millimeter.

Teiser: How did you happen to start using the Hasselblad?

Adams: They sent me the first model, the 1600, saying, "We'd like you to

try this. Tell us how you like it." Mr. [Victor] Hasselblad is a very
fine gentleman. So I got it and I worked with it, and I wrote a
report; it was about sixteen pages, double spaced, of what I found
wrong with it. From that time we were buddy-buddies. The people
that designed these cameras were engineers, had never taken any
pictures. For instance, the first camera, you'd put it in a
knapsack and tilt it and the mirror would fall out of its toggles.
The engineer had only thought of the camera as being upright. You
don't have to turn it sideways, because it's a square image. He
never thought you might carry it sideways.

Then the inside was a jet black cube. But there's no such
thing as a nonreflective surface, so we got some of the worst flare
that any camera's ever produced. And the lens shade was round
because that was the way you made lens shades then. It's just a
convention; it's perfectly ridiculous. Now Hasselblad has finally
come out with a lens-shade box system that the movie people have
been using ever since the days of Griffith, I think. It's just a
square opening, combined with bellows, which "frames" the image;
whatever the particular lens is seeing. It's quite a beautiful
device.

So then they made the 1000, and that was an improvement. That
meant one-thousandth of a second, focal plane.

Teiser: What was the 1600?

Adams: One sixteen-hundredth of a second. They never worked up at that
level. They never worked up to that point at all. They were
pretty accurate in the lower levels.

[Richard McGraw enters] Hi! Dick McGraw, this is The Bancroft
Library oral biography people. I'm telling them all. I was just
talking about you recently.

McGraw: Don't tell them too much about yourself.

Adams: They ought to interview you so you could tell them. [Laughter]

The between-the-lens shutters are, of course, more dependable.

In theory they shouldn't be, but it's awfully hard to get mechanical

systems that will move a curtain across a field at equal speed, from

start to finish. Of course, they've had all kinds of mathematical

342

Adams: compensations, where the curtain slit is a little bigger at first,
and then gets smaller as the curtain speed increases.

Teiser: Is there one called the Copal?

Adams: Well, that's just a between-the-lens; that's just a make, a design.

Teiser: Is there not a different kind of —

Adams: Oh, it has a little different system, and it's a shutter-blade

system. And of course we have the electronic shutters now, they're
somewhat different. They work on a capacitor system. They're very
accurate and quite expensive.

Teiser: Did you use the Hasselblad then quite a lot for awhile?

Adams: Oh yes, ever since I got it, way back in the fifties. I've used it
a lot.

Teiser: I suppose you don't take pictures with it that need the adjustments —

Adams: No, I use my Area Swiss view camera. Of course, you remember, there
are ways and means of correcting distortions by enlarging systems,
where the lens and the easel can be tilted to overcome the distor
tion. It's a pretty complicated business, because there's the
negative holder and lens board adjustments. I'd rather get it
straight to begin with!

Now, getting back to 35 for a minute, we find that with color,
many publications, like National Geographic, demand 35-millimeter
color because they can get better results than they can from larger
transparencies under their economic way of doing it. I don't know
whether that would hold if they really went to town with the larger
formats, but they can make a blowup from 35 and get an illusion of
depth. Also, anybody who goes out to do a story for National
Geographic does literally thousands and thousands of pictures, that
you wouldn't do if you used a four by five camera!

Photographs for Magazines

Teiser: Have you ever done any work for National Geographic?

Adams : No .

Teiser: Have they picked up any of your pictures ever?

343

Adams: I think they used one once. We aren't very sympathetic. Their
whole approach is extremely factual. Of course, it's getting
better now. But it's a kind of sterile thing. They don't invite
aesthetics.

The worst example we had of that is when an editor from
Holiday magazine came to San Francisco just before the magazine
started, and he had a big lunch or dinner for all the photographers.
Invited about thirty or forty photographers. And everybody got a
little happy and gay, nice dinner, and then he talked with them.
He said, "We're putting out this new magazine, and we're interested
in ideas, and we'd like to give you as many assignments as possible.
But we want it very clearly understood that we want to make the
pictures to look like the kind of pictures that a reasonably
knowledgeable, wealthy traveler would take. "We don't want no
estetics." [Laughter] In other words, the individual photographers
are proud; some got up and walked put. And he tried to explain
what his concept of journalism was, that this magazine was to be
sold to those people. First, they had to have money, good equip
ment. Now, what kind of pictures do they get? If you showed them
better pictures than they can do, you're patronizing them. So we
can't have that, you see. [Laughter]

Teiser: Didn't Holiday end by having some slightly more imaginative pictures,
though?

Adams: Yes. But you have to realize that when you're thinking of movies,
like the Disney movies, or National Geographic — any magazine — that
probably for every picture shown there's been a hundred taken, at
least. The law of averages says that if you take one hundred, you
might get something, and if you take fifty, you might not.

And of course, the best of all — Herbert Bayer, the designer —
we were all down at Aspen once, and the advertising man from Kodak
was attending the conference. He said, "Mr. Bayer, how many
submissions do you make when you have an advertising design job?"
Mr. Bayer says, "One, the best." Well, the Kodak man just couldn't
possibly understand. Because they're so used to seeing dozens of
things come in of the same subject. A fine artist says, "Well,
you ask me to do it, so I do one. That's my best. You don't see
the others."

And that is a problem in photography. I did a number of
assignments for Fortune, and you're working under a time pressure,
and you don't have time to contemplate, think and balance and
figure out. You have to do it. You have two weeks for the Union
Carbide article, for instance, and you work all day long and into
the night and you get everything you can and you know you've
failed on some. And you do them again and again. Then you end
up with some things that they're happy about. But if they'd only

344

Adams: give you two months, you could do so much better, but that isn't

the way. Everybody waits until the last minute, and then — "Got to
have it right away!" Has to be in yesterday!

Teiser: When you work for a magazine like Fortune, however, isn't it a lot
more satisfactory because the reproduction is —

Adams: I haven't done anything for a long, long time. I wouldn't know.
It used to be pretty good. It was a showcase for the advertising
profession, primarily. Very interesting thing — the whole theory
of Fortune. It still keeps going. It is notoriously inaccurate.
And I know, for instance, that the story I did with the PG&E, they
made something like twenty serious factual mistakes. And the PG&E
people were trying to prove to them. Of course, this was out of my
field; I was doing the pictures. They were trying to say, "Well,
this isn't right!" But the editors would go right ahead and do it
their way.

Now, the same thing happened with the big corporate farm story
they did in the Central Valley. Dorothea Lange and I worked on
that. And they made all kinds of impossible statements. -We saw the
text, and Paul Taylor would say, "That's not right. This is not
the description of the 160-acre law, and you've got the dates wrong."
Fortune would say, "Oh, we know what we're doing." So — it really
is a come-around that you really can't trust anything.

Polaroid had an article in Fortune. They didn't say much
about it, but I know it missed a lot of things, exaggerated others,
and was wrong in others.

A journalist gets in there and resents any adjustment. A
photographer, he just tries! Your best pictures aren't used, but
you've got nothing to do with that. However, the titles are
usually right; they don't mix those up.

Teiser: When you do work for a magazine, then do they own the negative?

Adams: It all depends. Usually, in an editorial story, they buy the
rights. They may want the negatives; on the other hand, if
you've done some beautiful stuff, you might keep the negatives.
Then if you ever use it, you only use it with their permission.

And the big battle with the A.S.M.P. [American Society of
Magazine Photographers] is when advertising use is involved. You
see, there's a difference between editorials and advertising. When
you do an advertising picture for a firm now, what are you doing it
for? Are you doing it for the one-time right, say a page in Life,
or are you doing it for the many times they wish to use that
picture in many magazines? And there's been a big squawk about
that, because the firm claims they can't afford it. Then we

345

Adams :

Teiser :
Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :
Teiser:
Adams :

counter back and say, "Well, you're paying $45,000, $50,000 a
page." One page in Life now — one issue. "Well, that's why we
can't afford it." [Laughter]

So the cost of advertising is simply tremendous, and there's
right on both sides. It seems a photographer should get a certain
percentage of the total cost. But say a Life page costs $40,000 —
the makeup alone of that page is costing the agency $5000; the
photography might cost as high as $5000, plus the models used.
There's $50,000. Well, of course the photographer would be paid
fully. But the agency takes 15 percent on the purchase. So if
you bought $100,000 worth of advertising from Life, the agent will
make $15,000. And that's where they make that money. Plus billing
for the photography and the art work and so on. So when you hear
of an agency having a $100 million billing, that means perhaps
that they took in $15 million as profit, because above and beyond
that they have to pay for the art work, but the customer also pays
for the photograph. But there's no two things exactly the same.
It's quite complicated.

Have you done photography for ads on commission or have you — ?

Oh yes — I've done several things. I did some for the National Gas
Association, just did a series for the Wolverine company — a
catalogue.

Were they done for that catalogue?
No, they just used existing work.
They took ones you'd already done.

And in my position now, I get a pretty high fee for the use of a
picture. But if, of course, Wolverine called up and said, "We want
to get a picture of a particular scene, with a mountain boot. We
want this situation," and so on, that's kind of a big undertaking
because you have to figure everything out from scratch, you have
to get your models right, you have to get a location. I don't know
what the going rate is now; the highest I know of was for a 35
millimeter shot of a still life that was on two pages of the Ladies'
Home Journal (I think) by I Richard] Avedon. He got $3600 just for
the use of this picture. That was editorial, you see. Now, if
that had been an advertisement, he would have probably gotten much
more.

346

Assignments

Adams: They have rates. When you do a job, it's so much a day, or so
much a page, whichever is larger. If I go out and it takes me
ten days to do a job at $400, that's $4000. If it's ten pages,
at $400 a page, that's $4000. But they usually pay expenses in
addition. Kodak always is very generous — model expense — all your
expenses, mileage, food, anything. All the film you could possibly
use. And then on top of that, they guarantee a fee for the
accepted picture — $1000, $1500, whatever it was.

Well, for one Colorama I did for them, the costs went way
over $6000 (this was twenty years ago) because of the trouble we
had finding the location and having expensive models along. I'd
call up Rochester frantically; I'd say, "Look, this is getting out
of hand." "Oh, just keep at it. That's all right." Well, it was
$6800 expenses!

Teiser: When you did work for Kodak, did they specify a certain type of
photograph they wanted or — ?

Adams: No. This is for the Colorama. They did two things: the big
Colorama in New York Central had to fit a certain dimension — a
certain size film. And I made mine seven by seventeen, the film
was cut for the seven by seventeen banquet camera. The image came
out finally 4 3/4 by 16 1/2. It has to be seen and planned on
that proportion, using models in the costumes and the desired
colors and using Kodak cameras. And the Kodak camera has to show
well and the models have to be the strawberries-and-cream, ail-
American "wasp" type, you know. Then of course it has to be very
sharp, because it is blown up to sixty feet long. Well, that's
one phase, and I would submit many images. We'd go out for maybe
a week, and I'd maybe take ten, fifteen, or more "situations."
And I'd go through $250 worth of flash lamps (blue) to fill in
shadows. I don't know what the film cost. They get that at a
rate, but that's hundreds of dollars, you see.

Then the other type is where they tell you, "Now, if you're
going on a trip, we'll send you a bunch of film. We guarantee
five hundred dollars," or so for a picture. And sometimes I'd
come back and would have less than that in value, and they
wouldn't care. And sometimes I'd come back and have very much
more.

So they've always been very fair. Of course, that's quite a
time ago. The rates have gone up. And they have their own crews.
And some of these things are getting terribly sterile, because they
don't have proper artists.

347

Teiser: Things like the U.S. Potash series » was that for annual reports — ?

Adams: I did quite a "take out" for IBM. They asked, "Come and do some
pictures down at the Poughkeepsie plant." I just went there and
lived at their Homestead at their expense and made many photographs.

Teiser: Had you done many so-called industrial photographs before?

Adams: Yes, quite a few.

Teiser: Can you remember what your earliest industrial photography was?

Adams: Oh, I did a winery.

Teiser: When was that?

Adams: Oh gosh, that was back in the thirties.

Teiser: What winery was that?

Adams: The S&J Winery, up in Lodi. And then I did Kennicott Copper; and
Union Carbide; Del Monte Properties, many years ago.

Teiser: What about Salz —

Adams: The Salz Leather Company, yes. In Santa Cruz.

Teiser: What work did you do for Salz Leather?

Adams: Just pictures in the tannery.

Teiser: IBM?

Adams: And there's IBM — just the Poughkeepsie plant. They then made
typewriters and some computers there. Then they moved the
typewriters to Kingston and the whole building went to computers.
Then they moved the typewriters from Kingston to Kentucky. Now
the typewriters are I think made in Italy, and I guess the Pough
keepsie plant is still in advanced computer work. And they
developed the new research lab at Kingston — a perfectly gorgeous
place.

Oh, I did all kinds of little things; I can't begin to
remember.

Teiser: The book for the University of Rochester?

Adams: Yes, I did a book for the University of Rochester, Creative Change.
The University of California — Fiat Lux. Dominican College, and
Paul Masson. The Sugar Institute as well.

348

Teiser: Is that beet or cane sugar?

Adams: That was beet — well, a little of everything. The Sugar Institute
was a general institution, and we had the cane sugar from Hawaii
and the beet sugar locally. And of course you're never supposed
to speak of one with the other, although it ends up as identical
sugar.

Teiser: They present different photographic problems, don't they?
Adams: Only in the field —

And of course my biggest continuing project has been my
consultantship with Polaroid.

Working with Dorothea Lange, Continued

Teiser: You mentioned that you had worked with Dorothea Lange on — what was
it?

Adams: Well, we worked on the Fortune story on the Central Valley, the
corporate farms.

Teiser: I think you said you'd worked with her on a series on the shipyards.

Adams: Yes, that was the OWI — the Office of War Information. It was quite
a "take out." Then we did a big story on the Mormons in southern
Utah — three villages, Gunlock, Toquerville, and St. George.

Teiser: What was that for?

Adams: That was done for Life, but that was kind of an unfortunate mix-up....

Teiser: Did it appear?

Adams: It wasn't very clear to anybody; it was a misrepresentation. I
didn't like it.

Teiser: Was it published?

Adams: It was published, but very small. We had an exhibit.

You see, they told me that we were going to do this exhibit,
that Life was going to publish it. Of course, the Mormons are very
suspicious people. Dorothea and Paul [Taylor], they took it on,
and they went to Utah and saw the big shots and got permission,
and it was very difficult. Then once we got in, we got going pretty

349

Adams: good, and the first set of pictures were very fine. Then it got
intellectual — Dorothea's capacity to get intellectual — and it's a
very strange dichotomy there, because she changed the whole
character of this exhibit from an emotional thing into a sort of
a sociological viewpoint. And then a few pictures came out in
Life, which were a very poor representation.

Teiser: Does it still exist as a collection somewhere?
Adams: I don't know where it is.
Teiser: Life has the whole thing?

Adams: No, Life just has a set of prints. I don't know what happened to
the exhibit.

Teiser: I hope it's been preserved.

Adams: Well, they weren't very satisfactory —

Teiser: As it was originally conceived, was it?

Adams: Well, as originally conceived, I think it had a great quality,
but when you get into politics, social points of view, things
can get hairy, you know.

Teiser: The OWI?

Adams: Well, it was a story on the shipyard production at Richmond, and
the life of the people. Of course, we got lots of things that
were not too pleasant, like people living in trailer houses on
mud flats. We had to walk over fifty feet of planks to get to
them, through mud. Incredible bars. And then, one of the typical
things — we were getting on the Richmond ferry and seeing these
people come in from some factory on the Peninsula and just flop
down and go to sleep by the boilers, just getting some rest so
they could work the next eight hours at Richmond. There were
untold numbers of people that were doing two full shifts a day —
moonlighting under different names and everything. You see, it
was kind of controlled, but they got by with it. And some of them
had sons in the war, and most of them were really trying to do
everything possible. It was a terrific experience.

Teiser: Was that satisfactory to you?

Adams: Yes, that was all right. We mixed our negatives. I can

recognize some I did and some I don't know. I mean, we would
just work together. For instance, we had one big job of the
people coming down out of this building — quitting time. Just a
whole flood of people coming.

350

Adams: That's my photograph I remember —

Teiser: That's one often attributed to Dorothea Lange, isn't it? [the one
in the 1966 Museum of Modern Art catalogue, Dorothea Lange,
captioned "Shipyard Construction Workers, Richmond, California,
1942"]

Adams: But when I say it's mine, I mean we were there with the camera, so
we worked it together.

Teiser: Were you using similar cameras?

Adams: Oh, sometimes. Yes, I used a Super Ikonta B and four by five
and five by seven cameras . Then we had to do a picture of the
big church in North Beach. That was a toughy. I always got the
tough technical things to do I

Teiser: Was that in the same OWI series?

Adams: Yes, in some way related to the freedoms — part of the government
project. But we did the freedom of religion, and then the farm
scenes — it was very complex, and I don't know what really
happened to that.

Teiser: Are all of these negatives with Dorothea Lange 's negatives in the
Oakland Museum?

Adams: I don't know where they are.

I had one — my trailer camp children was part of the OWI
series. I wouldn't give that negative up for anything; I want
to hang on to that. Then I have another one of this stout Negro
lady sitting in her trailer home doorway above the mud.

Teiser: With the goat?

Adams: With the goat, and then the panel in the mud, you know.

And then I had another one of the work transfer desk, which
is quite an emotional picture. I'd like to think of using that
again in an exhibit. You may remember that one, of the men talking.
It was done with a remote control camera. I was controlling the
camera as far away as I could. And these people would come in and
plead to change their jobs. You see, jobs were fixed. And they'd
come in with their hard hats on and say, "My family's not doing
so well in Alabama, and there's a job down there in a war plant,
and I'd like to transfer." So they'd have to have it all analyzed;
some could get it, some couldn't.

351

Adams: But there's something strange about that — I wonder why people

don't like that picture much. The expression of the man is very
good. Maybe it's the way it's cut. His head is against the light
globe. I can see where that would be disturbing. They weren't
even conscious of the camera. The camera — a Zeiss Juel — was low
on a tripod, back of filing cases, and I was operating it from a
distance, trying to get these people. They were talking.
Because in those days, people were very camera conscious.

Wartime Work

Adams: That takes us into the wartime. Part of the war, when I was

working — I wanted to get into something, and I was past the age —
except for extreme emergency — of what you'd call military work.
But here I was a photographer and I wanted to do something. Well,
whenever you ask a military man and say, "Am I going to be a
photographer?" they laugh at you. They'll make you a cook, like
Brett Weston. Through the intervention of Charis's uncle — a
general — he got closer to photography than many. He was cleaning
film on Long Island — movie filml

I asked General [Simon B.] Buckner once. I said, "I never
can understand. Here's trained photographers, and gee, as soon as
they get in the army they're digging holes somewhere or putting up
fences or cleaning guns." He said, "Well, you don't understand the
military. There's just a certain number of photographers. We have
to start from scratch. And when we get a man in — unless he's a
very top expert and goes in top echelon, he's a person in the ranks.
He gets a kind of evaluation, and maybe he'll be a good cook. So
we train him to be a cook. I don't care whether he's a photographer
or anything. Because in that way, there's always a resource of
expendable manpower. A trained cook could be eliminated, and
there 'd be another one. But if you said, "We've got just so many
photographers,' and put them in, if they were eliminated we
wouldn't have this recourse. So we can't count on their previous
training."

I wanted to do something. So Steichen called me up one day,
and he said, "Adams, I want you to run my labs." You know, he was
a captain in the navy. And I said, "Well, that's the only decent
offer I've had, where I feel I might be able to accomplish
something." "Yes," he says, "this is very important, and you'll
hear from me within the week." And the rank would be major and,
oh gosh — lot of baloney — guaranteed living quarters, and "You
would direct my central lab." That's the last I ever heard of it.

352

Adams: After a week, I called up; they said, "Captain Steichen is in the
South Pacific." I said, "Does anybody know about my offer?" He
said, "No, So-and-so is running his labs." As far as I can make
out, it was just a lot of hot air. I never had any use for him
anyway. This is one of the typical examples.

I went down to the Art Center School — well, it was before
then. I guess I was there earlier. But the Art Center School did
get contract jobs from the army. One was to train an airplane
workers photography group. And the other was to train young
men for the signal corps. That was very interesting, and was
really complex. Maybe that's worth a whole yak some time. Then
there was the office of engineering management and — well, it had
three initials (I forget). The schools were given grants for
training. But you had to have a minimum class; there had to be a
minimum number enrolled. The Art Center manager would go out in
the street and pull in the funniest people you've ever seen, you
know, and say, "Come on, we've got a job, and it pays pretty well.
We'll train you to be a printer." Our assignment was to teach
people to be printers. Other schools had the negative developing
classes. We would get reject negatives from the airplane plants
by hundreds. All kinds of parts of planes — detailed electronic
stuff, etc., and the students would have to learn how to print
them. Well, of course, it hit me right away — how do they know
what they're printing? I don't know what these things represent.
There's no title. They're all either stamped restricted or there's
nothing.

So we started analyzing light on various substances. If you
take a stainless steel tube, it will have a certain highlight.
But the thing you first look at is the shadow, and if the shadows
of all these little pieces are sharp, then you know a spotlight
or sunlight was used.

If the shadows are very diffused, you then have diffused
light — maybe available light in a room, or a big floodlight.
Well, once you know what the kind of light is from the shadows,
then you can figure what the highlight means. So you can then
interpret whether you're printing for steel or plastic or fabric —
so we would ask these people, "What do you think this material is?"
And they would finally get it; would study the negative and say,
"This is a plastic sheath over here, and this is a metal tube,"
etc., and then print accordingly.

Well, we got quite a commendation on the people who went to
work in the plants because they could take a negative that they'd
never seen before and print it and make some visual sense. It was
a very interesting thing.

353

Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :

Then I taught a group of people — a "disaster group" in Los
Angeles — at corpse identification techniques. In case of
disaster, how do you photograph? Well, we used a system of
mirrors. And we'd go to the morgue and pull out somebody; then
we'd place the mirror and photograph the profile and the full
face in one picture. And the idea there was to make two prints —
one reversed for recognition. So somebody could say, "Well, this
picture's a profile; it's right. And this other one is full face.
It's right." And we had twenty people in that group.

My last night in Los Angeles, I was up until nearly midnight
in the morgue with a group of people making photographs — and
measuring and documenting. Then they had to figure out how — when
you have a disaster, you're not nicely laid out on a slab in an
icebox, you're out there in the dust. And what do you do? And
they had all kinds of techniques — trying to just get identification.
And numbers had to be placed in the image — coded numbers and dates.

And I arrived at Edward Weston's the next morning smelling of
formaldehyde, feeling very weary — having spent part of the night
in the morgue. You picked up this formaldehyde effluvia — very
interesting stuff. Didn't bother me any — those people were not
worried about anything. [Laughs]

Was your whole period of teaching at the Art Center School just
in wartime?

Oh no, no. No, we had a regular photography department,
the war came on, and the whole school responded.

But then

Problems Encountered

Adams: Several things I did for Fortune were preliminary — in anticipation
of the war. I never realized it until later. But the people who
knew just said, "We're going to be in this, and we'd better get
ready." I photographed [for Fortune] the big electric furnaces of
Union Carbide in the town of Alloy [West Virginia]. Unbelievable.
I don't know how they work them now, but the electrodes — carbon
arcs — a single arc three feet in diameter, nine feet long, and
three of them are screwed together. They were cast with threads,
so they'd be screwed together into a single arc twenty-seven feet
high — carbon. And they would be grouped together in threes,
operated by hydraulic controls, and the cauldron was as big as
this whole place — forty feet across. The voltage was only six
volts, but it would have a tremendous amperage. And the current
comes in in folds of copper — not wires, but just thick bands —
ribbons — of copper.

354

Adams: Well, anyway, these great carbon electrodes come down into this
mix — slowly come down and make the contact, and it's just like a
volcano! It displays absolutely tremendous power. They had a
hydroelectric plant just for that purpose in that area.

[End Tape 13, Side 2]
[Begin Tape 14, Side 1]

Adams: Now, getting back to this photography for Fortune , the photography
of the electric furnaces at the town of Alloy, which is up the
Kanawha River. I described these great electrodes, which were
three feet across and twenty-seven feet long — three of them
bunched together. And the tremendous amount of electric power
required. And when these things touched the mix (I think they
call it the mix), it's something like a volcano. And they keep
burrowing in, and producing tremendous heat. And finally the
material starts to melt. It is steel and various alloy chemicals
making up certain crucial alloy metal.

Nobody is supposed to be in that place when the contact is
made, because it'd be like being on Mount Etna during an eruption,
you see. Well, I said I had to be there to make the photograph.
So they made me an asbestos garment, and they made an asbestos
shield for the camera. And I would stand there under the shield
with my hand on the cable release, you see. One could see just
the lens and my goggles. When the process began, I thought, "What
am I doing here?" Pieces of molten metal were coming at you. And
after about five minutes of this it quiets down and just starts to
melt, and then finally the carbon arcs are used up. You see them
dropping, slowly dropping into this incredible blue-white heat.
I forget the temperatures. I think it was over 4000°. It's one
of the highest temperatures used in metallurgy. I wouldn't want
to state it erroneously.

Anyway, when they pour this "melt," it's blinding blue-white.
And it runs out like water that seems much lighter than any water
you have seen. It just pours out through the channels — and you
have to wear goggles. You can't possibly look directly at it.
And they'd make these big ingots, and they go off to the mills.

And then we had another job for the Gas Association,* showing
the various uses of gas in industry and in the war. Oh, I did
everything from gas baking crackers to annealing anchor chains!
This was in Columbus, Ohio. I watched the chains come out of the
annealing chamber, moving very slowly. There was a great pile of
them. So they got a platform built, and I got my camera set up,
focussed on where they would be. And I was to take these red-hot
anchor chains as they were pushed out of this great asbestos crib.

*National Gas Association.

355

Adams: Orange-hot, they'd come out, moving very slowly. And I'd say,

"Stop," and they'd stop the belt and I'd take the picture. "Let
it go," and I'd take another one. And that was all rehearsed.

And here I am up there, and the real thing's happening.
This was in color. And out comes the chains. The heat was some
thing unbelievable, you see — never counted on that. So I'd yell,
"Stop," I'd take a picture; "Stop," I'd take another one. Finally,
my pants caught on fire. And I just grabbed the camera and
jumped, because here was a pile of massive chains that would fill
this room, and you're just about ten feet away from them.

Teiser: What happens to color film in that heat?

Adams: Oh, it doesn't make any difference. I got beautiful pictures.

It doesn't get hot enough for the camera, but my pants came down
nearer to them, and they just started to smolder. And I still
have a burn scar on my leg from it. But it was quite exciting.

These things happen to all photographers, sometimes much worse
things I

I think it was Eisenstadt — some big Life magazine man — who was
up on the roof of a great cathedral — oh, I know what this is: it
was when they were building the fake Gothic Grace Cathedral in
San Francisco in concrete. And the photographer was up there in
the roof getting pictures from the top. He dropped his camera,
and it fell all the way and landed on a little piece of wood just
above the concrete floor and bounced over on some sacking — no
damage I [Laughter] People have all kinds of things happen, but
of course all photography is not really glamorous. Most of it is
very hard work, very boring — waiting, fussing with equipment,
worrying about lights, etc. I told you what happened with the
round table group in the Palace Hotel.

Teiser: Oh yes. [Laughter]

Adams: And then the fact of getting somewhere and finding that you've
left all your lenses at home. You've got the camera, film — but
no lenses. When I was very young, in the 1920s, I made an arduous
ascent to the top of North Dome in Yosemite, with the most
beautiful thunder clouds I'd ever seen. I exposed twelve plates,
and came home and found I'd taken all the empty holders instead of
the full holders. There are equivalent stories that every
photographer can tell you.

Teiser: You were speaking of Rex Hardy. I remember he had a story about
his first assignment for Life, taking tine-lapse photographs of
a flower opening in a greenhouse. He thought he was going to
lead the glamorous life.

356

Adams: I did an assignment for Life which was a begonia story. And that
was to be fourteen or sixteen pages. It was a very lucrative
story. I got a several-thousand-dollar fee and time and expenses.
The begonias were up near Capitola, Santa Cruz, that area. Well,
the problem was, of course, when you're working with begonias
outdoors, the sunlight is very difficult and you have trouble.
So we did them in the greenhouse. But we had to use certain color
filters to balance the light through the greenhouse glass. One
person said, "That's just diffuse light, so you don't need any."
Well, you take one picture and you find you do. That light was
very much toward the greenish, so I had to use magenta filters.
And after working a week and having pictures taken, processed
and looked at, I finally got what I wanted. That's before they
had color-temperature meters. Now we have electric color-
temperature meters that work well. They're very expensive, but
they're really very elegant. They can tell you the Kelvin
temperature in almost any situation. And they translate that in
to what we call "decamirad" control. And you use filters as
indicated to balance the light to the sensitivity of the film.
The eye does that automatically, of course. You can be in blue
skylight or warm tungsten or light — and white paper still looks
white to the eye, but not to the filml

So I did all these pictures — beautifully. I worked like
a dog for three weeks. I understand the pictures were printed —
the whole insert of sixteen pages — I saw the proofs. They were
beautiful. They were all ready for an edition of Life. But "news"
started happening, and they couldn't find enough space. Finally
that whole begonia project was junked. They prepared a little
story on begonias in which they used a couple of the plates, but
that whole sixteen-page signature of color photographs — a million
copies or more — was printed, and then junked. And that happened
to so many Life stories. It finally came to the point when they
could not afford such stories. It costs thousands of dollars to
print one of these inserts — maybe fifty or sixty thousand at least
for that one.

Teiser: You don't do your own processing when you do color?

Adams: Oh no, I don't. A lot of photographers do. Life photographers

sent the work back to Life. They had wonderful labs. Life bought
whole "emulsions" of color. They'll order an emulsion and get the
whole run from the factory. And they had their own testing
laboratory so they could instruct the photographers what compensating
filters were needed. But those days are over. Look went out, and
Life will go out too.* And the future is in television and the
cassettes.

*Life did suspend publication in December 1972.

357

Teiser: Did you do any work with Look?

•

Adams: I never did a job for Look. I was there once — remember meeting
Merle Armitage, the art editor at the time. He and I never got
along. I've met a few people I don't get along with. Might as
well let it go down on tape as a fact; it's bound to come out.

Teiser: A lot of people didn't get on with him.

Adams: Well, he is a strange man. He had an enormous amount of energy.
He would plan or lay out a book and then have some company do it,
like Ward Ritchie, which really did the design work, but he'd take
the credit. The thing that bothered me all the time was that he
took credit for things he really never did. He was a kind of a
promoter — a producer. And my first gripe was when he put out the
first Edward Weston book — quite handsome reproductions, although
the whole job, type and everything, had a Vogue magazine feeling.
I wrote a criticism of it, and he never forgave me.

Teiser: What did you write it for — for publication?

Adams: Yes, it was a criticism for the Fortnightly — here were these great
photographs, but they were done in this kind of a slick Vogue
magazine manner which defeated Edward Weston' s simplicity. But
Edward Weston never got a bloody cent out of it. I thought that
was terrible. Armitage would do that with people, you see. He'd
say, "Well, I'll make you famous," or, "I'll get a book out for
you," and so on. But I just don't like the guy — never did and
never will, and I think the feeling is mutual. [Laughter] And I'm
on tape too.

There are very few people I've met in my life that I really
dislike. I've been very lucky — only one or two organizations I've
had any trouble with. Most of the time it's been on a good,
logical human basis and most people have been good. I've had a few
sour moments, like working on an advertisement for the telephone
company, and when we got into Virginia — and into the deep South —
it was real "anti-nigra" — you know, that kind of business. And
that got me down. It was very difficult.

Teiser: Did they want you to take pictures of a certain kind?

Adams: No, it had nothing to do with that. It was just their own human
attitude. Had it all the time — it was an obsession, you know.

But one very amusing thing — a little town in Virginia, and
the story of these ads related to "how does the telephone
representative help the community." Well, in small towns — as, for
instance, in an Ohio River community (I forget the name of it),
this man put in a water system for them; he got pipes and he laid

358

Adams: it, I had to photograph an old lady turning on the first spigot

in her sink — cold water. Everybody else had to go down to the town
well. She was the first one that had cold water come into the house.
And this was all done by a telephone employee — very carefully
researched.

Well, we got to this place in Virginia where there was another
telephone man. But we couldn't figure out what he did. What did
he do for the community? He had a complicated job taking care of
all the telephones. That wasn't the point. It finally came out
that he'd helped people understand their phone bills. He'd
interpret the telephone bills to them. There was a horrendous old
lady who ran the grocery store and the mortuary, and she agreed to
be photographed talking with him in the car — he sort of explaining
things — to this weird character. We did it over and over. It was
hard to cooperate. It was very hot, and the light was not right,
and we had to come around and do it again. We tried to get
spontaneous things — I was using a Hasselblad. And finally she says,
"Well, I guess we've done all we should do. You know this is
annoying my mother." And here was this old lady sitting at the
second-story window; she must have been ninety or more. Our woman
was seventy. I saw this woman up there glaring down on us, you
know. [Laughter] What an experience! So we got out of that fast.

Then I had to get a picture of the man who was taking care of
the nitrogen-measuring units — many of the cable telephone lines are
filled with nitrogen at slightly more than atmospheric pressure,
which keeps moisture out if there's a leak. These people have to
climb the poles and take the reading, just like you would blood
pressure, with a mercury device. They plug it in and they check it.
Here I was out with a truck with a lifting platform. We had to get
this thing done fast. We had two days to finish. And it was
sleeting. I've never been so cold in my life. And this guy was
all dressed up, and he was up here — he was all right at the top.
And here's me with the camera — and no warm overcoat. This sleet is
drifting down and getting on the lens , and I was trying to get this
person working. It was a pretty good picture, though; came out all
right .

And then there was another one of the cable splicer. That was
done with just one tungsten lamp. That's one of my best things.
It was made with a 60-millimeter Hasselblad lens down in this tunnel
where he was splicing cables. He'd been doing it for twenty years;
that was his job.

And the people who came here to put in our new phone system
the other day — oh boy, were they efficient! They have been doing
it for years. Whether they ever advance or not, I don't know, but
they know how to handle cables. You'd be surprised at the complexity

359

Adams: of this little three-line telephone unit in this house. The control
box looks like a mouse's eye view of a television set, you know —
relays and everything you can think of.

Teiser: I hesitate to start a whole large new subject at this point — but

maybe I should ask you about Yosemite, your workshop, that we'll be
looking in on soon.

Adams: We'll be showing a series of photographs. We have an overhead

projector, which can show small prints — project them on the screen.
The reflected quality is not very good, but for identification it's
all right.

I think it's the ideas that develop when you look at a print
that are important. For instance, the man — the guard standing by
the cannon — in the Brady picture. Well — how long was the exposure?
How long was he standing there? Was he asked over into this
particular position for composition reasons? Has somebody just
said, "Stand there and hold it," you see.

"Making" and "Shooting" Photographs

Adams: There's a very interesting comment, which I'm inclined to agree
with, by Ruth Bernhard, who is quite a person. She said we have
all kinds of colloquial terms in photography, and one is, "I'm
going to take a photograph." Now, taking a photograph is a bit
aggressive. We make a photograph — that's productive. Why do we
say "shoot"? That's the modern term. Why do we say "we made this
shot" or "we shoot a photograph"? If we say we take a photograph,
then what do we do when we operate the shutter? We expose the film.
But it's common practice now — it's in the dictionary — this "shot" —
that means a photograph. When you stop to think in terms,
psychologically related — violence — you shoot, you have a shot, you
take. As against — now what does a painter do? He doesn't do
anything like that. He observes and sketches and he draws and he
paints. But these aggressive terms relate to photography, as if
somebody was pointing at you with a gun. And a lot of people express
a certain amount of aggression through use of these terms. And a lot
of inferior photographers are very aggressive people. I'm inclined
to think there is a relationship there, although — I'd like a
psychologist to clarify it.

When you stop and go back and think of the connotations, it
really makes a lot of difference. I can't imagine Stieglitz "shoot
ing" anything, and I don't go out and "shoot" landscapes. It's
really kind of an immediate thing, you see. It's a newsman's term —
you grab it, you shoot it. But it still has a very strange
aggressive overtone to it.

360

Teiser: Would you say, "I'm going out and make photographs"?

Adams: Yes. "Let's go to Point Lobos and make some photographs." Not

taking them — that was the old Indian idea — a lot of tribes in the
world today have the same thing, that when you make a photograph
you're taking something away of their souls, you're extracting
something. Something comes from the person into the box and
disappears. And the early philosophy of light was a strange
illogical concept that light was like bullets — that originated in
the eye, went out to the subject and bounced back!

But if you take these terms, and look back in time on them,
you find that there are very strange connotations. And I suppose
one would be, "I'm looking at you. I'm burning you with my gaze,"
and I can't do that at all. I can look at you, but I can't give
you a "burning" glance, you see. And the photograph itself — it's
almost fundamentally an invasion of privacy, either of people or
nature. It's not a memory which you sketch; it's a thing that can
be made at the moment. And that tree is my "victim," for instance.
It can't fight back.

Teiser: The reaction of people to photographs brings to mind the use of the
Polaroid Land camera to give people pictures immediately to
reassure them, or something of the sort. Does it work?

Adams: Oh, it works tremendously well. Not for sophisticated people who
know what it is — but people travel in various countries around the
world and they find that some of the inhabitants are scared to
death of cameras. But they make a picture and give it to the
subject and immediately there's a sympathetic rapport established.

Well, a very interesting thing is what I experienced in
1928-1929 in the hill towns of New Mexico. These natives would
cooperate, and we'd come back and give them a print or proof. And
the native turned these pictures all around — he couldn't "read"
the picture as being anything to do with reality. I mentioned that
once to Margaret Mead, and she said, "Oh yes. That's very common.
There's many primitive races that have absolutely no ability or
understanding of translating the pictorial image to reality." Now,
I am sure the cave paintings and other primitive art forms can mean
something definite. But when you show primitives a real photographic
image they may not comprehend.

Teiser: You mean not even another person who knew that man could believe it
was his image?

Adams: No, he couldn't believe it. He'd never seen that aspect of the
person.

361

Adams: Then another thing is, the daguerreotype was so tremendously

popular because it is a mirror image, and it's the only way that
people ever see themselves. You only see yourself by looking in
the mirror. Now, I take a photograph of you, you're seeing you as
I see you, and having seen yourself only in the mirror all your
life, you may not be very happy with the result. The daguerreotype
is really — that was a very important step. And it was called — I
forget who used the term — "the mirror with a memory."

Printing and Papers

Teiser: You were speaking of mercury as being unstable —

Adams: It's not unstable, it's just poisonous.

Teiser: No —

Adams: Oh, mercury intensification of the negative. Oh yes.

Teiser: But isn't mercury a factor in the image in a daguerreotype?

Adams: Yes. But that's quite a different chemistry. Intensifying by

mercury is simply, as I remember, building mercuric salts around
the silver. It has a tendency to just dissolve, dissipate in time —
the negative fades, turns a bad yellow. But you remember that in
the earlier days, when you created a yellow or reddish image, you
held back light, you see. And we have a thing that's called "new
coccine," which has been used about a hundred years, which is a
reddish dye which you can apply in different degrees to the
negative. Take a shadow area and just put a slight wash of new
coccine, and that will hold back the area, because the photographic
papers are not sensitive to red or to green.

I was using today my Codelite, an enlarging light of both green
and blue light for variable contrast papers. I can see a brilliant
image on the enlarging screen with the green light, but the ordinary
"graded" paper won't respond to it. It only responds to blue.
Putting the new coccine on the negative will strengthen shadows,
but that can be grossly overdone.

And then, of course, there's the same thing in intensifying
negatives. The only safe intensifier is the Kodak In-5, which is an
intensifier which actually adds silver to the existing silver image.
And it is permanent. And the interesting thing is the five-solution
formula. You have to mix up five different solutions — silver
nitrate, elon, sulphite — then you mix up (well, I forget), but there's
five different solutions you blend in different quantities, then you
use that to intensify the negative.

362

Teiser: Let me ask you one question that slipped down in my mind when you
were talking about printing-out papers. Isn't the kind of studio
proof print paper that they use now printing-out paper?

Adams: Well, they have two kinds. They had the solio type, and you'll see
it has kind of a red brick color. But now Kodak has what is called
a proof-paper, which is a developing-out paper. Lousy quality.

Teiser: But the red is a printing-out paper?

Adams: Yes. It can be toned into very beautiful colors by various

processes. It's good paper but archaic in style. When it's toned,
it's as permanent as anything.

Teiser: Is it used much?

Adams: No. The paper stock is so bad, and I don't know what toner you'd use
now — a lead acetate perhaps. This chemistry gets rather complex.

Teiser: So it isn't worth it?

Adams: It isn't worth worrying about now. They make a paper in England,

I've been told, which is a good printing-out paper. But it requires
various toning procedures.

Now, we had beautiful results at the Art Center by subjecting
one of these prints to a few seconds in a hydroquinone developer,
arresting development and then putting it through the regular toner.
And we got a very rich tone. We never could duplicate it, I guess,
because we couldn't count seconds accurately enough I

No, I don't think these things are terribly important. They
get into complicated chemistry and physics , and even if we do get
them clarified, they don't have much meaning, because they're always
changing or being discontinued.

But the principle of the auto-masking printing-out paper still
is very important. What's called a "mask" in printing — if I have a
very contrasty negative, I can make a very delicate positive mask of
it, or a reverse mask, on which builds up density values in the
shadows. When I put mask and negative together, I get a more
balanced negative. But there's always something — the edging — or the
strange feeling about appropriate tonal value. I have not used a
mask for years. In color, the masking is used all the time to balance
different values. But if those masks don't absolutely align, it's
terrible. And in most of the color reproductions you see, the masking
is very bad. Because you may have illogical color effects, and you
have fuzzy edges .

Teiser: Well, I think we've kept you too long.

363

Adams: We got a lot of facts today. We didn't get much continuity,
[End Tape 14, Side 1]

More on Reproduction Rights

Teiser: I asked you, before we started taping, about the Magnum agency.

Adams: Yes, Magnum is a group of photographers of very top names, including
Cartier-Bresson in Europe. They had a Paris office and a New York
office. They were primarily oriented to journalism. I don't know
why they wanted me in it, but they nevertheless do sell a certain
number of what they call "pictorials." I just did one job with
them which still has to be resolved. But not being a journalist, I
really didn't have much function in that group. It's still going,
and I guess it's doing well. They take usually a 50 percent
commission, but they make a real sales effort, which is fair enough.
A dealer gets usually 40 percent, but an agent has to scramble
around much more. Well, 50 percent is better than nothing. This
is not 50 percent of sales of prints, but 50 percent commission on
the fee charged. They set the fee with that in mind.

Teiser: And these are all photographs for reproduction, are they?
Adams: Usually just sold to magazines and journals.
Teiser: Then I think you said you belonged to the —

Adams: The American Society of Magazine Photographers, called ASMP, which

now has some very long secondary title — [the Society of] Photographers
in Communication or something, which is silly because everybody knows
what it is. But this was started many years ago as a sort of
professional society. I joined with the idea and hope that it would
remain a professional group, like the American College of Surgeons

566

Adams: or the Institute of Architects or Engineers, where there's a high
professional level. Well, seeing that most photographers are not
of high professional level, it turned into a union which was really
into almost a price-fixing situation. There were constant squabbles
over what a fee represents — one use? multiple use? who owns the
negative? who owns the color transparency? are you paid to do the
job? And does the magazine use it as they wish, or do they have to
pay you for every separate use? And all this stuff. It gets
frankly very boring because professionally you do a job and
naturally expect the client to do what he wants with it. Providing
it's dignified and doesn't hurt your reputation, the more he can
get out of it the better, if the photographer's paid adequately for
it at first.

But the photographers wanted, at one time, 10 percent of the
total charge of the advertising; and of course that would be
impossible because the total cost of advertising — page rates and
so on — are so great. The thing that people don't realize is that
the advertising agency gets 15 percent over cost, and that's all it
gets in commission from the client. But that means that overhead
has to come out of that, you see. In other words, an agency will
bill the client for the photograph, for the art work, for all the
printing, for the plates — all the expenses involved in making the
photograph. Say this bill comes to $10,000, they may bill $11,500.
But out of that $11,500 they have to keep their office going, so
advertising isn't all gravy. It's pretty tight.

Suppose that somebody has a campaign. I just did one for the
Wolverine people — boots. I gave them a set of photographs, got a
very nice fee for it (comes in a monthly stipend). It was so
successful they want to do it again next year, which is fine. They
put out a brochure. Did I give you one of those?

Teiser: No.

Adams: Oh, I'll give you one. It's a very nice little thing. And they're
running full-page advertisements in Life. I think they've run
three, black and white. Well, the cost of Life pages is so much
greater than the cost of the photographs, but that doesn't really
excuse meager payment to the photographer.

Playboy, the last I heard, was $45,000 a page, an inside color
page. That cost is for one issue. Polaroid spends $20 million to
$25 million a year in TV and advertising, which is a set percentage
of their gross sales.

Teiser: Polaroid's advertising has such a wide range, from Aperture to the
Sunday paper and radio and television —

567

Adams: Oh yes. The point is entirely a matter of readership — how many
people see the ad. A certain percentage of those are going to
respond. That pays for the ad and makes a profit. They've got it
down to a cold-blooded mathematical fact.

Teiser: But most companies don't advertise to such a very wide range. They
figure "most of our buyers are here," in one or two categories.

Adams: Well, that's specific. That's a different thing. There is one

very important point: William Edwin Rudge told me that if you do
a book, no matter what the book is, if you send out a mailing list
of a hundred thousand names, you will get a minimum of two thousand
responses. That's part of the whole advertising promotion pattern.
But people forget what it costs to send out a hundred thousand ads,
you see. Your printing and postage alone is an absolute minimum of
10c apiece; a hundred thousand would be $10,000. Now, suppose you
get two thousand orders, and you make $2, at the most, on the book;
that's only $4000. But the minimum advertising cost is ten.

But the photographer working with the dealer (now Lee Witkin
in New York is my agent there and Carl Siembab in Boston, and 831
Gallery near Detroit, and the Focus Gallery in San Francisco) — they
work on another basis. They show prints at an exhibit, and they
have prints on hand and they sell them, almost always on a 40 percent
commission basis, like a book. The average of the book sales profit
was about 5 1/2 percent seven years ago. The publisher's profit was
a little bit higher, nearly 6 percent. So you see it is a very
close thing.

If I just wanted to sell my photographs myself, I could get a
big mailing list, and I could announce portfolios, and I imagine 1
could sell a great deal directly. But the cost of doing it would
still be a minimum of 25 percent, because I'd have to hire somebody
to help. I'm not going to write all those letters. So the direct
sale may be an illusion too.

A painter is in a little different situation. O'Keeffe has
given up any gallery. She just lives in New Mexico and paints.
People come and write or ask for appointments to see her, and
they'll consider the matter for two or three months, and finally
they'll like a painting and, "Well, all right," she will condescend
to sell them a painting. And a painting is $15,000 to $50,000 so
you know she does not have to do many in a year! That's a little
different world, because your production effort is way down (and
your fame way up!).

But the whole idea of associations and groups and sales, it
sounds commercial for somebody who's supposed to be an artist, but
still, these are the realities. And a great many very fine artists

568

Adams: in photography are having a terrible time because they don't face

the reality of just the cost of getting their work out to the people.
Edward Weston nearly starved to death. You know, he never made any
money at all. He was doing very well when he was a portrait
photographer in Glendale in the 1920s, but when he gave up that work
and went into purely creative work, he had a very tough time most of
his life. And it was so stupid, because getting the right agent,
Edward could have made quite a little bit of money and been
comfortable. I don't say he'd have been or wanted to be rich.

Teiser: He was just against the idea?

Adams: He was against the idea, but not on a very logical basis. For him
"business" was associated with prostitution. I always used to kid
him. I said, "Are you really against prostitution, or maybe you
don't like prostitution because it reminds you of business."
[Laughter]

Teiser: Would you tell again about your gold pagoda?

Adams: Oh, the gold pagoda. I often get honors and awards and things. I
got the progress medal from PSA. But before that, Nikon, the
Japanese camera company, gave an achievement award, and they picked
me out and I got my temple [laughter], which is a very nice model.
It's a trophy. Of course, it's much better than the average golf
trophy you see on businessmen's desks. Nothing in the world is
designed more terribly than the average trophy. Anyway, the
temple is very nice.

I think I also mentioned something about the trials of working
on Life special assignments. I did a big story on begonias —
worked for months on a sixteen-page color insert. And it really
came out very beautifully. It's a very difficult thing to photograph
begonias in a greenhouse because you have to control the color
sensitivity of the film, that is, control the light with filters.
And these were 8 by 10s, some of them really pretty spectacular —
and the people at Life were crazy about it. Everything was fine,
and I understand they printed it all; then something happened and
it wasn't used. They finally redid several pages in color and a
small text, but the main section was printed and then discarded
because there wasn't economic space for it. And this is a
continuing editorial burden which I think we have to face in
journalism. If a budget has so much money for pictures and
printing and they just spend it, they don't worry about it. If they
do something and it costs them $25,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 and
something comes up that's more important, they just junk it.

Teiser: Yes, in a news magazine it must be —

569

Adams: Yes, perplexing. And covers. Time will have several covers
prepared relating to impending events. Then they'll pick the
appropriate cover. And the artist is paid a fee and then gets so
much for the cover in addition to the fee if it's used. But I think
Time at one time had five covers holding for a couple of weeks — the
election, the war, etc. And they have to be all ready. These things
are commissioned, and when they're out of date, they're just
discarded.

Teiser: You said that now Bill Turnage has been getting you so much work
that you can't do it all.

Adams: Yes. Turnage is really doing extremely well by me, but he's doing
a little bit more than I can handle. I have to watch things very
carefully. Because now today I was doing some printing for the San
Francisco show. I really am tired at the end of the day, and I
think I made only four prints — four or five prints of each, while
I am at it.

Teiser: How many hours in the darkroom does that represent?

Adams: Oh, that's about six in the darkoom. But I mean four separate

subjects; when I once get the good print, then I make four or five
copies so I have them for other exhibits too. But a couple of them
usually have to be done over.

Sometimes things go extremely fast. The other day I was making
big prints, and it went very fine. The day before that I had real
trouble. Then you have what is called a "dirty negative" — the
negative has been damaged or gone through a fire, etc. With an 8 by
10 print it's fine; get them up to 16 by 20 and you begin to see all
the little defects, which have to be very carefully spotted.

Darkrooms

Teiser: You're going to take us on a tour of your darkroom —

Adams: I could probably preface it a little bit by the history of my

darkrooms. I had a little darkroom in the family house, a room that
the Chinese cook used to occupy. We cut a hole in the wall and I
had a daylight enlarger — an old 8 by 10 camera with enlarging film
holder, and outside was a great big aluminum reflector that pointed
up to the sky, and a diffusing screen. And it really was beautiful
light; daylight's handsome enlarging light. But unfortunately San
Francisco has a variation of weather, and the fog would come in and
my exposure would drop down terrifically, or the sun would hit the

570

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser;
Adams:
Teiser:
Adams :

reflector and I'd be in trouble. Then early in the day and late in
the afternoon the exposure changes, so I had no set exposure at all.
All the Taos book [Taos Pueblo] enlargements were made in daylight.
Which is a thing that I think I hadn't mentioned before; I remember
that. And I'd work after 10:00 a.m.— 10:00 to 3:00. I loved a
nice consistent heavy foggy day because it stayed at the same light
value. But storm days and sunny days with the sun coming through
trees and fog and producing changing light were pretty bad.

Well, then I got an enlarger with two Cooper-Hewitt M tubes in
it. Used the same enlarger but added the light. And I guess the
electrician didn't know what he was doing, because the tubes
resonated in phase and would break. Then I had to wipe up mercury
all over the place. Why I didn't die of mercury poisoning I don't
know. I must have gone through eight M tubes. The tubes are
rather widely separated. We put one tube back of the other, but
they "resonated." Then I had a mercury-argon 5-millimeter tube in
a big fourteen-inch grid, and a twenty- thousand-volt transformer.
That was simply marvelous light. I used that for many, many years.

Then when I came down here, I decided I'd go to tungsten light.
You can see the enlarger with thirty-six lamps in it, each one on a
switch. So now I have an enlarging-light control that I didn't have
before. I can dodge now directly. Also, this light is very fast.
The other one wasn't too fast.

That's the principle that used to be used in contact printers?

Yes, with contact printing we turn on and off lights in the box.
I turn on and off the enlarging lights at the back of the enlarger.

Was this your own invention?

Not an invention. It's just an adaptation of a principle.

Has anyone ever had an enlarger like that before?

Not that I know of. That's very funny; I don't know of one.
There's no reason why there shouldn't be. The point is to cross-
wire, so that if you look at the sky in the upper right hand of the
negative, and wish to give it less light, you operate the light
switch which is in the upper right-hand area of the panel. If
your lights are cross-wired, you then operate the light in the lower
left area. Sometimes I'll have sixteen lights off.

Well, after the little darkroom I invaded the family basement
and built a darkroom about twenty-eight feet long (it's just about
the same as this one in Carmel) and had vertical tracks for the big
enlarger. I made big prints — a lot of big images for Yosemite —

571

Adams: using big wooden trays. Used to develop by laying them out flat.
Now we develop them by rolling in deep narrow trays.

Teiser: Did you use gallons of black substance called Probus paint?

Adams: That's what we used, but that is pretty bad photographically; it

will cause fog. Now I use fiberglass. Of course, nothing's better
than stainless steel. It costs two or three times as much in the
beginning, but it lasts forever. I wish I'd had all my sinks done
in stainless steel. That would have cost something like $700. Now
I've spent $300 just getting the present sinks repainted and fixed
up, and that will happen again in a few years. So stainless steel
would have been the best choice.

When they first came out with metal tanks, etc., they had
monel metal, which preceded stainless. Then they had ordinary
stainless, and that doesn't react well with some photographic acids,
so they made what they call the 818 type. Now there's a new one
that's even a little more resistant to stain. The Calumet Corpora
tion makes marvelous sets of tanks and trays and equipment —
beautiful steel. It's not cheap but it's certainly top stuff.

When I moved down here, Mr. [Adolph] Gasser came from San
Francisco and laid the rails for the enlarger and set them to a
high degree of accuracy with a theodolite. You know how that is
used, for getting elevations. You lay down a track, and then start
with one end and put a mark on a post. Then you move the post down
the rail; if it sags, you support and then secure the rail, getting
exactly the same height over all. It's about the only way in which
you can get such things really right. You can with a level, I
presume, but it would be rather tricky.

Before coming down here from San Francisco, I had the difficult
problem of keeping my negatives in the vault of the Bank of
California, because the house wasn't fireproof. So when I'd start
to print I'd have to go downtown to the bank, get into the safe
deposit, get into the storeroom, pick out the negatives, come home,
find I'd forgotten one, go back againl It wasn't too expensive —
about $40 a month for storage and service — and the negatives were
safe.

So then, part of the plan of this house included a fireproof
vault. We have one that's built right into the rock. It is really
a bomb-shelter design — ten inches of thick concrete. If there's a
big fire and the house should burn, the vault would still be cool.
But anything can burn that's wood, and it's not right to have
negatives as prize possessions in a frame house.

I have, for me, an extremely efficient darkroom. It's bigger
than I would have if I didn't make large prints.

572

Teiser: You also have an adjacent room with finishing equipment in it, a
room between the darkroom and the gallery room.

Adams: Well, the original design of the house was that this darkroom would
lead into that workroom, which is for mounting and densitometers —
you know, the general area. Then there's "pass-through" storage,
which is back of those black doors in the gallery; it leads into
the workroom. Theoretically, you can pass things through to the
gallery across those four-foot shelves. They lead right into the
workroom. I'm the only thing — and the cat — that's ever really
passed through. But anyway, the principle is there. That and the
garage and the study space and the vault is about half the space
of the house and can be written off professionally as such. Has
been so far.

Darkroom Tour

[Darkroom tour follows. Taped while walking through the work areas.]

Adams: Well, if you want to go in the darkroom first, I can describe some
of its points. The average darkroom, of course, should be air
conditioned, but in this climate, we don't need it. We have fans.
The sound you're probably getting now [on the tape] is the drum
washer, washing the smaller prints. And they're about ready to come
out — a second batch.

This is the big enlarger, and it has, of course, a cooler —
blower — which is terribly important because the amount of heat
without heat-absorbing glass is very high. I use 130-volt lamps.
Ordinary 115-volt lamps would wear out much quicker when the power
is increased. We use a 24-inch Goerz Artar Tessar lens for most
enlarging. The enlarger moves on a track, by hand power, but the
magnetic easel (the paper is held on with magnets) is motorized.
My friend made me a metal strip guide for the big prints. I can
place the pipe at several levels, put the roll on it, pull the paper
down to the desired length, and secure it with big magnets at the
bottom. Then I just set the guide across the top under the roll and
cut right across.

Teiser: That's a straight-edge?

Adams: Yes. Well, it's a T-square straight-edge, and it has an edge guide.

This other enlarger is very fine; it has a very special and
remarkable light called the Code Light, made by the Ferrante brothers
in Los Angeles. I use it for variable contrast paper. There are two

573

Adams: tubes — one is for soft contrast, and the other for hard. When we use
the green light only we simulate a soft, number one paper. With the
same amount of green and blue light, the soft and hard get a number
two paper contrast. With the blue light only we get a number four
paper contrast. So you have an infinite variation of contrasts
using these two dials.

And then we have a third, hard light to use only for graded
paper. The graded paper is not sensitive to the green light. This
enlarger can be turned horizontally and project on to the large
vertical easel, making possible big prints from small negatives.
I use a ten-inch process lens for that as a rule. The longer the
focal length used, the straighter the rays and the more sharpness
you get from small negatives.

Teiser: The source of this Code Light is above the negative?

Adams: Yes. And the substance in the tubes puts out light of the same color,
independent of the intensity of light going through it. The grid
(this is built with a special head) is a little larger than usual,
and completely covers the negative. And of course the enlarger moves
up and down by motor. The transformers are in the console.

My friend Dick Julian made me a metronome; you see, it's an
electronic timer. I don't have a voltage-control machine because it
would have to be very large for the big enlarger, also would be very
expensive. But this timer is a computer: as the voltage drops, the
intervals increase; as the voltage rises, the intervals shorten. If
I want a ten-second exposure, I just count ten. Sometimes the
"second" may be a second and a quarter, or maybe even less — it varies
according to the amount of voltage. The intensity of the light
changes least with the fluorescent tubes, and greater with tungsten
lamps in the 8 by 10 enlarger.

And this device is a "target." (I'll turn it on for you.) Each
one of those illuminated squares is one zone apart, or is twice as
bright as the one below it. So, in photographing that, I get four
exposure zones at once. I can photograph Zones I, II, III, IV.
Then I can take another picture — Zones IV, V, VI, VII, or VII, VIII,
IX, X — overlaps show any discrepancies in the shutter. It takes a
little while for this target to heat up and reach standard intensity.

Teiser: You use that for — ?

Adams: Testing film. Find out what the film speed is and what the threshold
is and what optimum development times will be. When I get a new film
I must find out many things. "If I expose on Zone IV, how much more
development do I have to give to get density five?" The Zone System
controls help me in field work.

574

Adams: The rest of the darkroom is very simple; any normal good black and

white darkroom would be like this. Color labs are much more complex.

My friend also made me this electronic counter, which, as you
notice when I press this button, goes right back to 0 and begins to
count seconds.

Teiser: The digits are lighted in red so that they don't —

Adams: Well, I can get it up quite bright when printing, or when I'm doing
film in the dark I can bring it down to very low intensity. There
isn't any fog danger — it pushes back on the shelf out of sight.
It's an extremely handy device. It just keeps going; it doesn't do
anything special. But this is the most convenient and handy thing
I can imagine. I can use it in any operation.

Teiser: That's made by the same fellow who made the metronome computer?

Adams: Yes. He's a fine photographer, and an electronic engineer with
Hughes Corporation.

The big sinks are used for — this one especially — for laying
out the big enlargements to look at. All that equipment (washers,
etc.) comes out.

Teiser: You mentioned, I think, the largest size paper you can handle.

Adams: Oh, I can go up to seventy-eight inches in length, with a forty-inch
roll.

Then the drying racks — plastic screens are very practical.
Every once in a while, when it's a warm day, we take them out and
hose them off to assure chemical cleanness.

This is one of the photographs I was doing today — a 1929 eagle
dance. It's for the new Southwest book.

Teiser: How wonderful.

Adams: It still has a certain "feeling."

Oh, I might say that the darkroom is completely controlled by
this one switch, and it's on a relay. You can hear it — 7500 watts
in there, and I have to have a big positive switch for safety.

Teiser: No more fires. We're now in the workroom.

Adams: This is a big dry mounting press, mounting prints by heat. And this
is the tacking iron, a little device to tack the tissue to the mount.
And this is really a printer's trimmer, which is a very accurate

575

Adams: one — important because a lot of photographic trimmers aren't really
good and don't cut a clean edge.

Then I have two densitometers. This is a reflection densi-
tometer that measures the reflection density of prints, the scale
from black to white. This is the probe, and you just put this on
the print and depress it, and this gives you the percentage of
reflection, or the reflection density on the dial.

And this is the diffuse transmission densitometer, with the
read-out numbers. These are read-out numbers like the darkroom
timer, so when you depress it gently on the negative the density
shows in digital log numbers. This is a very valuable device.
This is where you measure the densities of your negative. Density
is usually given in log^0 values. It's just a convention; it could
be arithmetic, but it's always been put in terms of logs: 0.0 is 1,
1.0 is 10, 2.0 is 100, etc. You have to get used to that sequence.

Teiser: These are shelves on the wall that separates this room from the
gallery.

Adams: Yes. There's no pass-through here, there's just my paper. I have
to have a lot of paper on hand, because I never know what I'm going
to use. It looks like an imposing stock, but it's better to have
more than less when you really need it.

And then there's the Polaroid MP3 copy camera, a very handy
device.

So I can do a lot of work here. Then there's this garage,
which we now use for packing — no cars any more — storage and stuff.
It may be an office some day. Then what is known as a study, which
is in even greater shambles than usual. And this leads outside and
you can see the negative storage vault out there. It's just a
concrete cube — mostly filled with metal cases with negatives in
them.

So, you see, the circulation is such that we can really get a
lot of work done. But at the moment I'm trying to get things set
so it will all be clean and neat by tomorrow when we leave.

Now, the negative catalogues — for instance, this is [the
catalogue for] the Yosemite book. This isn't the original but a
duplicate. Well, I've got them all filed in a code. For instance,
you have Yosemite, and 1Y would be an 8 by 10 of Yosemite — "1"
meaning 8 by 10, "Y" meaning Yosemite. "3" is 5 by 7; "4" is 4 by 5;
"5" is 3 1/4 by 4 1/4; "6" is Hasselblad size, 2 1/4 by 2 1/4, etc.

Teiser: Is this a system you established long ago and have kept in use?

576

Adams: Yes. They're not cross-referenced. They have to be cross-
referenced some time, however.

Teiser: Here on your study wall are many, many awards.
Adams: Well, this is what we call "professional wall paper."
Teiser: Very impressive.

Adams: Well, they gave me a special citation from the American Institute
of Architects that I went to Detroit for. And then the Northern
California chapter [of the AIA] . Then I had — oh, Fred Farr got me
a senate resolution. And the membership scroll from the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. And — I don't remember all of them —
Governor Brown had some special citation. Stuart Udall gave me the
Conservation Award. I have the John Muir Award from the Sierra Club.
And five honorary degrees — that should be enough!

The gallery — the black wall is primarily to cut glare, because
when we're spotting or working here, we don't get any reflections
from black walls. The gray wall is a 20 percent gray, and the
panels are about 12 percent. Now, the total environmental reflection,
if you stand and look at the pictures, would be about 20 percent. And
the pictures should look their optimum value. If the room were white,
the pictures would look too dark; if the room were dark like that
black wall, the pictures would look too bright. In other words, if
you put a picture against this black wall, you get a totally
different emotional effect from it.

Teiser: What about the mounts?

Adams: Well, the mounts balance out, you see. The mounts in the darker
panels strike a sort of approximate balance, so the whole
environment remains about 20, 18 percent, actually, the geometric
mean of photographic reflection density values. That is, the
reflection density range of the print which is, say, 0.08 up to
about 2.0 +, and the geometric mean is about 0.7 or value 5. The
eye seems to respond logically to that. It doesn't make much
difference what color you use, providing it's about of that value.
You could have greens or blues, reds — I wouldn't like too much color
for myself. When you have very brilliant colors on the wall, like
those yellow boxes, for instance, it's terrible. A lot of people do
that to walls, and photographs look awful on them.

Well, I don't think there's anything else. A lot of people
think the darkroom is super-elaborate, but it really isn't. If I
were doing color photography, I would be trapped with more compli
cated processing stuff, like nitrogen bursts for agitation, and all
kinds of printing controls. Thank goodness I'm not doing color!

577

Teiser :

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams:

I think you mentioned on another tape, but let's put it on this,
that there's humidity control in the negative storage building.

Oh yes. Film, if kept in high humidity conditions, may become
hygroscopic and absorb moisture, and any adhesive in the envelopes
may cause trouble. A lot of Edward Weston's pictures had a blue
streak down the back — stained, from what they call the "hygroscopic"
effect from the center-line glue on the envelope.

Then in high humidity, plus heat, you have fungus problems.
If you keep your humidity between 40 and 50, that's normal and
that's about the best for film. If you go lower than that, the
film gets brittle, and it's especially true with movie film. (They
found to their sorrow if they had a very low humidity, the film
would just break.) So the temperature in my vault runs rarely up
to 70, never gets more in hot weather, and the humidity holds
around 45 percent.

Is there an alarm system on your dehumidif ier?

No, it will just stop when the humidity reaches the optimum. The
humidity here isn't extreme. The Westons keep all their father's
negatives and their own without himudity control, but I still
wouldn't — especially with older film, nitrate base.

You see, nitrate base is really a form of nitroglycerin. When
it becomes soggy, absorbs water, it can become really very dangerous.
That's the reason for the great tragedy that happened at the
Cleveland Clinic x-ray department — the film burned with a near
explosion. Kodak came out in the 1940s with what I believe is called
acetate base — well, it'll burn, but only if you put it in the
fireplace and stoke it. Then they have the new film material called
"Estar," which is a plastic of very high dimensional stability,
giving very little film shrinkage. Some of my old 8 by 10s are a
quarter inch less in dimension on each side; they've just shrunk!
The older films are extremely inflammable. In other words, if I
were to light a match to one it would go up with a "poof." But
they're kept in separate envelopes, in folders, and there's no danger.
If I had a bad fire in the vault and a lot of heat, they probably
would go. But there are not many of them.

There was a very nice woman here in Carmel — Mrs. Valeceritos — who'd
do quite fantastic things. She'd make a photograph of a natural
shape, or sculpture, and then she would subject her negative to hot
water. The gelatin would flow, and she'd develop these rather
fantastic patterns. And she really controlled it very beautifully.
Then the new films came out with synthetic gelatin, etc., that doesn't
melt, and she couldn't get them to flow!

578

Teiser:

I wonder how many art forms are lost because of such accidents of
fate.

Adams: That was really quite a blow to her.

Harroun: About how many negatives do you have in the vault?

Adams: Oh, it's somewhere between twenty-seven and thirty thousand. A lot
that aren't catalogued and a lot that relate just to historical
values. A lot that probably relate to trials and tests. One-half
of them probably have no real value. Then there's a certain number
that have very considerable historic value, especially the way the
Sierra looked fifty years ago. And then there's the creative work,
which is something else. But, it's surprising what you collect
over the years, and what you keep. You don't want to throw anything
away I

The other day I went through a lot of stuff and threw away two
big wastepaper baskets full of old negatives and tests and things
that have no possible value to anybody. Like an old commercial job
or something, such as a picture of a shirt!

My first commercial job was the Boudin Bakery, of which I took
the interior. It was a very nice little architectural design. Then
I rephotographed the sign over it. It's double-exposure, very
European, very modern in 1931. I kept that, because that has both
creative and historic value.

Formulas and Procedures

Teiser: We're continuing now after having completed the darkroom tour.

Are there any other things that you think of now that you feel
we should have discussed?

Adams: No, I don't think so. I think the basis of my work, of course, is
a maximum of simplicity. I mean, I don't use any more systems or
methods than I have to. At present I'm using Kodak HC 110 developer
for the negatives and Dektol for the prints. Occasionally I use for
prints what is known as Selectol Soft, which is really a surface
developer and can be made up from Ansco 120, or Beers A formula,
which is just Metol sodium sulphite and sodium carbonate. A lot of
people have worshiped Amidol; I never can use it. It's too potent
a developer for the type of papers we have now.

579

Adams: There's always a discussion about negative developers. You know,
everybody has their pets. But it's surprising how similar most of
them are. Then I use always a weak acid short stop between
developer and fixing bath, and I prefer Kodak's F6 fixing bath
formula, which contains a buffer, a balanced alkali which cuts down
the smell of the acid a great deal. It keeps the fixing solution at
a consistent acid pH.

I don't use quick fix; I don't like it. It's not necessary,
and I think it's harmful, because it has very potent action. If
you're doing "fast" stuff, as they say, you might save a minute.
So what?

All my fine prints are toned. They're first given a second
hypo bath, then they go into a hypo-clearing solution with selenium,
then into a plain hypo-clearing solution, and then a rinse and wash.
It's really very archival. The prints should last forever.

The prints you saw washing in there now are not toned, they've
just had the first fixing. But they will be thoroughly washed and
dried, and in about two or three weeks I'll be able to tone them.

Teiser: Is it necessary to wait that long?

Adams: No, but I have no way to do it now. It takes too long. I'd rather
look at them and figure out, "Did I do it right, or didn't I?" and
throw away the ones that aren't right, because some are pretty
complicated. And then tone the best ones?

Teiser: I was reading an article on Paul Strand which said that sometimes he
used gold toner and sometimes he used selenium toner, and he didn't
know why he used which.

Adams: Well, Ansco once put out Flemish gold toner, which is nothing but a
selenium formula. A real gold toner like the Kodak gold protective
solution gives a bluish cast. It makes the prints very permanent.
And then there's the Nelson gold toner, which is really a silver
nitrate formula. And the ordinary sulphide toners, where you bleach
out the silver and reconstitute it in silver sulphide, giving what I
call "the egg yolk sepia," the ordinary brown tone that you see —
rather ghastly. Then there's the Kodak brown toner and the poly
toner. Selenium seems to be the best. It gives a cool color, not a
yellow sulphide tone. No matter whether the print shows the color or
not, if it's subjected to a selenium toner it does have permanency.
I mount my fine prints with dry mounting on rag boards. Then we spot
them — inevitable, because of all the dust specks and the physical
defects that occur.

Teiser: Do you tone prints for reproduction?

580

Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :
Teiser:

No. Only for permanency. In fact, it adds to the density. Well,
I made some pictures the other day of a Clarence Kennedy negative
I'm going to make for reproduction, and I sent them to the engraver,
and I said, "Now, the color is slightly warm, and I can correct this
by putting it through a gold toner — gold protective solution, to be
exact." But the trouble is, it would increase the density; it would
make the blacks blacker — a richer tone. And that would probably
take it beyond the range of the engraving film. So he said, "No.
It's perfect the way it is. Leave it alone."

The whole process of reproduction is to get a print that does
not exceed the exposure range, if you want to use that term, of the
reproducing materials. You see, if you have a print — the average
bright print that we make today up to 2.0 density range — you can't
hold it in the engraving film. The blacks or the whites are going
to suffer. The two-plate offset printing system does give you a
little more range. One overlaps the other in favor of the whites
and blacks. But still, you have to keep your print down to not
more than 1.5 density range. Whereas, the prints you look at could
be 2.0 and higher. 1.5 would be roughly one to thirty-five arithmetic;
1.7 represents around 50 percent.

Will you have good control over the reproduction of the plates in
the second volume of The Eloquent Light?

It all depends who prints it. If it's to be printed by Rappaport
in the East, or George Waters out here, I won't worry at all. If
it's printed by somebody that doesn't know me, and I don't know
them, all kinds of things could happen.

I suppose the choice of the printer partly depends upon the economics
of the situation.

That's the trouble. It isn't so much the printer as the economics!
Here we have a book of so many pages and in such a size, and you
can't spend more than $2 on it because it should be a $10 book, or
you can't spend more than $5 because it's going to be a $25 book.
Then, what can you do with two hundred pages in this format? And
you'd like to have two-plate offset with varnish. Chances are you
can't. Raise it to $6.50, then you have to multiply that by five,
so there you have a $35 book. And so it goes!

Were you satisfied with the reproduction of volume one?

Fair. I think today they can do much better with the offset.

You were discussing the possibility of paperback editions,
reduce the size, would it be adequate?

If you

581

Adams: Well, what happens is very interesting. You take [Eliot] Porter's
book by Thoreau, In Wildness, and that was reduced — directly from
the original color separations. They reduced the screen to about
350 lines per inch, and got a quite beautiful effect with offset.
You couldn't possibly do that with the letterpress process.

So in setting up my book, we're going to keep this in mind, as
we'll probably reduce it down to three-fifths or two-thirds original
size. And that means, then, that we can't have tiny footnotes in
the text because they would become unreadable. If you have to
change that, that means stripping in another type block. It can
throw the book out of balance. So it's much better to design it
for size ahead of time. Although This is the American Earth and the
Wildness book and others have really come out very well by direct
reproduction. But that could not be done any other way but offset,
because if you're going to reproduce half-tone like that, your
metal dots would be so weak they could not hold up. They are like
a little mushroom on a stem, you see, and you get down to a delicate
spider web of metal, and it wouldn't work in the press.

[End Tape 23, Side 2]

582

Early Aesthetic Impact of Yosemite

[Interview XX (Sierra Club Interview I) — 16 July 1972]
[Begin Tape 24, Side 1]

Adams: I was very young — fourteen — when I went to Yosemite. The idea of
conservation had never entered my head. I knew about John Muir
and I remember reading about his death in 1914, I think it was,
before Christmas. I remember the headline in the paper, "John Muir
Dies," and to me he was a naturalist and a writer. But conservation
as such — developments in environmentalism and ecology — was
absolutely an unknown quantity.

My father came home from Washington one time and saw that they
had cleaned out all those beautiful little oak trees in Lobos Creek,
in San Francisco. It was a great loss, and we were all upset about
it. He was very much upset about it. And this was a real sense of
loss. But, you see, at that time there was so much wilderness and
so many wild places that it wasn't as it is today. The Hutchings
book, In the Heart of the Sierra, was a very intriguing guidebook
and showed a lot of wonders and curiosities.

Now, the National Park Service was really established with the
setting aside of Yellowstone — I think pretty much on the curiosity —
curio — attitude. In other words, it didn't have any of the quality
of Wordsworth's nature adoration, which was almost a form of English
pantheism. The Greeks got by very nicely by giving personalities to
everything. And who was it? — Ruskin? — who spoke of the "pathetic
fallacy" — I think it was Ruskin; I'm not enough of a scholar to
remember. And this pathetic fallacy was the imputation of human
traits to inanimate objects. Maybe you can give a more precise
definition than that. But it is a very difficult philosophical
point. And most of the aestheticians I've known, people like
Stephen Pepper, who was a wonderful man, and others, were wrestling
with this problem of why the natural scene is so important. Are we
involving ourselves in a pantheistic approach? Are we escaping?
What are we doing? Because nature is not aesthetic. Nature may
evoke emotional reactions.

The aesthetics of art and the quality of beauty is meant as a
human trait. Maynard Dixon and I used to have great arguments about
the Indian's level of appreciation. The Indian probably saw Monument
Valley very differently than we did. For instance, he saw it as a
home. And of course there was an endearing quality to that
particular landscape. And then these great natural features
acquired a religious significance; I think that that is perfectly
logical, and I think that is very important.

583

Adams: But we come along and we look at a certain view down a canyon, and
we have a semipossessory sense about it, and we say, "How beautiful
this is, and how wonderful this is! It's mine!" In my later years
of flying across the Sierra at thirty-eight thousand feet, you look
down on the Sierra Nevada of your youth, where you spent six weeks
going a relatively small distance with donkeys, and the whole thing
looks like God has stumbled on a cosmic rug, you know. It's just a
matter of ruffles. [Laughter]

The vaster world appears, and things become symbols. And a
lot of my friends in the East think I'm slightly fey — the ones who
climb mountains understand. That's a challenge. It's like those
ridiculous rock-climbing events that have developed in Yosemite,
drilling holes in the rock. To me that's nothing but engineering,
and I can't see where it is justified. It's a hazardous challenge
but nothing drastic has happened yet. I mean, they do it very well,
but it isn't like the real climbing; pitting yourself against the
situation and protecting yourself with a logical technique and
occasionally putting in a piton, which is called an artificial aid.
(It's a spike driven in rock cracks and you run the rope through it.)
That to me seems to be about the limit of what you can ethically do
and still say you're climbing a mountain. But when you drill holes
in the rock and put in expansion bolts, that doesn't seem to me to
be a fair — well, it's like shooting game from a helicopter. The
game has absolutely no chance.

But anyway, to get back to the early days when I went up there.*
When I got to Yosemite first, it was entirely without any awareness
of need of protection. I didn't know the difference between the
national park and the national forest, and these things hit me as
they do any number of people — with tremendous impact. And I hadn't
been prepared. I guess I just responded to the natural qualities
from the very beginning. That is, the details in the rocks and the
presence of little things on the trails. I might say that such
appreciation and indulgence requires a very good physique. People
forget that you cannot climb mountains and pack heavy loads around
and really explore wilderness unless you are in what would be
called reasonably good physical condition or training. A vast
number of people in this country are not trained at all in that
sense. In fact, we're at a very weak level of physical capacity
now. The farm people and miners and such people, of course, always
worked hard, but they never had much interest in the outdoors,
except hunting and fishing. It all gets very involved.

*For a previous discussion of early experiences in the Sierra, see
pp. 227-252.

584

Adams: In trying to figure out why this impact is strong, I would think
about it all as music, and a rather romantic experience in
literature, and living around nature, like at Bakers Beach and
the Marin Hills and the Santa Cruz Mountains. I mean, I was
definitely not a child of the ghetto. So all of this seems to tie
in, but it would be frightfully difficult to give it a true
philosophic description.

If I went to a philosophic psychiatrist and tried to analyze
now just what were my reactions — what, even, are my reactions
today — it would be a difficult thing to explain, because for most
of my life the enjoyment of nature has been a by-product of
affluence of some kind. I don't mean physical wealth, but being
able to live in the out-of-doors and do somewhat what you want.
Money did not necessarily enter into it, although to go on a Sierra
Club outing, you had to have some money, and you had to have some
equipment. But it was the young people, when I was just a kid,
that were living on practically nothing and being sort of super-
hippies. I don't see very much difference except that there
weren't any drugs around, but they needed baths as much as the
present ones do.

So this particular contact with the out-of-doors is, in a
sense, a feeling of meeting a challenge and a physical, or in my
case, I guess, a kind of emotional challenge. It's awfully hard to
describe, and I hope that I don't ramble too much on the tape.

There are certain terms you can use; I guess "revelation" or
"a sudden experience." We all get that in the arts, with a great
painting or hearing a great concert. I remember my first trip in
the high country. Mr. Holman and Miss Smith and Admiral Pond and
his daughter Bessie and two donkeys — we left Yosemite and went up
to Merced Lake Trail. Went all the way to Merced Lake. I was
absolutely exhausted. It was raining. We'd just get tantalizing
glimpses of mountains. The first time I'd ever slept out on the
ground. And Bessie Pond and the Admiral were very kind to me, and
they showed me how to fix the bed and cut off some pine boughs to
sleep on, which you wouldn't think of doing today. (That would be
terrible.) That was the way we made beds. There were plenty of
plants and trees around!

And then it rained a little that night, and I remember
rivulets going in the sleeping bag down my neck. And then it
cleared up » and I remember Bessie Pond and Admiral Pond — we were
all lying out on this meadow. And Bessie said, "Oh, look at the
stars!" and that was the first time I'd ever seen stars so
absolutely bright. This was at seven thousand feet. And that again
was a primal experience. It was just an amazing thing.

585

Adams: And then in the morning at dawn I got up and, along with everybody
else, climbed up a long tongue of granite on the north. And at
sunrise we saw the big crags under Mount Clark (which are really
not big at all) looked very spectacular in the sunrise light. And
the absolutely pure air and clean dawn wind and the glowing sunrise
on these warm-toned peaks, and the sound of the river and the
waterfall — the whole thing created an impact which was quite over
powering. I've never been able to put that particular experience
in a photograph because it was so complex in so many ways. I don't
know if I'm making sense with this. But this was the very first
great High Sierra experience. That whole trip was just one fine
experience after another. That was 1917.

So we all stayed three weeks, and I wrote to my mother and
said, "Well, I have to go back; this is it." And she was very good
about it. My father was wonderful about it. But the idea of me
going off and spending two or three months in the mountains, to my
mother was quite a hazard. And when I got doing more and more
photography, and finally decided I'm going to be a photographer,
she was very much upset. "You're not going to be just a photographer,
are you?" She was thinking of me being a musician, because
photography was not known as an art by people of her age and type.
If anything, it was something down on Fillmore Street where you'd
go and get a family portrait for a few dollars!

So this was very complex. In 1917, then 1918 and 1919, I made
many, many trips with Frank Holman and friends — an old farmer, Mr.
Schu, and Mr. Lewis, who was a farmer and a very fine gentleman
from near Lodi — real down-to-earth people — and then a few professors.
Went all over Yosemite Park, and it was sometimes rather arduous
trips, because Mr. Holman being of New England extraction and a
severe disciplinarian, we'd get up before dawn and would cook dinner
after sunset. We would travell Often we'd stay in one area and
travel around and explore.

"Some Wild Experiences"

Adams: We had some wild experiences, like climbing the gorge just southeast
of Lake Washburn. We knew there was a chock stone in it; we didn't
know there were three I A chock stone is a big boulder that's
wedged in a crack or gorge, and if you can't climb under it you have
to climb around it. That was probably the most hazardous single
thing I did, because we only had window cord to secure us. When
I got to the top of this gorge I was a very happy and relieved
person, and so was Mr. Holman. Because after going over the second
chock stone, there was no going back. We weren't trained climbers

586

Adams: and were using this cord, without any technique. If we'd fallen on
the window cord, we'd have been cut in two I And the gorge was very
steep, so when you were climbing up the wall to get around the last
big boulder (as big as this room) , you were exposed to about a three-
hundred-foot drop.

There were lots of experiences like that. I remember getting
within two hundred feet of the top of Rodgers Peak, and I sat down
on a big piece of slate, bigger than this rug, and the whole thing
started to slide, and it slid for about fifteen feet with me sitting
on it. Mr. Holman was white as a sheet. It stopped. Mr. Holman
says, "I think we'd better go home now. We're all a bit too tired."
The top was very craggy at nearly thirteen thousand feet, and we had
no equipment for climbing. It's terribly rough country, and getting
back at eight o'clock at night and having to cook, then stake the
donkey out again — such were tough times I Someone said the "good
old times" are the product of a poor memory. [Laughter] I think
I've had some of that too, because we really went through some real
physical agonies in the high mountains.

I remember the Lyell fork of the Merced and going to get water
one evening after a clearing thunderstorm — the winds had come up and
it was really pretty cold. I went to the river to get water, the
bank gave way, and I fell right into the very cold river up to my
neck. Well, it's icy water, but getting out with the wind blowing
and getting out of these soaking wet clothes and not much firewood
and trying to build a fire and get something organized is much
worse I I didn't get pneumonia.

But I can inject a rather humorous event. Mr. Holman decided
that we had been rather uncivilized — gone on all these trips and
slept in our clothes* He was going to be a gentleman again — no
reason why he shouldn't. He had a nightgown. He was going to
completely disrobe, put on this nightgown and be civilized. And
he hung his clothes on the willow branches (it was up at Young
Lake in October). I wasn't inclined to that at all. I put on a
jacket, put the shoes under my head and climbed in. That night
there was about six inches of snow. I didn't know it until I woke
up, feeling a pressure. "Oh, oh." I reached out and found all
this snow. I got out and looked about and everything was covered
with fresh snow, including Mr. Holman 's clothes, hanging on the
tree — his shirts, trousers, underwear, socks — everything encrusted
with snow. And Mr. Holman blissfully sleeping in a nightshirt in a
sleeping bag. [Laughter]

Well, the danger was that with it snowing it would be very
hard for the donkeys to get out, because we were at nearly ten
thousand feet. So we had to wake up Uncle Frank. And Mr. Schu and
I got as big a fire as we could going, and we thawed out his clothes.

587

Adams: In other words, we got the snow off! And he had to put them on and
they were damp. He went through agony, and we packed up and got
out and went all the way to Yosemite Valley, over thirty miles.
Got in at nine o'clock at night. That was the final trip of that
season.

Well, that's going apart, a little, from the conservation idea.
Teiser: Well, those are typical trips, I suppose.

Adams: Yes, and they were marvelous. And Holman, of course, was very

conservation-minded, in a different way. He was collecting birds
for the Academy of Sciences, and he was disturbed by the sheep.

Animals and People in the National Parks

Teiser: Were the sheep always a kind of a bugaboo of the Sierra Club people?

Adams: Well, the sheep at one time were terrible. In fact, someone said
the other day that the damage done by the sheep in the late 1800s
is still apparent in the high country. It'll take many, many years
to return to the original condition. When first Muir came, the
whole High Sierra was completely overrun with sheep — even to the
highest passes. So the wildf lowers and the meadows were in a
pretty sad state. So one of the first objectives of the Sierra
Club was, of course, to eliminate the sheep from the very high
meadows. That was very difficult to do because it was public
domain. But when we got out of the parks and into the National
Forest, then sheep were everywhere — very apparent and odoriferous.
Sometimes, we'd have a hard time finding enough grass for the
donkeys, because a whole flock of sheep had gone right through the
high meadows for miles. You see, they might start from Bakersfield,
go into the Tehachapi Mountains, then up the Kern River. Sometimes
they'd have to go out to the desert on the east for provisions and
supplies. The shepherds and their flocks were out for quite a few
months .

Teiser: But cattle, if you control the number of them, are not so destructive?

Adams: Well, they don't go to the high elevations as much, you see. But

they can do just as much damage on the lower ones. They can chew up
fine meadows like Horse Corral Meadow or Big Meadow, near Yosemite.
And when they go to certain types of forest with the green under
growth, they can do a lot of damage.

588

Adams: A national park can't logically exist with sheep or cattle in it.
In the early days, the Yosemite rangers would find a shepherd and
a flock up in the northern part of the park, say near Tower Peak.
They would scatter the flock and take the shepherd all the way to
Wawona at the southern end of the park for trial, and then he'd
spend the rest of the summer trying to gather his sheep. Pretty
drasticl

When I told people in the East that Yosemite Park is nearly
twelve hundred square miles, they'd say, "Oh, you mean acres." Oh,
no. (It's 1200 square miles, and Yellowstone is 3200 or 3300.
Glacier Bay National Monument is going to be 4000.) So to find
anybody in Yosemite Park or to locate a herd of sheep would really
be not too easy. And the shepherds would sneak in around the
borders and take the grass. They'd have lookouts and if they'd see
a ranger camp or a patrol, they'd move out.

Well then, my first idea of conservation as such came about
when I met Mr. Colby and got into the Sierra Club. And you have to
remember the Sierra Club started as a social group of elitists and
intellectuals. They were very fine people — university people,
lawyers and doctors. They were trying to help John Muir in keeping
the sheep out and preserving the national park. Muir wanted the
whole High Sierra to be a park.

The outings were started with the idea of bringing people into
the mountains to experience them so they would appreciate their
beauty and then work to protect them through congressional laws
and regulations. The first motto of the club was "to explore,
enjoy, and render accessible." And what they meant was this:
accessible for the elitist group directly, and for all people of
that persuasion who wanted to come to the mountains — without any
idea at all of how many would eventually come. So the idea of even
roads was not anathema at all — trails, preferably, but roads to
trailheads were acceptable. Around 1908 — Colby told me this, but
I can't remember his exact date — he and John Muir were standing
at Glacier Point. You see, Colby was a great Muir disciple — Muir
could do no wrong whatsoever. (Muir was a great man. He made a
few mistakes, and he wasn't perfect. Neither was Colby, and
neither is anybody else, for that matter.)

Muir stood at Glacier Point and said to Colby, "Bill, won't
it be wonderful when one million people can see what we are seeing
today." And that's about 1908! Of course, one million people
didn't have any real meaning. He meant a good quantity, a number
of people. He couldn't conceive of such a number. Well, many
millions of people have seen it, as you know.

589

Adams: The preservationist extremists have been fighting against that broad
viewpoint. They say that only the most hardy people should be
privileged. They'd like to close Yosemite off at El Portal, make
everybody walk in with a pack on their back, assuming this would be
a great experience. When you think of the humanistic balance, that
would be an impossibility. There should be some places left like
that, but I can't imagine closing off Yosemite. It would be the
utmost of selfishness.

Colby had a very wonderful idea, and of course at that time he
didn't realize all the hazards. So when we were fighting, say, the
Chamber of Commerce kind of development, the park motto in the
thirties and forties was, "Make every year a national park year."
Everybody should get traveling, and come and see the parks. And
all the concessioners thought it was wonderful. So they were
building up this travel scheme which very quickly just overpowered
them.

Then we had the problem of too many people and people of the
wrong kind. And that came to a head several years ago at Yosemite
when we had that riot and all kinds of questionable people appeared.
It was a pretty difficult situation. Then suddenly it changed, and
just the type of people we wanted to come to Yosemite came. All
the young people who wanted to climb and hike and pack — most of
them very good people — perhaps only about 10 percent were bad. And
some communes were established in Little Yosemite and other places,
which caused a great deal of worry — very unsanitary, for one thing.
But, in the main, there's this wonderful group of young people, just
the kind of people we always thought should experience the park.
Now there's too many of them; even though they're all the ideal
kind, there are too many.

For years, the club has been trying to justify its outings, and
we finally had to capitulate. We were doing a great deal of damage
with all our horses and mules — us plus other outings, and the
hunters. Things were getting in pretty bad shape. There wasn't
enough firewood, so we brought in gas tanks. Whole strings of mules
now come in to the mountains with gas cylinders; we cook with propane
and butane — whatever it is.

Now the mules are causing a problem! So the only answer is the
helicopter to fly in and deposit supply dumps on a schedule
rigorously controlled. It would do far less damage. Of course,
the purists again say that it's a mechanical intrusion. "It spoils
my mood to hear a plane." Well, the planes are going overhead by
fifty to a hundred a day anyway. It's commercial planes — the skies
are filled with jet trails. So it seems to me a rather ridiculous
thing to say, in this age of the helicopter, that you can't come in
at a given time and make a large deposit of supplies needed and get

590

Adams: out. People go in with the last word in outing equipment and

camping equipment and portable radios, and the whole matter becomes
very difficult. Just what is wilderness? If you want to really
face the wilderness, you'd go to the borders of Yosemite and divest
yourself of all your clothes, hardware, and food and just walk in
and see what would happen!

Teiser: With the good equipment that people have now, however, how far do
you think you would get with just what you could carry?

Adams: Well, I think if I were strong and could carry a good pack and I

had a fishing line — but didn't include camera equipment — I think I
could probably go for thirty days — probably more than that.

John Salathe, who made the first ascent of the Lost Arrow,
was a "fruititarian." That is, he wouldn't eat any vegetables that
grew underground — peanuts, for instance. He'd consume bananas and
nuts and fruit juice and pineapple juice, and so on. He had the
stamina, but when you'd shake hands with him, it was shaking a glove
full of cotton. He seemed to have relatively small protein
structure. Dr. Stern at Yosemite was very much interested in him
medically. He said, "Where does he get his protein? I can
understand where he gets energy (winos get energy just from wine) ,
but he must have proteins because of his physical expenditure of
muscle. So what does he eat?" I said, "He eats nuts, bananas,
walnuts." I think he talked to him one time and found out what it
was — probably from nuts.

Teiser: What did you say he'd climbed?

Adams: He made the first ascent of the Lost Arrow. That was the first

really great single rock climb in history in our part of the country.
It was done with expansion bolts — four days of hard work! And Ax
Nelson, who was a six footer plus — a great big strong guy — was his
companion. They made it and came to our house in Yosemite afterwards
for dinner that evening. Ax Nelson went through a couple of steaks
that would have fed a regiment — totally exhausted. John Salathe
was sitting there smiling, eating raisins and a couple of bananas;
he was in perfect shape. He'd done this arduous thing with a
minimum of nourishment. [Laughter]

Of course, Muir said, "Well, you just take some crusts of
bread and a little tea." Well, that is physiologically impossible.
I mean, Muir must have had something else. Because you're not
going to live on a few crusts of bread and tea and raise 180 or 190
pounds, whatever you weigh, so many thousand feet. I mean, you get
to the old BTU principle. So Muir was guilty of very frequent
flamboyant and happy exaggerations, which were made with the
acceptable exaggerations of the times.

591

Adams: We used to go on trips with mush and rice and bacon and sugar and
salt and flour and some tins of jam and some canned butter and
canned milk, and we'd be out for weeks. Nothing more than that.
We'd catch some fish sometimes. None of the amenities. But we had
enough food.

Teiser: You never caught small game?

Adams: You can't in the park. We never did that. That's something that

the old pioneers did and the shepherds; they did shoot deer and dry
meat and so on. They didn't have other things much to fall back on.

We'd have a couple of kayaks and packs on the donkeys just
filled up — canvas sacks of rice and flour and salt. The LeContes
are small people — really tiny; you know, I think I ate as much as
any three of them. When we planned a trip, they had to just
figure out what they'd eat and then double it, because I ate a
whole pot of mush in the morning. I don't know where it went. I
must have had a distended digestive system, because I would eat an
entire pot of oatmeal. [Laughter] Loaded with sugar. Joe LeConte
would always stop on the trail for lunch, and we all had our little
duties — we'd dash off to attend to them. One person would water
and stake out the donkey, another one would get firewood, and
another one would start cooking, and Joe LeConte would make the
biscuit dough, somebody would get the reflector oven set up, and
in about twenty minutes we'd be having hot biscuits with canned
butter or jam. Helen LeConte will remember that very well. Then
we'd relax for a while, and then Joe or I would go and get the mule
and Helen would wash the dishes and Joe would get the packs
balanced. Sometimes if you don't balance your packs on a donkey
or a mule, you have trouble, because they slide over. There's
nothing more awful than to have a pack reverse itself on a panicky
animal. You're really in trouble then. So we'd balance the packs,
and some of the less scrupulous people would throw a rock in a light
pack, just to balance it.

There were always the nested pots. The job of getting the soot
off the outside of the pot was a daily ritual. But you finally
learned to do it so fast that we could clear camp in ten minutes.

One thing that was very painful, though, was going out on a
frosty morning and undoing the tie ropes for the donkey, which were
frozen; your fingers are aching and you're walking up to your knees
in wet, cold, dewy grass, and everything is sort of soaked from the
knees down, and the donkey is shivering, and giving you a reproach
ful look. [Laughter] That was extraordinary.

Teiser: When you went on those trips, were you doing anything that would have
been common then and not thought to be harmful, that would not be done
now — other than cutting pine boughs?

592

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser:

Yes. We cut wood to build fires. We were always very careful with
fires. We put fires out with care, although on a couple of
occasions one got away from me. Came back one time to a camp in
Illilouette Valley and found the fire I'd built had gotten into
roots and was really spreading, and I spent a whole day getting
that thing out, scared to death. That happens to everybody. We
were extremely careful about it, but we weren't as careful then as
we are now.

You gathered your wood as you went?

We just gathered the wood; the wood was everywhere. Now there's
hardly any available wood along the trails. The tragedy is in the
High Sierra, way up high, where the beautiful white albicaulis are —
dead white branches. Now people go as much as a mile off the trail
to gather those. This was typical of the High Sierra. This kind of
white flame has largely been burned up.

I remember at Moraine Lake, the Sierra Club lit up a great
dead Foxtail pine. It was standing right in the middle of a sandy
area. We built wood against that and lit it, and the tree went up
like a four-hundred-foot torch. Well, we wouldn't even think of
doing that now. But there were just thousands of dead trees and a
few score people.

How did you handle your garbage?
it now?

Any differently than you'd handle

Adams: Well, we always dug a hole, which we know now that the bears always
came along very promptly and undug. With a small party, that isn't
too bad, because there isn't very much. We always buried the cans.
One way to do it is to put them down crevices in rocks and put
rocks on top of them.

But the Sierra Club garbage pits used to be dug six to eight
feet deep, and the bears would get into that. So we used to get
roars from the Forest Service people about it.

Teiser: Is that bad for the bears?

Adams: I don't think anything can hurt a bear much.

Teiser: But I suppose they scattered stuff.

Adams: Oh yes, they dug it up, and there were cans all over the place.

A terrible mess. The forest rangers would have to rebury it. Bears
are really terrible — what they can do. They can smell through many
feet of earth, and they'd dig down deep and get it and just scatter
it over a large area.

593

Adams: So now we pack out everything, you see. All the cans are smashed,
compacted. There's nothing wrong with organics. That's the thing
we have to remember, that organic garbage — food wastes and peelings
and all that. We go up to the rocks and scatter them, because the
animals will eat it, and it will naturally go back into the soil.
But it's the foils and the cans and glass and the plastics that
cause the trouble.

Teiser: Has there been a need to control the bear population?

Adams: It's controlled very stringently. They have what they call bear
traps, and they'll catch a bear and take him way out — fifty or
sixty miles. Then of course he'll probably come back. And they
shoot a certain number in the national parks. They have to do that
with deer. Deer are very bad. Because the deer proliferate and
the predators are minor, and people feed deer all kinds of tidbits
and garbage, and the deer suffer. At the Grand Canyon, I never saw
so many awful- looking deer. I think they had a real cleanup and
shot hundreds of them; they had to, they were in such bad shape.

But, you see, there was a bounty on mountain lions, so the
mountain lion population dropped, and it knocked the balance of
nature out. The same applies to the coyotes.

Teiser: There's been some effort to save mountain lions now.

Adams: Yes, there's so few of them. But as soon as there's a few more of
them, then they'll start doing damage to the herds again, and then
the cattlemen will object strongly. It's a very difficult thing
because coyotes and mountain lions do raise serious problems for
the ranchers. It's awfully hard to know just what is the right or
the wrong thing to do. If I say now to certain people that parks
are for people, why, I'm branded a traitor to the cause. I strongly
believe that, but under strict controls. But how do you justify
predators doing serious damage to herds? We put ant powder around
when the ants get in our sink. I'm trying to find the essential
logic, which I find very difficult sometimes.

Teiser: I was reading a quite superficial account yesterday which was

indicating that at one time there were two opposing camps: the
Muir people, who wanted to protect everything, and the Gifford
Pinchot people, who wanted multiple use!

Adams: Yes. The argument still goes on. [Interruption]

594

Sierra Club Indoctrination, 1923

Adams: My first direct contact with the Sierra Club, other than personally
knowing Mr. Colby and the LeContes earlier, was in 1923 when the
club came to Yosemite when I was custodian of the LeConte Memorial
Lodge. They started out from Yosemite, up the Yosemite Falls Trail,
Yosemite Creek, over to Waterwheel Falls and down to Pate Valley,
and then they went up the Tuolumne River to Tuolumne Meadows.

Mr. Colby asked me if I'd come with them for the first part
of this trip, just for a few days, and I did. I went up to
Yosemite Creek with them and on up to Ten Lakes and then dashed
back to Yosemite because I had to keep the LeConte Memorial open.
But Glair Tappaan, Judge Tappaan from Los Angeles (his son is
Francis Tappaan, who's still living — manager of the outings later
on and a very fine lawyer) — he left me his big car, an "Oakland
Eight," an open car which was really a huge hunk of machinery. The
club had gone to the northern part of the park and about half way
through they'd come back to Tuolumne Meadows, and Mr. Morley, a
mining engineer, had been on a rock climb with some of the people
on what they call now Matthes Crest (which is near Coxcomb Crest of
the Cathedral range). He had slipped and fallen and had mortally
injured himself; he had a basal skull fracture. They carried him
back miles to the meadows, and I got a telephone message to bring
up the car. I'd just been up the day before with seven hundred
pounds of meat, which I had loaded up at the village store. I
drove up, spent the day, and came back early the next day, then
that night proceeded to bring up the car again.

Dr. Walter Alvarez and Dr. Herbert Evans were at the LeConte
Memorial planning to go in the next day for the beginning of the
second two weeks of the trip. We drove up, leaving at midnight.
There was nothing we could do much for Mr. Morley. He lived about
a week in the Parsons Lodge. And Mrs. Morley came in by taxi from
San Francisco and we were all very grim. The [club] trip was
modified somewhat because some of the people had to stay there with
him.

Well, it was on that first trip when I got the indoctrination
of the Sierra Club ideals. That was my basic introduction to the
conservation world. (I put that in different terms from the
natural world, because the conservation world is the world of
people relating to regulations and laws and procedures, really
trying to accomplish things.) So I had a chance to talk to many
people at that time, and I really learned a great deal.

595

Concepts and Techniques of Conservation

Adams: I would say that was the first time I was really aware of the — what
do you call it — the real meaning of the word "conservation," which
is of course a very bad word, because it relates to the conservation
of everything, from oil to bad habits. [Laughter] "Ecology" is an
equally dangerous word to use, because it is a scientific discipline.
I think the term "environment" or "environmental procedure" is good
because environment implies conscience; it's everybody's environment,
yours and mine, and the quality of conscience comes in there. So
what we're trying to do is to preserve an environment, which of
course is subject to many definitions, but never out of a certain
logical pattern. Conservation was the accepted catchword, and was
used by Gifford Pinchot in the conservation of lumber and the
conservation of oil and the conservation of natural resources and,
perhaps, the conservation of scenery. So, to many minds, it has
many meanings, and that's I think an important point.

Well, the Forest Service, representing Gifford Pinchot's
philosophy, is very powerful. We can't forget that the Forest
Service was set up as a conserving organization to control the
management of forests for the benefit of lumber people in the
country at large — lumbering and the lumber industry, and by
implication, the people at large who wouldn't want to cut down all
the forest because there wouldn't be any more lumber. It was an
economic not a "spiritual" conservation.

[End Tape 24, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 24, Side 2]

Adams: This is a very complex thing that few people really know about now,
except those that were in the field.

The Forest Service was set up to preserve the forests for the
economic integrity. That is, to manage them, and in that proportion
their cutting and their control and their replanting for definite
economic purposes, because people had gotten into the forests and
were devastating tremendous areas, with great damage to watershed.
And the Forest Service also took over grazing. The interplay of
watershed was terribly important. So this was really management of
natural resources, primarily for economic reasons.

Pinchot was very much against Muir and everything he represented.
He fought Muir on the Hetch Hetchy [dam] and many other things. His idea
was, well, it was nice to go out in the woods, but the woods, of
course, are for the benefit of people at the economic level.

596

Adams: Our former director, Bestor Robinson, a lawyer, was very close to
the Service and did a terrific amount of good in adjusting Sierra
Club policy to the Service and getting the Service to realize they
had to have a little conservation of another kind too. As the
Forest Service progressed, we were able to define the first concept
of "wilderness areas" — and also to open up areas for recreation.
I remember in the early twenties we felt that things were sometimes
more intense and more untouched and more "unmanicured" in the Forest
Service areas than in the park areas. And we used to go over Isberg
Pass in Yosemite into the Forest Service area where there 'd be mines
and sheep, and we'd find a "human touch." We didn't fully recognize
what this meant, but there was something "human" going on there.
They were a different kind of people than just tourists — there were
miners and sheepherders and cattle people. They were all a pretty
well bunch of people. And we weren't too conscious of breakdown
because, again, there just weren't that many people involved. Sure,
we were annoyed by the sheep and it was sometimes difficult to find
a campsite that you could stand, but that seemed all part of life.

And many friends used to come to Yosemite and say, "Oh, the hell
with the mountains. I just like the natural life and picking up and
getting wood and water and getting out there battling the elements."
And that was a very important part of their philosophy.

So the Forest Service gradually undertook a recreation program,
and then the Sierra Club worked with them in getting them to save
certain important areas. We were very instrumental in accomplishing
a great deal with them, and I think we could have controlled the
Mineral King situation because we weren't against any ski development
as such; we just didn't want to have some colossal enterprise going
on in a beautiful place and building a road across Sequoia National
Park to get to it.

But again I have to say that Dave Brower and his particular
group were so antagonistic and so uncompromising that the Forest
Service and the Park Service and the lumber people, who used to talk
to us (we used to come sometimes to very reasonable, balanced
conclusions) would no longer have anything to do with us. So the
costs of that regime will never be known. It's a thing I never like
to forget, and I certainly can't forgive, because I know the damage
is too great. And you don't get anywhere by kicking people in the
shins when you should be sitting down around the table.

I think I remember saying that the Save-the-Redwoods League
faced the reality and handled it in the most wonderful way. The
lumber people owned the redwoods, not the Bureau of Public Lands or
the Forest Service, lands that could be switched around by government

edict. This was private property. Now, how do you save redwoods on
private property? You buy them. You either get them to give them,

597

Adams: or you buy them. The Save-the-Redwoods League and the state parks
on the matching-fund bond issue bought very considerable areas of
fine redwoods. And my recollection of the whole thing is that the
lumber people really cooperated pretty well. I mean, they sold at
a minimum. But you can't merely appropriate it without recompense,
and that's what the wild-eyed people that have taken over the club
in recent years have tried to do. They've said, "They can't cut
their trees. These are redwoods; this must become a state park."
Where's the money? "Well, that isn't important." It happens to be
important because eminent domain is a pretty well-established fact
of the American constitutional government. You just don't go in and
appropriate lands. The animosity that that attitude caused, you
never know what the price was on that.

Some people say that the Grand Canyon was saved from dams
because Dave Brower and his group took extremely aggressive action.
Remember that phrase, "Would you flood the Sistine Chapel to better
see the ceiling?" [Laughter] Well, that was my phrase which he
appropriated, and I was always ashamed of it because we never
intended to flood the Grand Canyon; we were going to put dams at
the ends and somewhat restrict the river, but the Grand Canyon was
not to be filled with water. They gave the impression that the
whole Grand Canyon was to be turned into a lake, you see, which it
wasn' t.

Well, in any event, I'd rather dams were stopped, but I think
they could have been stopped by logical methods, as well as what I
call "aggressive public opinion dynamite." I'm not entirely happy
having the Grand Canyon developed in even most minor ways,
accompanied with basic hard feelings. I think problems can be
balanced. And again, I'd like to say that even in the 1920s there
were many poor people — what we call now our ghetto group — who were
questioning the expenditures of funds for a lot of wild rock and
trees in the parks when there were dire social needs.

I remember when Point Lobos was bought for $400,000, and Colby
raised half of it and the state put up the other half. I think it
was $400,000. I had some friends who were absolutely furious to
spend all that money for just a lot of old cypress trees and rocks
when we have poverty, health problems, and other shameful situations,
right in San Francisco. They have a very strong point. In the next
several years, this point will have to be resolved, because the
ghetto people aren't going to stand for the incredibly miserable
treatment they're undergoing, while they see billions of dollars
spent in rockets and space exploration and buying up vast tracks of
wilderness, which to them means nothing at all. I believe it's a
matter of education. And I'm really concerned about it. But I know
that even that early, in the twenties, there was still a feeling of
antagonism — the cattlemen and the San Joaquin people were very

598

Adams: resentful of the park, because of the restrictions on cattle running.
They were very resentful on parks because they couldn't hunt when
they wanted, especially even in the hunting season.

We had the problem of the Lone Pine-Porterville road come out
in the twenties or thirties. Colby and his group were very much
against it because it was a true invasion of wilderness. The club
had figured out that the best way across the Sierra was at Minaret
summit; the road would go up the San Joaquin River, pass Huntington
Lake, and on over the crest. It was the least interesting part of
the Sierra at that point, although the Minarets to the north and the
San Joaquin Mountains to the south were wonderful. But the pass
itself was far less interesting than Tioga; the least interesting
pass in the whole Sierra.

So we made a gentleman's agreement. I was at that particular
lunch with the chief of the Highway Division. It was a gentleman's
agreement; such things couldn't be legally bound. As long as this
administration was in, they'd support it. We would press for the
Minaret summit road if they would give up Lone Pine-Porterville road.
Nobody mentioned developing the Tioga; we thought it was just too
impossible. And it was at that time, technically, with the
machinery available. Well, of course nothing happened. The Minarets
road wasn't developed and the others weren't developed, and the Tioga
road was then developed. And I remember putting up a squawk and
saying, "Well, why don't we press for our Minaret summit road to
forestall this?" Oh, everybody became very mad and denounced the
Minaret summit road, that it would "bisect the John Muir Trail."
And that was the emotional plea, as if it would have beheaded the
Sierra! The John Muir Trail does cross that area, but when you're
bisecting a trail, just what do you mean? I mean putting a road
across and putting an overpass or an underpass to something is not
doing any damage to a trail. And I wanted the road to go over in
the form of a parkway where there would be no side roads in those
particular areas, which would mean that you'd have to go away almost
to Mammoth and come back on this little old existing road to Agnew
Meadow and that you wouldn't have the road as an invitation to
invade the wilderness.

The frantic people on that opposition side considered it to be
absolutely awful, and they denounced the Minaret summit road. And
then the Tioga Road was put through and did a great amount of damage
that never should have been done and could have been avoided had this
other road been established. And we still don't have the Minaret
summit road. As sure as fate we're going to have one at Lone Pine-
Porterville, and further development of the Walker Pass, and further
development of Tioga because this population that's growing in the
San Joaquin have got to get their products east.

599

Adams: Dr. [Edgar] Wayburn, who was president of the Sierra Club during
its more impassioned and sometimes more stupid period, replied —
when I asked him, "What are the farmers at Bakersfield, Fresno, and
as far as Merced going to do?" — "Let them go up to Sonora Pass or
Donner Summit." I said, "Well, let's be realistic. You're telling
a million people that they have to move their produce hundreds of
extra miles, and they're going to fight for a road across the Sierra.
Why don't you accept this fact and have it where it will do the
least damage?" I was considered a traitor to the cause for that
attitude, but I still stand up for it. If that kind of thought
signifies being a traitor, well, so be it. I find it very disturbing.

I find the lack of logic — and I've always found this—in the
early days — that there were always a certain number of people who
were very practical. I can think of people like Colby and LeConte
and Robert Price and Judge Tappaan and Marion Randall Parsons and
Aurelia Harwood and, oh, Bestor Robinson, Dick Leonard et al — who
were primarily completely devoted to the ideal but also were, in the
best sense of the word, practical. They were trying to say that,
after all, people do exist and we can't exact impossible things.
How do you save the most? Because by cutting out this Minaret road,
you are not saving the most, you are losing. I'm all for saving the
most too, but there are ways of doing it.

Then of course you have in the next ten years the development
of different modes of transportation — the plane and the rapid transit
systems are certainly going to cut down the automobile and the truck.
But we don't know when or how. But I still am emotionally shocked
when I see a helicopter coming into a High Sierra meadow. But then
I'm also shocked when I see a string of fifty mules come in and chew
up the meadow. The meadow isn't hurt by the helicopter. So I've
had to make that decision.

In fact, I always had that tendency. When the first idea of
a cable railway to Glacier Point was suggested, we all rose up in
abject horror. I mean, this was like desecrating the Vatican or
something. Then the road went in. (It was either the cable or the
road.) The cable was so resoundly beaten that the government
constructed the road. And when I saw the road and its terminus at
Glacier Point, I realized what a hideous mistake I'd made in support
ing it — the road against the cable. Because the cable would have
gone where we planned it and hoped it to be, up the gorge on the east
side of Sentinel Rock, and you wouldn't see it. There's power lines
there now that you don't see.

Teiser: There were early suggestions that an elevator be put inside the
mountain.

600

Adams: That would have been perfectly acceptable but extremely expensive,
and would have presented a tailings problem, but I don't think too
bad. I do not believe you could do it in one stage. You can take
a mining cage with a few people a long way down, but to have an
elevator to handle big crowds of people for a three-thousand-foot
drop you've got an engineering problem. So you must have perhaps
three stages; at least two. And that involves a great deal of power
and what would you have done with the tailings — the rock? You see,
when they cut out the Wawona Tunnel, most of the rock went into
building the esplanade that you drive out on. Some went east to
some fills in the road and some also went down towards the valley.
But that's a four-thousand-foot tunnel which is 20 by 20 feet; it's
a terrific amount of stuff, but they used that to build up the
esplanade that you drive out on, etc.

One of the most wonderful things about Yosemite is that from
that esplanade view you cannot see a road or any of the works of
man whatsoever except the old four-mile trail if you look very
carefully. And there is a quarry that was west of El Capitan, which
is now grown over. Most people think it's a gully. But there's
absolutely no sign — it's one of the great achievements of planning.
Well, if you go over to the far edge and look down, you see the
highway by the river. But when you look at the main view you see
nothing.

Teiser: That brings up the point of reclamation — not in the usual sense —
but you say there's a quarry overgrown. Have you seen a lot of
damage repaired, in your recollection?

Adams: Yes, quite a lot. Some roads have been taken out. Not much damage
has been done in Yosemite. The road from the Ahwahnee to Camp Curry
and the road north from the old village were taken out. It's not
quite as simple as it sounds. They have to remove all the blacktop
and several feet of fill, and then they have to allow natural soil
conditions to develop. The roads cut the meadows in half. But the
scar of the old road from the Central Bridge is practically gone.
I haven't seen too much damage in the valley. The place where great
damage occurs and can never be replaced is on the granite slope from
Olmsted View going down to Tenaya Lake. That's a great tragedy.
They also cut right through the roche moutonnee beyond Tenaya Lake.
It'll take another glacial epoch to replace it.

On the east side, Leevining Canyon is an irreparable mess. It's
a wonderful road to drive on, but it's just a vast cut in the mountain
side.

Now, in some of the other parks — the road up to Mesa Verde is
very visible from below. I think the worst example of stupid
engineering is in the Hawaii National Park, leading up to Volcano

601

Adams: House through the rain forest. It's an absolutely straight road

for miles and miles and miles. When you see it from the air, it's
just a cut. And the superintendent was so proud of that! (He was
an engineer.) He said, "This is one of the straightest roads in
the whole park service. It's wonderful." All they had to do was
to wind it about a little! But now it is just a cut. When you're
driving on it, you go for miles in a straight line, and when you're
up above, flying, it's just a gash. It's very bad taste.

Well, my conservation concept just grew, a kind of "personal
Topsy." And I became more and more interested in the club. For a
while I was a member of the American Alpine Club. That's a very
snobbish group. We really didn't have anything in common. It
really is high society, again an elitist club of the worst kind.
There are nice people in it, but they're just out there to climb,
you know. I don't think they have much or any influence in
conservation.

Forces For and Against Conservation

Adams: The Appalachian Mountain Club has been wonderful. Then, of course,
Robert Marshall set up the Wilderness Society, which was a great
thing to do, and George Marshall, his brother, has been very active
in the Sierra Club.

Teiser: You mentioned staying in the apartment of someone named Marshall
in New York when you were helping the Newhalls move. Is that the
same one?

Adams: Yes, that's the one. They had an apartment on Ninety-sixth Street,
then they built a house on Beekman Place. It was very beautiful.
Then they moved out to Beverly Hills. They're marvelous people —
George and Betty Marshall. Really dedicated. Their father was
the great Louis Marshall, a liberal lawyer. The story is he left
$15 million which was divided up between three brothers.

Robert Marshall was a strange, recluse-type person who was
devoted to wilderness. He loved Alaska, especially the Brooks
Range, and he died rather young of a heart attack. He did an
immense amount of good in founding the Wilderness Society.

Now we have a problem that ties in with the oil pipeline
problem. Really it's a situation that if you're not going to have
oil, you've got to have something like it. Do you need the oil?
A lot of people say you don't, and then the realists say there's a
lot of oil coming from Venezuela. But South America may nationalize

602

Adams: its oil. So the government had this idea of securing resources from
the north shore of Alaska, the Arctic side. And the oil pipeline
is to me probably the stupidest thing in the world because it's
absolutely vulnerable to sabotage — eight hundred miles of mostly
exposed pipe. Just imagine what you could do in a total wilderness.
They do have shut-off valves frequently to control pollution.

The brightest idea I heard of was building super tanker planes.
They'd be several times bigger than the 747. They just load up with
oil and fly to special air fields, and of course the bigger the
plane is, the safer it may be. But if it does crash, it would
probably be completely consumed by fire. It depends where it crashed.
But it would be safer from the pollution point of view than great
tankers.

We didn't get anywhere with Canada, which was too bad, because
we could have paralleled some lines there. So it all boils down to
the question, do we need the oil? And if we really are honest and
truly need the oil, then I suppose that's the place to get it. But
the pipeline seems to be the worst possible way of conveying it.
Don't worry too much about the pollution hazard, though, because in
normal conditions I think pollution would be a very minor hazard,
but in war conditions we'd have something else to worry about.

Teiser: Well, in the early days the forces against conservation seemed
spearheaded by the big businessman. Now they're what?

Adams: Well, there's been enlightened big businessmen who've always

supported environmental ism. There's been the mining interests, the
lumber interests, the cattle interests, and the sheep interests, to
whom restricting areas in which they could function would naturally
be to their disadvantage. Seeing that they do not have any wilder
ness mystique whatsoever, they think we're just a bunch of nuts.
They just can't understand us or our ideals.

Then you take people like Walter Starr, who is one of the early
Sierra Club people, a great man; he was a lumberman, head of the
Soundview Pulp Company. And he was really in a very difficult
position, because whatever he would support as conservation would be
in antithesis to his business interests as a pulp manufacturer. He
did a great deal of good in trying to convince the lumber industry
that there was some give and take involved, and that they had to
consider natural beauty, that we knew we had to have pulp, but we
don't have to destroy a prime place to get it. That had been the
battle all along, and we fortunately had very fine industrial
people who would support our theoretical point of view. But then,
when it comes to the showdown, they very often have to take the
realistic point of view in relation to their business.

603

Adams: We have a situation in Yosemite now that they've closed off the
plaza in front of us [Best's Studio]. We think it would be
perfectly wonderful to have all that blacktop taken up and the plaza
put in pools and greens and trees and make it just a mall. We'll
have to adjust our business to it, that's all. Instead of having
cars out there, we'll have, we hope, a very beautiful mall in which
people will congregate. But what they did was just to cut it off
to keep the cars out of it, and they haven't done anything since.
It's been extremely bad for business. So then we come in as conser
vationists, put it this way, and say, "For God's sake, get business
and get that mall going. From the business point of view, why did
you cut the cars out until you were ready to do this thing to the
mall?" It's cost us maybe $20,000 in the last two or three months
alone, just by not having cars and an empty parking lot.

Well, the government said, "It's «n experiment to see how
people use it." Well, the people aren't going to use an empty
parking lot; but they certainly would come and use a mall. So
that's one of the things we're hitting very hard on now. Balance
the conservation! Ideally, we shouldn't be there in the first
place, but we are there and the concessions are there, and the
public is served in a particular pattern. Now the automobiles are
going to go out and there are going to be buses, which I think is
great, and then the accommodations will gradually be cut down, and
then all of the facilities in the valley will be moved out. And
while there will be the restaurants and perhaps our studio will
remain, all the employees should be moved out. I'm pleading just
to have somebody sleep in the building at night, just for security —
the manager, somebody. And even that is considered to be out; it's
up to the rangers to protect! But that's quite a number of years
in the future. It's this constant balance, you see, between
obligation, the ideal theory, and the fact that Yosemite belongs
to the people and is a great experience which everbody should
share — all that contrasted with the concept that it should be
restricted only to those that can walk in for miles on their own
feet.

I think there was a time when I would have espoused that idea,
because I could walk anywhere on my own feet — ten thousand feet
elevation a day, if necessary — but that is a very selfish point of
view. And yet, there has to be a balance. Now, when you look at
the Disney development, that's a terrible, hideous thing in the
other direction. So who's going to make the decision of what d.s_
control? I mean, the focal point of policy. What is the vista
cutting going to be in the valley, getting out this overgrowth of
trees? Well, normally it would have been taken care of by fire.
We had fires every so often; the Indians burned off the undergrowth
and small trees so they could better see game, and the whole open

604

Adams: Sierra forest, as Muir saw it first, was the product of fire. We
stopped the fires, and now we have this tinderbox of undergrowth.
And we no longer have vistas, so we can hardly see the great objects.

Teiser: What do you do? Selective logging?

Adams: Well, if it isn't selective logging, it's clear cutting — it's a

terrible thing to try to even figure out what to do. You have to
have a committee or group of people who are sympathetic in the
aesthetic sense. I mean, we'll not just dig tunnels to see a view
through. We have to say probably 1900 would be a good year to hit
for, and study old photographs and just take out hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of trees. We're burning off the meadows now.
We've burned thirty-four thousand little trees off the El Capitan
meadow, which was a terrible mess for a few months, and then it all
came out green and^lively again. If that hadn't been done there
wouldn't be any meadow in about ten years; it would all be small
trees.

Now, what right have we got to interfere? We have interfered
by restricting fire; that's been the first interference. See, if
you just said, every time a fire starts, let it burn.... This whole
hill here, where we are now, was burned off completely in, I think
it was, 1923. And if you go out on the road, you'll notice there's
oaks on the north side of the road. There's no oaks on the south
side. That road was a natural fire break. Now what's going to
happen to this hill? It's changed a little in ten years, but in
theory it should have burned off before this. It burned off more
than fifty years ago. If it's not burned, then its basic character
changes.

Like the bug infestation in Tuolumne Meadows. I've seen three
of them. When I first came there was a stand of dead trees, with
young trees coming up. Twenty-five years later, another stand of
dead trees, and young trees coming up, and then, not too long ago,
another stand. Then they sprayed, when they wanted to stop the
infestation. Well, did they stop it? They completely changed the
character of the forest. The hemlocks persisted — beautiful hemlock
groves all over the Tuolumne area. And they sprayed down the river,
and all the bugs left, and then all the fish left, and now the bugs
are back again. I think they're learning now, that this was a
natural thing, which has been going on for thousands of years, which
gave us the Tuolumne Meadow forest. So why do anything about it?

For a number of years, you'll see a beautiful mixture of white
tree trunks and then they gradually fall and go back to the soil,
and the new trees grow up, and pretty soon the bugs get them. This
is a balance. But I don't know how long these shrubs on this hill,

605

Adams: for instance, are going to last. How long-lived are they? They

could easily defeat themselves. We could have a fire, and nothing
would remain for a while. Aesthetically, it may be sad to look out
on a burned hill. That's where man's interference comes in; he
doesn't want a fire.

Teiser: I grew up in Oregon, and I remember great mountainsides of dead

trunks of trees from their terribly, terribly intense forest fires.
The forests must have been protected and allowed to grow so dense
that when it came the fire destroyed everything.

Adams: Well, that's it. Around Sequoia Park and the foothills now are the
most deadly areas we have, and even the big trees can't take the
threat of really intense fire. The big trees have taken many fires.
You see charred scars on them. But when a fire starts up in that
present area, it's going to be something unbelievable.

Now, what can you take out? We talked about selective logging.
You go into a beautiful forest, and they have this tree taken out,
then that one and that one. The trees are felled and the forest
looks awful. It loses its aesthetic quality; the mystique is gone.
If it was only once it would recover, but then they come in the next
four or five years and take another set of trees out. So the forest
is always in a state of surgical operation.

Now, with the complete clear-cut and a forest beginning again,
by just sowing seeds or planting at random you create a new forest
which is aesthetically much more important. But that's the problem
that I can't seem to get anywhere with, with people. Everybody has
totally different ideas.

I'm always interested in the young person who says, "I'm having
a new life style; I'm going out in the wilderness." So he goes out
in the wilderness with the best possible pack equipment and boots
and beautifully condensed food, right down to the limit, and a little
Probus stove and a transistor radio. He thinks he's facing nature.
Now, as soon as his things begin to wear out, he's in a terrible
situation. His radio can wear out — that wouldn't kill him. But as
soon as his boots go, or his pants begin to tear, or suppose
something happens to his eyeglasses? I mean, just think of the fact
that indulging in the wilderness is an illusion. We don't indulge
in the wilderness, we indulge in the wilderness mystique. We have a
magnificent backdrop of natural beauty, which to us is very emotional
and gives us spiritual, emotional, and aesthetic benefit. The
aesthetic is something else — that's a function of art.

You know, just go to talk to somebody who lives (and likes) south
of Market in San Francisco, or over on Telegraph in Berkeley or in
Harlem in New York, and try to figure out just what they think it is.
"Man, just what you talking about?" [Laughter] They wouldn't have
the slightest idea.

606

Balancing Preservation and Recreation

Adams: A director of the Park Service should be trying to achieve a

balance. We are trying to get park and recreation areas near big
centers. The whole concept of the park service system is changing.
We have to preserve wilderness, some of it, at least — that's very
important. We have to provide much more recreation. But to say
"provide a wilderness experience for the multitude" is impossible,
because if the multitude is introduced to it, you no longer have
wilderness. It's a very serious question.

Teiser: I've always wondered about those Sierra Club trips, when two hundred
people go out at once.

Adams: Well, the only reason we tolerated that was, they were all of the
same sympathy and understanding. There were always some kooks on
it. There's about five difficult people on every outing. There
had to be. But everybody was there for the same purpose, and we
all tolerated the confusion. I used to think of that a great deal.
People would say to me, "You go out with two hundred people. How
do you enjoy the country?" I said, "Well, they are all enjoying
the same thing." So you are my brother or sister in wilderness,
and you do not bother me because you believe in what I believe in,
and vice versa.

Teiser: But can you all stand on the same rock at the same time?

Adams: No, it was really quite a remarkable thing. There was very seldom
any sense of confusion. Two hundred people isn't many — spread out
over a large area. It's a "tribal" thing, let's put it that way.
And the other tribe of hunters, you see, or wealthy tourists coming
in with twenty mules for five people, these were the things we were
fighting. But the two hundred people who were of our tribe, that
was sort of a joyous exodus. It had its own particular psychology
and its own particular social validity. We could imagine at any
time certain people coming in that could have destroyed that. In
fact, we sometimes did have such people. As I say, there were
always four or five people in our group who weren't in sympathy.

But that same thing occurs in art and musical groups and any
group you can think of. I'm sure the California Historical Society
has got a few members in it that cause problems. But, after all,
what is history? What is wilderness? I think Ted [Eldridge T.]
Spencer, the architect, had by far the most enlightened concept of
development in.Yosemite, because he was fundamentally a humanist,
and extremely well trained as an architect in Europe, and his wife
a great authority in stained glass and a very fine artist. And
they looked at it humanistically and asked, "What are you trying to

607

Adams: preserve? Now you can't hurt the cliffs — " (well, you could if you
wanted to really destroy them) . "You can hurt the meadows and the
floor of the valley." So here's a whole concept of development
which would put all construction in what we call the talus area.
That's the oak-covered area between the cliff and the meadow.
There structures could be built and hidden. You couldn't see them
from the meadow and you couldn't see them from the heights. And
the thing against that was it was rather expensive, putting in
sewers and water supplies and roads in a very complicated, rocky
talus area. The best example of that is the employee or executive
housing section that's just east of Yosemite Village. You can't
see it, and yet there's approximately twenty-five houses in there.
They're built right into the rock and the oak trees cover them;
you can't see it from above or below or from the side.

So in his concept the person coming to Yosemite has the
experience of the gigantic cliffs and the beautiful tranquil
river and the meadow, and that's it. And put your human elements
out of sight in the slope, where they could be hidden.

The new concept at Glacier, after the hotel burned down (which
was a total monstrosity — only sad thing of its going, it burned up
a lot of nice trees too) is that there may be the esplanade.
You'll get off the bus or the tram or what ever 's there, and nothing
will interfere with the view. You'll walk out and have one of the
great views in the world in front of you. And then you will go
downstairs to accommodations and restaurants and gift shops and
things, and they will be below esplanade level. There won't be
anything above. Of course, this is a tremendous concept, and a lot
of the stupid concessioner types will say, "We want people to see
our gift shop!" And at Glacier Point, you used to get out and walk
into the hotel to the front porch to get the view, and you went
through what is probably the worst gift shop that I've ever seen
in my life, which is not a preparation for this tremendous view.
And yet I'm quite sure that the average person didn't have much of
a sensitive response to it. They go and buy an Indian pennant
pillow or a crazy curio and then go right on and look at the view.
But it really wasn't any reparation for this particular experience,
which should be of almost religious dignity.

I remember going into the chapel at Princeton, which was the
last gothic building built in this country — my friend [David]
McAlpin insisted we go in. And we sat down and the organ was
playing (the music department kept the organ going most of the
time) . And he insisted we sit down at one of the pews at the end
and look at the windows; then we moved down closer and looked at
another window, then we went over and looked into the apse, or
whatever they call it — perfectly beautiful windows and this
gorgeous music, and this was certainly a "preparation." Well, why
not? Things like that could happen in a great park.

608

Adams: I became rapidly conservationist and skeptically political, and I
guess I did the job I had to do. But, as I look at it now, I'm
trying to recognize the fact that there are millions of people who
have the right or the privilege to experience certain things. And
certain things cannot take more than a certain impact, or else the
experience is damaged or lost. So how do you show millions of
people Yosemite without destroying Yosemite? And how do you
maintain a little wilderness where somebody, kids especially, can
go and camp and experience some degree of solitude? How many can
do that without destroying the very thing that's important?

[End Tape 24, Side 2]

Sierra Club People

[Interview XXI (Sierra Club Interview II) — 11 August 1972]
[Begin Tape 25, Side 1]

Teiser: I've been reading Helen LeConte's copies of the Sierra Club

Bulletins, and I copied down the names of the people who were the
officers and directors in the late twenties, which would be I
suppose the first group that you encountered.

Adams: Well, my first trip was '23, if I remember. I went on the trip for
a few days. Many of the directors participated in the outings.

Teiser: When did you actually join the Sierra Club?

Adams: Oh, I would imagine it would have been 1918 or '19.

Teiser: Just before you —

Adams: Took charge of the LeConte Memorial, yes.

Teiser: I came across something that Marion Randall Parsons wrote in 1919,
which was the year you were first at that lodge. Maybe it says
something about the temper of the club at that time.

She wrote: "Our members should consider themselves guardians
of the scenery of the West, an intelligent mass of a public opinion
ready to voice its protest when the well-being of the parks, or of
areas that ought to be parks, is in question."

Adams: Yes, that's a great statement I She was a very gifted woman and a
very good writer. I think that that's one of the best early
statements of club policy. Actually, when the Sierra Club started
(prompted by Muir, and Colby, more or less his right-hand man) the

609

Adams: word "club" meant just that. It was a group of people who enjoyed

the hikes in the mountains. It was a "closed" club; you had to have
two sponsors and all kinds of credentials to get in.

Teiser: Someone said that even in the twenties it took months and months to
be admitted.

Adams: Yes. The membership committee had to see the [sponsoring] people
and talk to them.

Teiser: Was anyone ever not admitted?

Adams: Oh yes.

Teiser: On what grounds?

Adams: Well, perhaps somebody didn't like them! There has to be unanimous
approval of the board. Some very nice people were turned down.
And then there was some racial trouble. Oh, they were very anti-
Jewish for a while, at the start.

Then in the thirties we had a very clear policy of no racial
restrictions whatsoever. But the Los Angeles chapter tried to
prevent a black lady from joining. We threatened to cancel the
charter of the chapter if they didn't accept her. There was no
valid reason for refusal other than that she was black.

Teiser: Are there Jewish members now?

Adams: Oh yes. And black members. We never have enough of them, but we
find that relatively few black people are interested in wilderness.
Jewish people are very much interested. In the twenties a good
percentage was Jewish. But in the beginning it was pretty WASP.

Teiser: It was heavily university too, wasn't it?

Adams: Pretty much so. Universities, legal profession, and doctors. But
that peculiar uppercrust of the WASP domain is very hard to define.
They're wonderful people, and they're the soul of integrity, but
they just had a class consciousness. As a social club, that might
be understandable, but then of course, when it got into the larger
domains, it wasn't.

Teiser: I see that Marion Randall Parsons wrote frequently in the twenties
for the Bulletin. Who was she?

Adams: Well, her name was Marion Randall originally, and she married
Edward T. Parsons, who was, I think, a big lawyer — a good but
rather crusty man. Some people said he was very difficult, but he
did a great deal for the club. He put up the money for a memorial

610

Adams: of some kind; thought there might be a nice place in Tuolumne

Meadows for what you called then a "lodge." The club had bought
the McCauley property, and I think Parsons was very instrumental
in acquiring that. Now, these are historic facts that I can't
be sure of, but I know he was quite important. The Parsons Memorial
Lodge was constructed in his memory.

Teiser: I'm surprised how many women were active in the club.

Adams: Oh, many! We had Aurelia Harwood as director and then president.
She was a wonderful woman.

Teiser: She was from Southern California?

Adams : Yes .

Teiser: What did she do when she wasn't' —

Adams: Oh, I guess cut coupons. I think she was a New England lady. And
there's the Sierra Club Harwood Lodge down south, in her memory.

Teiser: Then you had Aurelia Henry Reinhardt as a director.

Adams: Oh yes, she was a very important person. Then Marge [Marjory B.]
Farquhar, who's still living, of course. She remains very
prominent. Now, we have two women on the board, I think, both very
aggressive. Virginia was on the board for two sessions. I deposed
her [in 1934]. She had enough to do with the kids'.

Teiser: It looks a little as if the people on the board and the officers
played musical chairs for many years.

Adams: They did. It was really a closed corporation, in a sense. Mr.
Colby really ran it for many, many years. Of course, he was a
person of absolute highest integrity, so it was a good thing.

Teiser: Were there any quarrels with him? Did people counter him?

Adams: I think there was some opposition, but of a very minor nature. You
know, people of a superior ability, they are resented per se. If
you find anything to gripe about, you gripe. I think the worst
thing that happened to him was when he was chairman of the state
parks, and one man went around making the most libelous remarks —
said that Colby received a commission on all appropriations or
gifts — they were terrible false statements. And I said to Bill,
"You have good reason for a suit." And he said — what is that
remark about a skunk? — that if you're having trouble with a skunk,
Just get out of the way. [Laughter] Because everybody knew this
was so improbable as if to say I was stealing cars or something.

611

Adams: He was really the father of the state parks, which is an extremely
important fact of history. He dedicated an awful lot of his time
and energy to that. He had unlimited energy. He was a total
constructive extrovert.

Teiser: He was interviewed by the Oral History Office,* but only a small
part of the interview is on the Sierra Club.

Adams: It was an important part of his life — tremendous.

Teiser: He was an attorney, wasn't he?

Adams: He was a top mining lawyer.

Teiser: What was he like? Was he an outgoing — ?

Adams: Oh, marvelous person. Very big, very tall, sort of massive — an
extremely generous, direct person.

Teiser: He headed the outing committee?

Adams: Yes, he ran the outings; that was his main fun. He was the

secretary of the club, then became president. Then he settled
down and became secretary for many, many years. They just
automatically reelected Bill Colby secretary. He had everything
at the tip of his fingers, and when the club was small, he had his
law office upstairs in the Mills Building, eleventh floor, I think,
and the Sierra Club office was just one office about as big as our
gallery — a standard one-room office on the floor below. Nell
Taggart was the assistant secretary, and she ran the whole clerical
business — letters, the membership, etc. Of course, they had lots
of volunteers. The club always has; couldn't have existed without
that any more than our Friends of Photography can.

An organization of that type really depends on volunteers.
Like our hospital here. If it wasn't for the "pink ladies," they'd
have a difficult time. They not only help with the records and
admissions, they help the patients, they clean, they work at the
coffee shop. So any organization like the club has always been
full of volunteers.

Teiser: It's had an increasingly larger paid staff, though.

*See interview with William E. Colby, Reminiscences, Regional Oral
History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley, 1954.

612

Adams: Oh yes. Now it's gotten to the point where the volunteers are
primarily in the chapters. The club's too big for volunteers.
Well, we have people to do some things, but now it's so big, they
could hash things up easily if they weren't extremely careful,
because there's so much to know.

It's been losing membership lately, though. We don't know
why. Take such issues as Vietnam and population control, and some
people resent that; they think that other organizations are better
fitted to solve those problems. And I'm inclined to agree. I don't
believe in an "across the board" program. I have my privilege of
believing and doing what I want and joining what organizations I
want, but I really feel the Sierra Club's got an environmental
mandate that includes pollution and would include many things we
never thought about in the earlier days.

But I still think they get far afield when they get into
difficult political situations — abortion and overpopulation, all
that. It's just like the nuclear power plant business. The board
is divided on this issue, as are the scientists.

I must say a lot of people have very strong opinions now;
a sort of latent hostility. They take it out in espousing activist
causes without really knowing what they're doing. That fundamentally
bothers me.

We've always had a bunch of nuts in the club, anyway. Always
a certain fringe, a really small percentage, but enough to cause
trouble. That exists in any organization.

Teiser: I just took down the 1928 officers. It's as good a list as any of
the people active through the twenties. Duncan McDuffie was
president —

Adams: Well, he was an extremely great gentleman, a very fine man, very
intelligent. He was president, director for many years, but one
year he wasn't elected! You see, that's before we had a limitation
on the term. That's why people like Leonard and Colby and Walter
Huber and Joe LeConte and Clair Tappaan and [Robert M. ] Price and
all those people — Lewis Clark — kept going and going and going, year
after year after year. They were all wonderful and all helped, so
that it was good, but it finally came to the point that it wasn't
a democratic way of doing things, that other people had some rights
to run the club. So we established the two-year term. And since
then you have to be off the board a year before you can be reelected.

Of course, if that had happened during the Colby days, it
would have been very bad for the club, because there wasn't anybody
who could take his place — his great ability to work with all kinds
of people and groups. It was really pretty impressive.

613

Teiser: Phil S. Bernays.

Adams: Yes, he's a great old man. He's still living [he died in 1976].

He's of the old school. I don't know just how really effective he
was, except that he was a very charming man and always espoused
the helpful causes. He was a great conciliator. He very deeply
resented Brewer's shin-kicking, as we call it. And, looking back,
we accomplished a great deal by what is called gentlemanly
persuasion — sitting down and talking together. It worked most of
the time. Sometimes it didn't, but there wasn't an acrimonious
attitude.

Hetch Hetchy

Adams: We lost the Hetch Hetchy. And one of the great disappointments
there was Gifford Pinchot's support of it. He really turned the
trick with the secretary of the interior, although he was in a
different department. People forget the Forest Service is
primarily a commercially-oriented, really a controlling administra
tion, that apportions the timber, and keeps it going as a natural
resource, but is primarily interested in harvesting and cutting.
It's just recently that they've been stressing "multiple use"
for political reasons. The multiple-use principle sounds very
fine, and in many ways is all right. But when you get into very
beautiful areas that should have park or wilderness status, it
doesn't work. You can't have lumbering and timbering and mining
and grazing and recreation all together. I mean, it sounds good,
but it usually doesn't work. We'll come around to that, I guess,
in greater detail later.

Teiser: You mentioned Hetch Hetchy.

Adams: That was about 1912.

Teiser: By the time you came into the club it was all settled —

Adams: Finished. Completed.

Teiser: Was there continued resentment about it?

Adams: Oh yes; there were many things that happened. You see, the

resentment was very well founded. The Raker Act specified that the
city [San Francisco] would generate and distribute its own power but
could not sell it. Well, of course, that's been violated from the
very beginning — the PG&E buys all the power and distributes it. It
was absolutely ridiculous to think of a city putting up parallel

614

Adams: power lines. People are still thinking of that, you know, because
they've just got it in for the PG&E. I personally think that the
PG&E has done a wonderful job. They're so restricted and controlled
as it is that they're not really a private organization. They're
really a public utility with thousands of stockholders, and they've
kept pretty much to the grindstone. And according to law and
agreement, they have to look ahead and — like the Highway Department —
they have to study future traffic, use, development. And they have
to say, "Well, there are going to be one hundred thousand more
people in this area. Now, we have to prepare for the required
power. We can't wait until the one hundred thousand people come."
So that*s why these new plants are planned and built. They look at
their charts and their census, and they discuss it with the state or
the federal government. They find that there's to be need for more
power in a certain number of years; this curve is rising, and they
have to start building. Every plant they've put up has nothing but
opposition. The Point Arena plant is now having trouble, and it
doesn't make any sense, because it's not in an attractive place.
It's a perfectly logical place for a power plant. And it's an
absolutely nonpolluting kind of power.

But the "no" people are right there! Of course, they're
afraid of atomic energy, which I think is — I really think it's
ridiculous, I think it's the only sure power source. As a good
scientific friend says, "What else is there?" Until we get
adequate solar power or fusion. Now, if the government will fund
a multibillion-dollar crash program to develop fusion power, we
might be all right. We wouldn't have any trouble with fusion
because that's clean. But that's a technical breakthrough that is
yet to come — although they've made very big strides lately.

Teiser: Mr. Richard Leonard told me he was in favor of taking Hetch Hetchy
dam down.

Adams: Yes. That's one of the craziest things I've ever heard. Where we
going to get our water? That's San Francisco water. I can't
understand Dick on that. I mean, he brought that up at a meeting,
and I said, "Well, where are you going to get your water? In San
Francisco that's our water supply." And there isn't any other
source; there's nothing in the coast range that can provide it.

"Oh," one of the people said, "we can put a desalting plant
down the coast." And I asked what kind. "Atomic." And I said,
"But just this morning, we passed a resolution against an atomic
plant of any kind on any shore, river, lake, ocean, or pond in the
hemisphere. Now, four hours later, you say we'll put a nuclear
desalting plant in!"

615

Adams: I think taking the Hetch Hetchy down is — I cannot understand it.

It's crazy! They'd have to put in another dam to store the water.
But where? San Francisco is a big community. The Russian River was
once considered. You see, what happened at Hetch Hetchy was that
there was another site further down the river that would be much
bigger in expanse but not so deep. And we worked for that very
hard, but that could not provide enough power. There wouldn't be
enough "fall." And the other thing was, it would be of such great
area that the evaporation would be a very serious problem. You see,
it would have to be lower than the floor of Hetch Hetchy, which is
about thirty-six hundred feet. It was claimed that they could pay
for the operation of the Hetch Hetchy by the power it would produce.
And you know if you've been over the Pacheco Pass and seen the San
Luis Reservoir, that the water's pumped into the dam. There isn't
enough local water there to fill a bathtub. I mean, it's a very
dry, arid country except for an occasional heavy runoff from storms.

They have a power plant there, and the water flowing out of
the dam to the forebay creates power, which provides about 50 percent
of the cost of pumping it in. That's a perfectly logical plan.

But the whole Hetch Hetchy was put where it is, in the Hetch
Hetchy Valley, because of the favorable power situation. It's a
long and sad story.

Teiser: After Hetch Hetchy was done, how did those people who had fought it
feel about it?

Adams: Well, there was nothing they could do. They accepted it; it was

done. I remember thousands of people fought the Golden Gate Bridge.
My mother used to think it was "just terrible, ruining the Gate."
Well, the bridge is up. I personally don't think it was so bad.
I think it's a very majestic structure. The Bay Bridge is certainly
marvelous, but a lot of people fought that. Of course, a lot of
people just fight for the hell of it, just to fight something. And
I was guilty of many, many positions myself. I'd go right along
with opinion, because my friends did.

Atomic Power Plants

Adams: I came to this dilemma on the meetings with the club over atomic

power. I'm not a scientist; by no stretch of the imagination can I
be considered a fraction of a scientist. So when the vote came up
on an atomic power issue I had no real right to vote. I abstained.
[If] I knew there's somebody there I trust [who] knew more than I
did, I would go along with him, as an expert.

616

Teiser: Do you think that a club like the Sierra Club shouldn't make that
its business?

Adams: Well, I think in the first place, if it concerns pollution and

destruction of the natural scene, it certainly should. But they
shouldn't make judgments on uneducated opinion. In other words,
the club should have gotten a special panel of scientists, you see,
and taken their majority opinion. Because very few people in the
club know anything about it. I don't know anything about it. When
my scientific friends are for atomic power, I trust them, and I
think they have enough knowledge to make a valid statement, and I
can follow them.

Teiser: What would be the mechanics of getting expert opinion? Would they
get a fund for a study, or — ?

Adams: Yes, you'd have to do that. Of course, there have been many studies
made at certain locations. You go to Stanford and you have [Paul]
Ehrlich and a few extremists in that area and you go to somewhere
else and find other viewpoints. We find that when the club has
asked for studies, they've usually gone to the places that they
know they're going to get a certain favorable response [from].
That's happened time and again. Now, getting an impartial response
is something else. So theoretically they should have taken a
scientist from MIT and from AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] and from
Harvard and California and Chicago — maybe twelve people that would
be invited to join in a panel, primarily by correspondence if
necessary. Have a mediating group of nuclear physicists who could
know what they're talking about and could interpret it. Then get
their opinion. And if three out of eight said atomic plants are
no good, well, we'd be favorable. If eight out of three say
they're dangerous, we'd be unfavorable I

You see, here's a situation which is a very bad thing. It
shows how people can be really fundamentally dishonest at times.
We've fought very hard to get PG&E off the Oceano Dunes to protect
the state park. PG&E said, "Fine, we'll consider this and we'll
do something about it." And Doris Leonard, I think, was very
important in talking to the executives. They agreed. "We have to
have this plant. We have to find another location." They went
north beyond Pismo Beach and chose the Diablo Canyon site, and the
club approved of that. Instantly, along comes a group within the
club against Diablo Canyon. "The most beautiful canyon on the
coast" — a gross exaggeration!

There were certain characters like Martin Litton and others who
just took Diablo Canyon as a challenge and said the Sierra Club
betrayed conservation and ruined this beautiful canyon! And they
made special photographs of the oak trees, etc. It isn't the

617

Adams: camera that lies, it's the photographer. So they made it out that
this was really one of the most extraordinary places on the coast.
Well, it was a nice little canyon, but there are scores better.
I've seen many real, not motivated photographs. And while I regret
having any beautiful spot spoiled for any purpose, at least they
took the proposed plant off the state park Oceano Dunes, which are
very beautiful, and put it in this remote canyon; they had to go
somewhere. But of course many claim we don't need any more power.
We said to one of the directors who made such a fuss about this,
"Did you walk in to San Francisco from Redwood City this morning?"
Of course not, he came up in his Buick with one person in it. When
the power goes off, they're the first ones to complain. So I have
a very sour impression about such unreasonable people.

Private Interests and the Public Interest

Adams: Now, in the earlier days they weren't quite so unreasonable. There
was more unreason on the other side. I knew some business people
in Visalia and Fresno who would say, "There's too many parks. We
shouldn't have any parks. Yosemite Valley's all right, but you're
strangling the cattleman and the rancher; cutting him out of his
livelihood." Well, to a certain extent, the park and wilderness
areas have caused serious loss to the cattlemen. But with the
advent of the feed lots, they now have no leg to stand on. Because
the animals are raised for a good part of their life in very well
controlled pasture and then put into feed lots and stuffed. Now,
for sheep, I've been told it's no longer economical to run sheep
into very high country. When Muir came, the Sierra was just
absolutely infested with sheep, and they tell me that the damage
is not yet repaired, that they created such fundamental damage to
the ground cover that what we see in the Sierra today is pretty
much the result. The meadows must have been quite different in the
fifties and sixties before they started running sheep. Of course,
hunting is another thing — we feel we probably have the privilege
of hunting as part of the American dream, but I'm a thousand percent
against it. The hunters were very much in opposition to parks and to
wilderness.

You have a very protracted, continuing opposition to this, and
you have it often come up in Congress. There have been several
worrisome bills presented. One was that all government lands
should be administered by the nearest township. That would mean
Yosemite would be run by El Portal! And another one is that the
government should sell off government land to private interests!
That bill was actually presented. It didn't pass, but there are a
lot of people that feel that way.

618

Teiser: Were the national forests used at all to reconcile those people?

Adams: Well, the national forest is valid, only in the sense that it's

controlled. You see, grazing and all other use is by permit. And
just like trees, the ground cover is a resource, and just so many
cattle can use it. If it's over-used, it's ruined for quite a
while, maybe forever. So, the Forest Service controls grazing and
lumbering and, of course, mining is a fundamental privilege that
goes somehow with the land, like water rights. The Hudson family
here, I've been told, owns the mining rights to enormous amounts of
country around here. They just bought the mining rights, just like
you would the oil rights. A lot of people did that to protect the
land, because quarrying is part of mining. I could go to a person's
land here that might have an attractive bluff and say, "We're going
to have to protect this. I'll buy the mining rights to your
property." And for a hundred dollars or a nominal amount, I could
buy that and perhaps give it to a trust and nobody could exploit it.
No matter who owns the property, the mining rights could be owned
by others.

Teiser: So individuals own mining rights in the national forests?

Adams: No, they can't in the national forests, only in private lands.

Unless you had mining rights to begin with, then the Forest Service
might take them over. That gets pretty complicated legally.

Teiser: The Forest Service allows mining in the national forests?

Adams: Yes, I believe so, in appropriate situations. And the national

monuments, under the national parks, have to carry mining rights.
A national monument, by law, cannot preclude mining. You can still
mine in Death Valley. I can go in there and stake a mining claim.
But I can't open a resort.

Teiser: But the basic philosophy of the national Forest Service is quite
different from that of the National Park Service?

Adams: It's tremendously different and it should be clarified. Very few
people realize what the difference is. The National Park Service
is for preservation of the natural scene for the enjoyment of the
people, and they use the word "re-creation" as well as "recreation,"
and nothing can be done in a park of any commercial nature except
under contract. Concessioners operate under permits. You can't
even collect pine cones!

Now, the Forest Service is an institution which is designed to
protect and control many natural resources. In the early days when
my grandfather was a lumberman in Puget Sound, forest harvesting
was severe; they completely denuded the country. I remember flying

619

Adams: twenty years ago over Vancouver Island. It looked like there

wasn't a bush for hundreds of miles. It seemed completely logged
out. There was an unlimited amount of timber in early days, so
they just never thought anything of it. Then Gifford Pinchot came
on the scene, and he realized the whole forest resource of America
was going down the drain; that in a matter of a few years there
would be little left. So the Forest Service was established. You
have to remember that this cutting was on primarily public domain
land, and there were no restrictions. I don't even think people
had to get permits. They would buy up vast tracts for nominal
amounts. The railroads did that, such as the Southern Pacific and
Union Pacific, acquired millions of acres, which they sold or
leased to lumbermen. It's all very complicated.

Up in northern California the redwood groves were privately
owned; they never were under public domain for many, many years.
They were bought out very cheaply. And that's why the Forest
Service never had influence there. There is the Mendocino National
Forest and a few other areas, but most of it is privately owned.
So when the state parks were formed and the Save-the-Redwoods
League became active, they bought much land from the private owners.
They usually got along fine. They said, "We wish to establish a
grove or a park, and we have a million-dollar pledge, and we want
to buy this timber. We'll take all you can give us." And they'd
sit down and have lunch or drinks and negotiate. The Save-the-
Redwoods League has done the greatest single job of conservation
with the least acrimony. Some very contemporary activists in the
Sierra Club think the Save-the-Redwoods League was responsible for
a great loss of redwoods. Being totally unrealistic about the whole
thing. Some think you can simply take those areas and put them in
parks. Well, you can't. You have to pay for it, under the
principle of eminent domain.

The tragedy in the Redwood Park is that we had a very fine
location — sixty-something thousand acres — all ready to go, and then
I must say my friend Dr. Wayburn and a few others said that wasn't
enough, they wanted a hundred thousand acres, and they threw a
monkey wrench in the procedures. The lumber people caught on and
started cutting into the best areas, and finally we ended up with
what is now, for me, an inferior park, instead of the superior
stands, which you might have had if the first plan had gone through.
The several years delay was a tragedy. Another tragedy is that the
government can establish a park like Point Reyes National Seashore
and the Redwood Park, but they don't appropriate money. In the
meantime, the land value goes up. So when the government does get
around to buying, they're paying three or four times as much for it
as they would have at first.

620

Adams:

Teiser:

Adams :

Teiser ;
Adams :

Now I think there's some law being invoked that when the government
once designates an area, the value at the time of determination
holds, plus a logical amount of interest which would accrue if
there were a delay in appropriations. Do I make myself clear? And
those things are very important. The Point Reyes Seashore lost some
very valuable areas. They can come and take my house, but they have
to pay me the appraised value. Eminent domain is inflexible. If
they came and said to me, "I offer you X dollars for this property,"
I can say, "No, it's worth more than that." So I take it to court,
and then the judge can either agree with the proposed value or put
a new price on it. But no matter what happens, when that price is
determined by the court, I have to give it up. There's no way I
can hold it.

Now, the only law that is a little "aloof" is the homestead act.
There were many property rights in Yosemite, such as around Lake
Tenaya, and I think the Sierra Club property in Tuolumne Meadows
was homesteaded, so they were automatically excluded from the
acquisition of the park for the lifetime of the owners. They can't
be touched; I think that's part of the homestead law. And I think
a homestead cannot be taken for bad debts. I think a homestead is
an absolutely secure situation, which was based on the fact that a
man and his family go west to start a farm and he homesteads his
land. He's got that asset; nobody can take that away from him — any
more than if I went into bankruptcy, they couldn't take my cameras.
A carpenter can't lose his tools. He can't be deprived of his
means of livelihood. He can lose his house and his sofa and his
liquor collection and everything else that he owns, except his
clothes and his wife and his tools. They are safe, and that's in
a way the principle of the homestead.

During the twenties, one of the campaigns the Sierra Club was
fighting for was for acquisition of private lands in the national
parks. Were there lands in Yosemite that were then brought into
the park?

Oh yes, many lands. All around Tenaya Lake; the club got those for
the park. We got some of the land at Wawona; I don't know how much,
but there's still a great deal of land at Wawona that's not in the
park.

You say "we got." Did the government appropriate money for it?

Well, what the club did in many cases was to buy the land and hold
it for the government when it had the money. It was a risky thing.
It's what the Nature Conservancy does. They'll go to somebody and
say, "We need $5 million to secure this parcel of land. The state
is interested and the government is interested, and if within a
certain number of years they don't buy it, then we will sell it."

621

Adams :

Teiser ;

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams:

In other words, they make the attempt. We tried to get them to
buy the artichoke fields down here, but there's too much money
involved. In other words, the state or the county couldn't
possibly afford to buy it for what it was worth. Now, Tom Hudson
sold twenty-seven acres of their property to the state, adjoining
Point Lobos, for $4,500,000. Well, that was understandable; that
was increasing an important area. And then he donated many acres
on the other side of the road. But he'd put that property up as
collateral — option money to try to save the artichokes. He really
did a wonderful job of trying to save some of our land, and almost
went bankrupt. The bank was very helpful. The bank, by law, had
to foreclose, but they invoked some kind of regulation that
permitted him the time to sell it to the state, which was a good
thing. The state got it at a pretty good figure, and he gets out
off the hook, which is fine!

We did somewhat the same in several areas — I forget where they
were. Then, of course, the McCauley property was available at Soda
Springs, and the club thought that they should buy that to protect
it, because it was in Tuolumne County and was outside the park.
Anybody could come in and start a development. Then by law they
had the rights of access and the rights of water. The city of
San Francisco was concerned over that.

San Francisco, after Hetch Hetchy was established (to go back
to that for a minute), wanted to close the entire Tuolumne watershed
to traffic, as a dangerous possible pollution hazard to the San
Francisco water supply. Well, that would have involved about half
of Yosemite National Park] There was a big fight. Of course, we
won on that. That was a public issue, because it was conclusively
proven that the pollution was minor, and the water had to be
purified anyway.

Well, that's another case of incompatibility,
supplies, like cattle and recreation.

People and water

Now there's no stream in the Sierra that's safe to drink out of!
We used to think nothing of going up to Merced Lake and camping by
the river and drinking the river water and other streams — then the
purest water in the world. You can't do it now; there's just too
many people in the area.

Do all these people have to bring their water in?

You have to boil or chlorinate your water or otherwise treat it.
A lot of people don't do it. Mr. Colby, in the early twenties,
got ptomaine poisoning somewhere near Reds Meadow. The water had
perhaps run through a cattle or sheep camp. So you can get these
bugs anywhere, but now it's very serious.

622

Adams: The club bought the Tuolumne Meadows property on the basis of
certificates. A number of people put up $100 each and got a
certificate of part ownership. And that gave us the required
money. I forget what it was. I shouldn't be quoting, because I
don't know. I think it was 250 certificates — $25,000 in all.
Some people thought it was very extravagant, but we got this whole
section of land. The whole idea was to hold it until we were sure
that the government could properly operate it. Now, we had a very
sharp superintendent once, who wanted to put the Tuolumne Meadows
Lodge right on our border thinking that it would bug us into
getting rid of it. We saw what the motive was, and we took it to
Washington and stopped it because it was such an obvious trick.
The lodge didn't belong there; it was just a bureaucratic ploy,
you see.

Believe me, there's been plenty of monkey business in the
Park Service and the Forest Service. What's going to happen is
always a political gamble.

The Sierra Club and the Government

Teiser: In going over the Sierra Club Bulletins of the twenties, it looked
as if a lot of government officials were great friends of the
Sierra Club. They'd come to camps —

Adams: Yes, that was a very important thing. That leads to the immediate
present, or the last seven or eight years. In the early days we
did have a very fine relationship, especially with people like
[Stephen T.] Mather, and the early directors and secretaries of
the Interior, and the Forest Service people. They knew what we
stood for. And we'd voice our opinions very strongly, and we'd
offer help, and we'd make studies for them, and all kinds of
efforts to come to conclusions. Sometimes we lost, but everybody
was on a first-name basis. There weren't any nasty things going on.
Oh, once in a while there 'd be a doublecross, but it was very rare.
Leonard was very fine at negotiations. Bestor Robinson was a very
important man for many years, and he was our liaison man with the
Forest Service.

Teiser: How did he happen to achieve this?

Adams: Well, he was a lawyer who I think had clients with lumber interests
and advised the Forest Service. He was terribly interested in
conservation, and he understood the Forest Service point of view,
and he knew when to stop. He would say, "The Forest Service has
its lawful obligations, and I'm trying to get them to see the light

623

Adams: in this case, and please don't butt in at the moment. I think I've
got it under control." And we'd agree. He could talk to these
people, and as a rule he accomplished an enormous amount.

[End Tape 25, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 25, Side 2]

Teiser: You were saying that Bestor Robinson was a man of importance.

Adams: Well, he was accused by many of the more activist members of selling
out to the Forest Service, and a lot of things which were not true.
He was very definitely attempting to try to bring us together, and
he did, and he had, I know, a high order of mutual respect. The
realities of the situation are that the people who own property and
are in business are naturally going to protect their interest,
which relates more to those people I've mentioned, more to the
business types, and in very many cases in opposition to the Interior
Department and the National Park Service.

Now, [Harold] Ickes tried to combine the Forest Service and the
Interior into a new department called the Department of Conservation.
I was all for that, and a lot of people were, and then we finally
realized that it's good to have two enemies in adjoining houses
rather than in the same apartment. [Laughter] I mean, you really
couldn't reconcile the two, because the word "conservation" covers
a multitude of sins. It's a very bad word in many cases because
it's so broad. Bestor, time and again, would have meetings with
them, authorized by us. He would arrange meetings. I remember
many times when Colby or someone would call up — this was in the
thirties or forties — "We are having lunch with the chief forester.
Can you come down?" Well, I come down; we sit and talk. And he
might be pounding on the table, but always with a twinkle, everybody
with first-name status, and we'd all leave friends. Well, that went
along fine until Brower got in as executive director.

He worked wonderfully for Dick Leonard for a year or so. Dick
thought he was the greatest thing that ever happened to the club.
We all did. I was instrumental in getting him in. He gave up a
big job with tenure at the University of California Press. He
really is a highly gifted man, there's no question of it. But
then he began to get the aggressive bug, and gradually went down
the accusation road, and would bring in personalities, making very
bold statements that weren't always factual. And these people
finally pulled away; they wouldn't talk with us.

Teiser: Was Bestor Robinson one of them?

624

Adams: Well, Bestor Robinson left. He was very much in opposition to

Brower when he started that tactic. But these people in the Forest
Service and the Park Service and the state, they wouldn't talk to
the club people any more because Brower represented the club in the
most aggressive, what we call shin-kicking way. You don't sit down
to talk business with somebody and then kick them in the shins, call
them S.O.B.s and then say, "What do you want? You can't have it."
That attitude is terrible!

That's why the Mineral King got by us. We never knew anything
about it until it was formally announced. Now, in the earlier days
the Forest Service would have discussed that with us. We had
discussed for many years the development of ski areas, and Mineral
King was discussed as a ski area. The difficulty was the road —
that's one of the main problems. You can't desecrate the country
with new roads, and of course it is usually too expensive.

There was dead silence for six or seven years. Then they come
out with the Disney plan — a bombshell. It never would have happened
before. And this occurs over and over again. And even Dick, to
some extent, has been a little hypnotized with what he calls "Brower
achievements" like "saving" the Grand Canyon.

Well, Brower did a great deal. It's by no means a settled
situation, I assure you. One of his basic principles was to seldom
give credit to anybody else working on a project, and that rankled
with other associations. You suddenly find out that here's two or
three more important organizations who are working along the same
lines, but he never would admit it.

The Park Service and the Forest Service

Teiser: I've been reading a little about Stephen Mather, and it struck me
that there were some parallels, and some contrast too, between
him and Brower.

Adams: The only way you could say they were alike is that they were

extremely forceful and direct action people. Mather was a very,
very fine man and was very wealthy. He dedicated himself to the
Park Service. He did found it, in fact. He was the first director.
And he's the one — you see, [it was] proposed that the Park Service
should invite business firms to operate the public service. Mather
was very much for that because he was a free enterprise man. I
frankly think government operation would have been best. It would
have solved a lot of problems, but it also would have invited a lot
more. He felt that they should encourage capital to come into the

625

Adams: the parks and provide the services and operate under strict
supervision. And being a very honorable man, he assumed the
people he would get to do that would be equally honorable. I think
most of them were; some of them were not. But there was no doubt
as to who directed the parks.

There's a very wonderful story about the Glacier Park people,
when they built the hotels and the lodges. Mather was indef atigably,
constantly touring, checking everything himself, you see. So they
opened the chalets at Glacier National Park, and he approved, said,
"It's fine, but that shed's coming down, isn't it?" They said,
"Oh yes, it's temporary." He said, "Well, get it out before next
season." He came around next season, in the spring, and the shed
was still there. He said, "I thought you were going to take that
out." He said, "Well, Mr. Mather, we just haven't been able to get
around to it." He said, "Well, I insist that it be out without
delay. It's an eyesore. Get it out." He came around in the fall
and the shed was still there. He called the trail crew. He said,
"Bring some dynamite, put it under that shed, and blow it up."

"Mr. Mather, is that really legal?"

"We'll decide that later. Get that shed out. Two hours from
now, that shed isn't going to exist." And it didn't. They blew
that thing to "Whew!" [Laughter]

From there on, they realized he meant business. They could
have sued him. Now, there would have been all kinds of legal
problems, "due process," etc. But he gave them the warnings. It
was of no consequence. It was just an ugly shed, maybe as big as
this room. But ever since then, they had a tremendous respect for
him. When Mather said something, they said, "Yes sir!" [Laughter]
Went about and did it. He had very high standards and, I think, did
a very wonderful job.

Teiser: Do you remember him at Sierra Club events?

Adams: Oh yes. He went on outings of the Sierra Club in 1927. I saw him
several times. I had letters from him. He was very cordial and
very firm. Francis Farquhar was his assistant and chief accountant
for the Service. And Farquhar, of course, could be dynamite too —
too much so, sometimes.

There's a wonderful story about Farquhar and old Dr. [Kaspar]
Pischel. Dr. Pischel was a famous eye, ear, nose, and throat man
in San Francisco. A very sturdy, wonderful, erudite man — had a
white beard. Used to go around in — what do they call that? —
lederhosen, those leather pants. Great hiker, brown as a berry,
and that white beard! So here he was in his little abbreviated

626

Adams: leather pants, way up near Cold Canyon, in the northern part of
Yosemite Park, and along comes the district ranger, who arrests
him for not wearing the routine attire. There must be a sleeve
less shirt (it's in the park regulations, believe it or not — the
equivalent of a sleeveless shirt) on the traill And of course
Pischel was spluttering like a bunch of fireworks. The ranger said,
"Sorry," and gave him a citation. He said, "I can't take you in,
but you'll have to report to the headquarters when you get back."

Along comes Francis Farquhar down the trail. Pischel is
spluttering and Farquhar says, "What is this?" (It was Ranger
Banner, I think.) He says, "Mr. Farquhar, I'm sorry, but this man
is violating park regulations. He's not properly dressed." Mr.
Farquhar says, "I think it's a very strange thing in the wilderness
that a man can't go out without wearing a shirt; in fact, I'll take
mine off right now if it will make you feel any better." Banner
said, "I'll have to give you a citation." Farquhar said, "By the
way, do you have your credentials with you?" Banner didn't have
his star! He didn't have anything! He didn't have a scrap of paper
to show he was a park ranger! [Laughter] Farquhar said, "You're
absolutely without authority. You can't make any arrest of any
kind without your credentials^ you have nothing to say." So- Banner
went back to Tuolumne Meadows and that was the end of that, although
Farquhar, I think, brought it to the attention of the director of
the National Park Service as a ridiculous interpretation. They
applied the regulation in the midst of Yosemite Valley in crowds,
they wanted people to have — although now people go around in bikinis,
practically. But at that time it was a regulation, and this man was
interpreting it rigidly. It was so funny!

And it's the truth, you know. If an FBI man comes to talk to
you, and if he can't show you his card, he has no authority. I have
a press card (I'm on the ASMP [American Society of Magazine
Photographers]), and I can go to a news event, if there's something
happening, and I can show my press card. But I can't say, "I'm
a member of the ASMP and I have a card." Which is right. You can't
drive a car without a license, and so on.

The first ranger group was a very fine, specially selected
group of people. Some of them came from the army, I guess. Chief
[Forrest] Townsley in Yosemite was a real character and did a
wonderful job. And the rangers in those days were really rangers
in the sense that they were trail riders, woodsmen, and lawmen in
the best sense. They were after poachers and many hunters and
stock men who'd try to get in on the fringes of the park. And
they'd get caught. The rangers would fight fires and take care of
people in emergencies.

627

Adams: The ranger now is pretty much a briefcase man who must have a

degree. He's sort of a sublimated police officer plus naturalist.
And they've had some trouble getting rangers to staff the outposts
because they don't know enough. It's very seldom that you find a
man who can really be a ranger in this sense of the word, who goes
to Merced Lake or Tuolumne Meadows — a district, as they call it —
and [can] run that district, and know all about fire and all kinds
of problems that are both wilderness and human problems.

Teiser: Did Mather set the standards for them?

Adams: Yes, Mather set up a marvelous organization. You see, that was

under [Woodrow] Wilson. And this is typical of what I think is a
good administration. Wilson was very much of a Democrat, Mather
was a pure Republican, but he'd always had an interest in
conservation and proposed the Park Service, and Wilson listened
to it and thought it was a wonderful idea and said, "All Right.
You direct it. It will be set up in the Department of the Interior."
It was a crossover of political lines. And in a sense the Park
Service has kept pretty intact. Basically they're very good.
They've fired a lot of secondary people to fit party lines, but the
directors, as a whole, and the superintendents and the top staff
group — they've been relatively untouched. Probably the cleanest
bureau there is.

Teiser: Who was in charge of the national Forest Service during that
period?

Adams: I forget whether that was Pinchot or whether he'd died. But he set
up the basic organization, a very capable one. It's part of the
Department of Agriculture. They still have the chief forester, and
the regional foresters, and the actual forest chiefs of the many
national forests.

Teiser: Has it developed as strong a tradition, however, as the Park Service?

Adams: It's much more powerful politically. It relates to far more people.
Far more people visit the National Forest areas, I'm told. And they
do an excellent job with their campsites. I think they're a very
admirable crowd of people. Their ideals aren't the same. But thank
heaven we've got them, because they have listened and have followed
on pretty well with the wilderness bill provisions, with certain
obvious exceptions because, after all, their job is to protect and
develop commercial forests.

Teiser: When Horace Albright succeeded Mather, did he continue —

Adams: Oh yes, Horace is one of the great people. In fact, I suppose — well,
Mather remains the top man. He's the instigator. As his memorial
plaque says, "We'll never know the good that he has done." Albright

628

Adams: really carried it on in the most noble way. Albright was practically
mentor for the Rockefeller sons. Old John D. entrusted the boys to
Albright in many cases — outdoor life and counseling. In some
questions of taste, I would say Albright was probably deficient.
Everything he did, he did with the highest motives, but he did some
questionable things, like putting roads across the middle of meadows
so that people could get the greatest views. Nobody knew then what
the impact on the meadow was going to be, so many of those roads are
coming out. You can't blame people for doing those things that they
felt were the best thing to do. His motives were always of a very
high order,,

Teiser: He did not remain in that position long, though, did he?

Adams: Well, he was superintendent of Yellowstone. Then he came to Yosemite,
then became director. Now, I'm hazy as to whether he was director
before or after his superintendences.*

Teiser: After. After Yellowstone, anyway.

Adams: Yes, but I don't know whether he came to Yosemite as an emergency

fill-in or not. Then of course he resigned and became president of
the U.S. Potash Company, which I think Mather was affiliated with
in some way. Mather represented the Borax people — Twenty Mule Team
Borax, for example.

Teiser: How did Albright happen to resign after — ?

Adams: Well, I think he just had to look for himself, his future. He did
his job and then got to be president of this huge company with
offices in Rockefeller Center and worked for the Rockefellers too
on other things. And I think he did pretty well for himself — I
hope.

Teiser: Did he prepare a successor for himself, as apparently Mather had
prepared him?

Adams: Oh yes, the Park Service prepares. The Park Service has rarely

brought people in from the outside. They move up from the ranks.
And there was Arno Cameron. Quite a number of very fine men were
directors. Some men had more imagination than others, but as a
whole they were good. We have a live wire now in [George B., Jr.]

*Horace Albright was superintendent at Yellowstone from 1919 to 1929
and temporary superintendent at Yosemite in 1927 and 1928. He was
director of the National Park Service from 1929 to 1933.

629

Adams: Hartzog, who is getting great opposition because he's being firm

about things. I always got along very well with him. I always got
along well with secretaries of the interior. I think, as a whole,
it's been pretty good. Secretary Albert Fall was a big catastrophe.
But [Harold] Ickes certainly was wonderful.

Teiser: But didn't Fall actually do some good things for the —

Adams: Yes, he did. He was all right in conservation. But he got caught
in that oil scandal.

[Oscar L.] Chapman was a very good man; he was a power man.
His concern was primarily power, like the Columbia River develop
ments. But he had good sense in appointing the park people. You
see, you have the secretaries, then you have the undersecretary who
is in charge of certain divisions. An undersecretary will be in
charge of the national parks and the Biological Survey, and another
undersecretary will have the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It goes
down to the regional directors, then to the superintendents.

Teiser: You had a good deal to do, at one time or another, with Ickes, if I
remember.

Adams: Oh yes, I was appointed photo-muralist for the Interior Department.
And from the point of view of rank, that was very high; actually,
I outranked all superintendents and even regional directors!

Teiser: Is that right I

Adams: Not in the money sense. It was only a matter of being on the books.

But I could go to any park and commandeer a truck. I say "commandeer;"
I could say, "I want a truck. I need help." I was working for the
secretary.

My funniest story is when I once 'got to Boulder Dam. The
secretary asked for a real good picture of Boulder Dam. I went to
the director of the whole business down there, and I said, "The
secretary wants a knockout picture. What I'd like is, with your
help, to pick the ideal location, and I'll arrange the photographic
setup — get the right lens and everything. We'll really make this
an outstanding picture." I said, "I'd just like that wonderful
aspect of the dam where you open the spill gates and see the great
arches of water."

This man put his hands to his head. He said, "You know what
that means?" I said, "No." He said, "It means at least a month's
preparation. I have to send a notice to every water user below here
to the Mexican border that there'll be so many million acre feet of

630

Adams: water released. The dams below here will have to reduce their
capacity to take over flow. That has to be planned." He said,
"It'll cost somewhere near the order of $50,000 to $75,000. Does
the secretary know that?" I said, "No, but he will. I can't be
part of that." [Laughter] And Ickes understood. I wrote a letter
and I said I wanted to get this picture with all these plumes of
water, but when I heard what it represented in water and reclamation,
I said I think we'd better forego that. "I've got to hope for the
secretary's agreement. It would be an unwanted extravagance."
[Laughter]

Teiser: Was Ickes a good conservation man?

Adams: Oh yes, one of the greatest. He was a — what do they call it? — a
curmudgeon? Because he could really be tough. One of my most
extraordinary experiences in Washington was going to a dinner given
by some organization — I forget what 'it was — at which Ickes and Henry
Wallace were to debate. They both gave a short address, and then
there was a debate. And you wouldn't have believed it; I never
heard such vituperative comments from both sides. It was
outstanding! I mean, everybody was sitting there goggle-eyed. When
they got through, they got up, shook hands warmly and left.
[Laughter] But it really was vituperative. "Not only do you not
know what you're talking about, but you have no intention of telling
the truth on this matter."

"My dear Mr. Ickes, I have always considered that it was
possible to talk to high government officials in our departments,
but any semblance of courtesy which I expected is completely
lacking."

"My dear sir, I consider you really beneath the floor."

And they went on that way for an hour, you know. [Laughter]
And of course Wallace was a conservationist too, but had an awful
time with his Forest Service undersecretary. It's a very long,
complicated story which I just don't remember and I have no
authority to talk about because I know only a little of these
things.

Teiser: There's a story about Ickes having met with the board of the Sierra
Club about the Kings River in 1938 and getting mad.

Adams: Well, as I remember that (I had nothing to do with that) they had

this meeting and he came, and .a couple of members of the board took
the occasion to openly criticize him, and he claimed that he'd come
to talk about the Kings Canyon and that this wasn't a public hearing,
and that he resented the inquisitorial attitude on the part of these
people. And I think he was quite right. I mean, he was all full of

631

Adams :

Teiser:

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :

fire. He went east and he talked to senators and congressmen and
tried to promote the idea. But this wasn't the time to criticize
him for other things — nothing related to the parks. But we had our
fanatics then too. And Farquhar was very much against Ickes just
because he was — I don't know — perhaps a Democrat!

And I one time got up and said to the Sierra Club board, "In
view of the fact of what Ickes has done, and supported conservation
for so long, we should send him a letter of appreciation." Farquhar
opposed it very strenuously, saying that no public servant needs a
letter of appreciation for doing his duty. And I was not alert
enough to pound on the table back and say, "I insist on a vote."
many people came up afterwards and said, "I'm so ashamed I didn't
speak up. But what in the world was the matter with Farquhar?"
Farquhar just had those strange acts of intolerance every once in a
while. There's probably a psychological reason for them.

I think this is going fine. We're getting a lot of ideas.

Yes. You had, I
situation.

guess, a fairly active part in the Kings Canyon

Yes, I did in a sense. I don't know how potent it was, but I
called on at least thirty senators, and more than that number in
Congress, and had a set of pictures, and got a very good response —
except one. One man said, "Too many parks." I said, "I guess we
can't talk to you." He said, "No, but I'm glad to see you. I'd
like to take you to lunch if I didn't have a meeting. But we can't
talk about this matter. There's too many parks." I forget who it
was.

Was there anybody in the Sierra Club opposed to the Kings Canyon?

Oh, nobody on the board. There probably was among the members.
There are always members, for instance, who were for Mineral King.
We were officially opposed to Mineral King, and yet we have
thousands of members who want to ski in Southern California. They
disagree violently.

There was a protest against a road through the Sequoia National Park
area?

That's the basic sound protest, that the road will do a great deal
of damage. Originally it would cost $26 million, but now it would
cost nearly $50 million, and it has now been turned down by the
state senate. So the road won't be built. On the other hand,
Disney said they'll put a cog railway in, which is all right with
me. That'll just go up the foothills in a beeline and won't do any
real damage. I can't say that I'm against the ski thing. I don't

632

Adams: think many people are against the actual ski development, and even
Disney had the idea that they'd park way down the canyon and come
in on buses. Now, the danger of the ski situation is that it does
cut trees and it takes people to the top of the ridge, and that
means probably some development on the other side of the ridge and
on the wilderness area.

My main objection is the "coyness" of the projected village,
which is a sort of pseudo-Zermatt. But I think that if they can't
have the road, and people come in on a cog railway, crowds will be
cut down to a reasonable number. And knowing the paucity of ski
areas in the south, I just have to believe that it would be fair to
give people a good place to ski if it can be accomplished without
doing any damage. This road must go across ten miles of Sequoia
Park. Mineral King was not put in Sequoia Park because of the
existing mineral rights. Mineral rights cost money, and I don't
think anybody's ever done mining there to any extent. I forget the
dates, but Mount Ritter and Banner Peak and Thousand Island Lake
and Garnet Lake and Shadow Lake Canyon and the Minarets — easily some
of the most beautiful parts of the Sierra — originally were in
Yosemite Park. The mining people had a lobby and thought there
was a lot of juicy minerals there, but Mr. Colby had proven by
careful study and exploration that the veins were shattered and that
it was uneconomical.

They wouldn't listen to him. They influenced Congress to make
a trade (this shows you that a park is a vulnerable thing) of so
many acres — thousands of acres — for sugar pine forests in the
northern part of Yosemite. So that beautiful part of the Sierra is
now out of the park. They went in there and they spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars in mines. It's just as Colby said, the veins
are shattered — they've faulted. So you get a lot of nice juicy ore
for fifteen feet and suddenly you come up against a blank wall,
literally. And where is the vein? So the mines just petered out.
And the Forest Service won't put it back in the park, and some
people think it's better where it is. It has practically no timber
value at all. And Devil's Postpile National Monument is adjacent to
it. So it's a strange situation. It is park status, but I don't
see it's been hurt at all by not being in the park. There's some
relics of some mines there which have now become historic.

Trans-Sierra Highways, Continued

Teiser: There were suggestions of a road into the Kings Canyon —

Adams: That was very bad. This brings up a whole point that is terribly

important. Many years ago, say in the middle thirties, we recognized
there was a pressure for a road across the Sierra. And the chambers

633

Adams: of commerce have been working for what they call the Porterville-
Lone Pine road, and that would go through Golden Trout Creek and
really penetrate some wonderful wilderness area. And the Sierra
Club vigorously opposed this. There was another road up the Kings
Canyon (we have a road into Kings Canyon proper), but this was to
go up Paradise Valley and over Independence Pass. We opposed that.
The opposition was balanced by the fact that we approved of a big
road over what is called Minaret summit — from Huntington Lake and
that country over the Sierra — and if that road were put through,
we would support it with the provision that the Lone Pine-
Porterville and other trans-Sierra roads would not be built. The
Highway Division agreed to that. They couldn't be legally bound,
but they said this makes sense; it gives a basis for negotiation,
"and we can assure you that the present administration will not
press for these other roads."

Well, that has been the policy of the club for years. The war
came and no roads were built. Then the pressure started again.
Then the new group of people (I call them the "activists") opposed
that road and said, "There should be no trans-Sierra road." Well,
with a million people coming to the southern San Joaquin Valley it
would be awfully hard, realistically, to say you can't have a road
across the Sierra. I asked Wayburn one time, "I wonder what in the
world has got into us? I mean, here's a chance to build a road
which would go through the least interesting part of the mountain."
[Wayburn answered,] "It bisects the John Muir Trail." I said, "What
do you mean? You put a tunnel under the road or an overpass. It's
uninteresting country." He said, "Oh, it'll open up the north and
the south." And I said, "No, it can be built as a parkway without
access," which is the truth. But they're adamant, you see. On some —
what do you call it? — tautologic point?

The result is now that they're starting up activity again for
a road across the southern Sierra. The governor goes down and he
says, "We'll never build a road over Minaret summit." Well, he's
an absolute idiot because there's going to be a trans-Sierra road,
and that's the only logical place, where it would do the least
damage.

I know Mr. Colby was very strong on that. I have a great
admiration for Colby's strong feeling about it. But, realistically,
we have to have a road, and that's the place to put it. If we'd
have had that road, we wouldn't have the present development of the
Tioga Road. The re 'd be no need for it at all. I just keep trying
to be realistic, and I'm accused all the time of being a traitor and
destroying conservation ideals. But, believe me, a road across
Minaret summit would do no damage of any consequence compared to
one further south, or even what the Tioga has done. Just look at
the east side of the Leevining Canyon. It is just a great excavation!

634

Teiser: I've seen your photographs recently of that.

Adams: And then they build the new road by Tenaya Lake; they cut right
through a granite slope. Those are terrible things.

Teiser: The Sierra Club has apparently been working on that one for years
and years to try to —

Adams: We tried to control it, and at the last minute they weasled. I was
very anxious that the road never go to Tenaya Lake — it should bypass
the lake, go up the canyon, come over Polly Dome and follow up
Cathedral Creek and then to Tuolumne Meadows. And they weasled out
on it. I got so mad; I came home and I sent a telegram resigning
from the board of the Sierra Club. Then I sent four hot telegrams
to Washington, duplicates to the director, to the secretary, to the
Bureau of Public Roads, and the director of the Corps of Engineers.
Before I sent them I called up Dick Leonard, fortunately, at eleven
o'clock at night and said, "I want to send this telegram." I read
it to him. I had accused them of acts of criminal negligence in
this destruction. Dick said, "Put in 'approaching'. Don't get
yourself out on a limb." So I changed it. Boy, within two days
there were fifteen people from Washington in Yosemite. The
superintendent was talking about seeing his lawyer; he's accused of
"criminal negligence." And that word "approaching" is what saved it
because it really approached ruining this country. And I had plenty
of people that would stand back of it.

Well, it didn't do any good. Things had gone too far. But the
club refused my resignation cold and sent it back by messenger. But
anyway, I kept myself ethical, you see, in the sense that I was
opposing the club, and being a director I couldn't do that. I had
to say, "All right, I'm through; this is my opinion."

Teiser: Had the club gone along with the route, you mean, or was it opposing
it too?

Adams: No, it opposed it, but it shilly-shallied and it got weak-kneed and
it got "tired." You know, many of these very important issues came
up toward the end of the day and everybody's tired and they don't
use proper judgment. That's the time when you really should step in
and say, "We'll have the meeting tomorrow and continue it on Sunday."
But when they wouldn't do that, and somebody came up with a half
hearted idea, "We're invading wilderness if we take an alternative
route" — Here's the most beautiful part of the whole Yosemite Park,
this granite sculpture, which is unique in Yosemite, and they could
have bypassed it, but they didn't. They went right through what they
call the roches moutonnees, rounded ridges of granite. And in order
to keep the grade, they dynamited a lot, and one ranger said, "Well,
we moved all these glacial boulders around. Nobody knows that!"
[Laughter]

635

Adams: This is a high-speed road, which it wasn't supposed to be. But if
you're going sixty miles an hour you have to see far enough ahead.
So you have to grade the road accordingly. You could easily get
into a catastrophic accident. If it were a 35-mile-an-hour road,
it would not be necessary. Incidentally, it's supposed to be a 35-
mile-an-hour road]

Teiser: The Pfeiffer redwood grove — Pfeiffer-Big Sur State Park —

Adams: Well, that was Colby's big thing, the Big Sur. They finally made
a deal, a pretty sharp deal. But with the state park bond issue
the money was available if it was matched, like with Point Lobos.

In the Big Sur park, which Colby almost single-handedly
accomplished, the Pfeiffers owned a lot of land, and they put a
very high price on it. This was not entirely an eminent-domain
situation. This was simply that the state would pay half the
matching money. We have a little deal now with the Friends of
Photography where we have $2500 promised if we can get $2500 more.
It's a pretty sound way to go about it. It certainly cuts out
boondoggling, and it puts things on a realistic basis. So that's
all I know about the Pfeiffer redwoods. Mr. Pfeiffer just figured
out how many board feet he had and what it was worth. You have so
many acres for farming or development, or so many board feet in your
trees, and you expect to be paid for it. If it's eminent domain,
the judge will make a fair appraisal — but if it's just a private
sale, one could say, "Sure, you can have this house for a million
dollars." It's not worth a million dollars, but if somebody says,
"All right, I'm from Texas and I want it," it's my privilege to set
my price. I think that's what happened with a lot of the state park
areas. It was a matter of discussion, figuring out what somebody
would take for a piece of land. That's all there was to it.

Teiser: We're coming close to the end of this tape. Do you want to —
Adams: No, go ahead.

636

The National Geographic and the Sierra Club Bulletin

Teiser: I'll ask you a short question. Another person who came to a
Sierra Club even was Gilbert H. Grosvenor, the head of the
National Geographic Society. He turned out for the dedication of
the plaque to Mather. Was he a friend of the Sierra Club?

Adams: Well, he wasn't any friend of mine. He was a pompous ass. So is
the National Geographic [Laughter] I hope if this is going to be
published, we won't be sued for libel. [Laughter] He was a peculiar
figure. In a sense he exploited nature and conservation. The whole
National Geographic setup is to me a very questionable and very
uncertain situation, and he is the head of this very successful
business, which it really is. How it ever got by the IRS I don't
know, because it's probably one of the most successful financial
enterprises of its kind. And I'd be darned if I know exactly what
they do. They built a $17 million building; I have seen it. They
have many expeditions. They pay for obvious things and advertise
all over the place — in rather bad taste. I have a total disregard
for that whole outfit, and I'd like to go on record as saying that.

When he came out to dedicate a plaque, I suppose he was
invited as a significant person in the conservation world, of which
we had many that I don't think really justify that designation.
Does that answer the question? [Laughing]

Teiser: Very nicely. Absolutely.

Harroun: I think the National Geographic is the worst excuse for —

Adams: Well, the thing that bothered me was the ostentation, if you want
to use the term. When I was East several years ago, I was taken
to see the new building, and my gosh, the executive officers in
the top floor, the president's office, was like what I'd read about
Mussolini's office. I mean, the most elaborate — and secretaries,
the most svelte. The whole thing looked like an IBM executive
office. They claim it's nonprofit, but boy, they must have had
very good salaries. Which is all right. I mean, the Sierra Club
deserves to pay better salaries to the director and staff than we
can. We're up to the $40,000-$45,000 bracket now, for the
executive director. Their magazine must have fantastic production
costs; but the advertisements must pay well. I'm glad to say that
the Sierra Club Bulletin has finally awakened and is taking in
advertising of the proper kind which helps pay for many of the
costs.

Teiser: It did in the 1920s. It had some ads.

637

Adams: Yes, it had very nice little advertisements, and that's all due to
Francis Farquhar and Dr. Bade.* They. were really the ones that did
an enormous amount of good in editing and producing that bulletin.
And it was a very fine one, the best of any organization, and I
wish, in a sense, they could go back to it. The one now is kind of
flashy, promotional, and full of color, but that early Sierra Club
Bulletin contained very fine literary material.

[End Tape 25, Side 2]

Sierra Club Outings

[Interview XXII (Sierra Club Interview III)
[Begin Tape 26, Side 1]

12 August 1972]

Teiser: Have you had any thoughts about what things you think should be
discussed, or have you been too busy to think about it?

Adams: Oh, I think you were doing beautifully, giving me your questions
and letting me expand on them. Do you have more questions?

Teiser: [Laughs] Yes, I do.

Adams: I think that's the best way. I think that trying to go back and

reconstitute things in any sequence would be very difficult. Your
questioning brings things out clearly.

Teiser: Last night at dinner somebody brought up Mount Ansel Adams. I
think that should be on the record.

Adams: Oh well, that came about when I was one of the leaders of the Sierra
Club outings. I got the group into the Lyell Fork of the Merced
country, which is very remote and quite beautiful. We had an
amusing experience. A sign fell down at the junction of the McClure
Lake and Isberg Pass trail, and some do-gooder put it up, but on the
other side of the trail so the arrow was pointing down instead of
to the left. So while most of the people got up to the Florence
Plateau, which is a big flat land above Lake Washburn, pack animals
and everybody riding went on down to Merced Lake. They found out
what the error was. Everybody arrived after eight o'clock at night,
very tired and no food. It was quite an experience.

Well, then we went on from this plateau, which gives a
marvelous view of the Merced group, as well as two thousand feet
down on Lake Washburn. And then the next day we had quite a rough
time getting over the old Isberg Trail to the Lyell Fork canyon,
and then going a mile across country upstream to the big meadows,

*William F. Bade.

638

Adams: where we camped and then made ascents of Mount Lyell from the south
and Rodgers Peak. Everybody just loved it. They climbed a little
crag that leads out from Electra Peak and put a receptacle on it
and called it Mount Adams. [Laughter] It can't be called that as
long as I'm around — you can't name peaks after living people. The
receptacle may still be there. I had nothing to do with it
personally.'

Teiser: How high is it?

Adams: Oh, it isn't very high. It's more a spectacular crag. It's really
part of a ridge. It's only important when you look up at it. It's
quite a shape — looks like a battleship. When you get up high on
Foerster Peak you look down upon it. It'd be like the Washington
Column in Yosemite seen from North Dome.

Teiser: In general, when you participated in leading those outings, what
were your duties?

Adams: I was in charge of the mountaineering schedules and leaders. If
they wanted to go on a trip, they would discuss it with me. We'd
outline trips and appoint leaders. I had to pick out the main
camps. I'd get there early and pick out men's, women's, and
married camps, and the commissary, campfire, and latrine, and
stock control areas. Meantime, I'd try to photograph. I had
charge of the campfires and the lost and found. So sometimes it
was a pretty hectic business. Francis Tappaan, who was Judge
Tappaan's son, actually managed the outing. And of course that's
quite a responsibility, with two hundred people, all the food
problems and running the packers and the basic schedules. So we
worked pretty well together.

Teiser: Were you involved in them for many years?

Adams: Oh, I don't know. Let's see: 1927 — I went to Canada in '28.
Missed 1929. Then 1930 through '36, I guess.

Teiser: Were you paid?

Adams: I was given the trip and got a small fee and made photographs, and

then a lot of people bought photographs, which I made for about cost.
So it was hardly profitable! But it was a way of getting a good
trip. I got — I forget — $200, I think, for expenses.

Teiser: Are the groups they take on outings now smaller than they were then?

Adams: Yes, I think there's one big outing, but I don't think we ever have
any as large as before. And I think that the normal outings now
have a paid staff, and the small outings are all volunteer — or some
body who leads may get something. Because there's a lot of detail.
It's like running a photography workshop!

639

Teiser: How did you keep track of people? How did you know when somebody
wasn't lost?

Adams: We'd look at the bags at night in the bag dumping area, and if

there were a couple of bags there that hadn't been picked up, we'd
make an inquiry, "Is So-and-so here?" Sometimes they were; we said,
"You hadn't picked up your bags; we didn't know." Sometimes people
got sick on the way and we had to send somebody back for them. The
difficulty was during the stay-overs, when we were in camp. The
people would go out climbing and they'd get lost, and there 'd be no
way to know, except if somebody said, "I haven't seen Joe lately.
Have you?" I would say, "No."

"Well, he went up Milestone today with a friend." Ay, yai,
yai, it's dark and no Joe ! Well, if he told somebody where he went,
we'd know what to do and set out. If it were a moonlight night and
we had a trail, we'd send out a party immediately. If not, we'd
just wait until morning. They were instructed to sit tight. You
could kill yourself going out on those rocks at night. It's one
of the basic rules of mountaineering: you don't climb at night.
You don't do anything when you can't see. Of course, a good trail
and a moonlight night, that's something different.

And we had some accidents and deaths — there were some falls
and drownings and some serious illness. We didn't have any
helicopters or radio or anything. It was a matter of strapping
them on a mule and getting them out.

Teiser: Did you usually have a doctor with you?

Adams: There was always an intern or an advanced medical student who'd

take care of the minor things. Then we always had doctors on the
party. In case of a real emergency, these doctors would help.

There was one case, one man who refused to do anything. He
said, "It's my vacation." And I said to the doctor, "I think this
man's got something very wrong in his tummy and I think you'd
better check." Well, it finally got so serious that the doctor
decided this guest had to go out, and the guest didn't want to go
out to civilization. But with real effort we got him out on a
mule. He barely made it.

Then we had another case of a man who had, oh, he had a
terrible cold, and he was very sick, and the camp doctor said, "I'm
worried about him. I don't like his lung sounds." I think it was
Dr. [Walter] Alvarez, and somebody else who agreed. They looked
at him and said, "We've got to get him out right away — it looks
like double pneumonia. And at this altitude, eleven thousand feet,
it can be fatal. He'll be dead in a matter of a few hours. We're

640

Adams:

Teiser;

Adams:

Teiser:

Adams:

lucky if we can get him to a low enough altitude soon." Well, he
did not want to go down. It would ruin his vacation. He'd been
looking forward to it for years, and he refused to go. We had a
tough legal problem, because how can you force anybody to do
something against his will? It becomes abduction or kidnapping.
So the doctor said, "We'll stand back of you. If he doesn't go
out, he's going to be dead." So they went over and they "talked
turkey" to him. They picked him up and put him on a mule, and he
was very, very mad and threatened suit. We got him to Fresno, and
he just pulled through. Later he wrote the most apologetic,
thankful letter. He didn't realize what he had. When your lungs
start to fill up at high altitude, and low oxygen, it's bad. I
suppose if you had a hospital there, with intensive care and all
that stuff, it would be okay. But out in a sleeping bag on a frosty
night at eleven thousand feet with pneumonia!

Well, we had all kinds of things happen, funny things too.

I have a feeling that, on the social side, there were more
marriages made on the Sierra Club outings than in heaven. Is that
right?

I think there were quite a few, out of the marriageable group.
There was always a young group, and then there was a middle-aged,
rather conservative group, and then there was a fairly old group
of superior people. They may have been too old to be going on
those trips, but they'd been doing them for years, and when they
got really too old to hike, they'd ride. We had our two hundred
people — we had over a hundred animals — mules and saddle animals
and guide and pack animals. They really did a lot of damage to the
country. Chewed up the meadows almost as bad as John Muir's sheep.
Later when we took animals in, we had to pack in grain. Now we
pack in gas heat. (We can't burn wood any more.)

Then there were great controversies — factions who said outings
didn't hurt the country, and other people who said the outings did —
back and forth, back and forth.

Well, again, are you going to be easy on the country and keep
everybody out of it?

Oh, I don't think it'll ever get to that stage. We have it
managed now so the food is packed in and the garbage packed out.
The animals don't stay. We leave caches. If they do stay, they
have grain. And we're thinking of — I think it's already been done —
packing in with a helicopter. And of course a lot of romantically
minded people think that's terrible, but it really isn't, it's the
easiest thing on the country. You come in with a load of supplies,
and there you are. You don't have any problems.

641

Adams: Now, the riding horses do make a problem, and then there's the

pack animals for the sleeping bags. But we used to work a kind of
complicated logistics where they'd come in and we'd be in a camp
two days, and they'd go out — say to Bishop — and return with meat
and fresh vegetables. And then they would pack a portion on ahead
to a cache. Then they'd come back and get the people's bags.
Depending on the size of the mule, there 'd be five or six bags per
animal. Well, say six bags, the maximum weight was thirty-five
pounds; that would be two hundred pounds per animal. So you take
sixty people, there's ten animals; 120 people, there's twenty
animals, in strings of five, and there' d be a packer for each
string. So there 'd be twenty-four animals. And then there 'd be,
I think, two strings for the commissary — all the equipment and the
pots and pans, and commissary people's bags and stuff. And many
strings were needed for food. Really complicated. Sometimes we'd
sit there and wonder how in the world we'were going to get this
food in and move it ahead, and we might have to change schedules
or hold people over for a day.

I remember one day we had a forced march for three days, long
walks, and there were many very tired people.

Teiser: How far over an average mountain trail would a day's trip be?

Adams: Oh, I suppose our walks would be about twelve miles. You might
have some that would be eight, some fifteen. Usually the first
one was a toughy, getting out of some low elevation, like getting
out of Yosemite up to Hardin Lake or getting out of the floor of
Kings Canyon to Granite Pass. Let's see, from Sequoia we'd go to
Summit Meadow — a long way. It wasn't so much of a climb; it was
over minor passes but many miles.

Probably one of the toughest was the Granite Basin. That was
a six-thousand-foot climb out of the Kings Canyon. We had to go
three or four miles on the floor of the Kings to the base of the
trail, and then we had to go up six thousand feet and over the top
for a couple of miles to the plateau where the camp site was. That
was eleven thousand feet high. Sometimes in the beginning the
people would have very serious trouble with altitude. They'd be
coming in at all times of night. I don't think it was very good
for them if they had any heart trouble.

One lady had serious heart trouble at Sphinx Pass, and they
got her down to the Ralph Merritt Ranch on Roaring River and
thought she'd be there two or three days. She was there six weeks!
The doctor wouldn't dare move her, and finally said, "She's as good
as she's ever going to be. I guess if we go very slowly we can get
her over the pass." (It was about a 2500-feet climb.) She didn't
make it. We got up to 2500 feet and she expired with total heart

642

Adams: failure. This was a case of not being able to properly treat

anybody. The doctor knew what she had, but what could he do? She
had total rest but could not take that change in altitude. Once
in a while things do happen, but I don't think we had any more than
the average sad events.

Teiser: You were telling the other day about trips with the LeConte family.
They'd whip everything out and have a big lunch. On these club
outings, did people just carry their own small lunches?

Adams: There was a lunch line set up, usually after dinner (they liked to
get the food out the night before), and sometimes after breakfast,
if it was a short walk. That would be hardtack and, as Cedric
Wright used to say, "a dried fig with a bug in it" [laughter],
chocolate, deviled ham, dates, cheese, and rye crisp. Then, if we
were going over a pass, we'd have little cans of marmalade. We'd
have one can for every two or three people, so they'd have to gang
together and mix it up with snow which, by the way, is very bad to
do. To eat snow at a high altitude is one of the worst things you
can do. It depletes energy terrifically — like drinking too much
cold water. I've seen people pass right out cold. They're right
at the edge of the fatigue limit anyway, and then they take this
snow. It's a caloric problem.

So the lunches would be then put in a canvas cloth or plastic
bag, and bits and pieces would gradually accumulate. It wasn't
the kind that had organic dissolution; it just dried. And the
hardtack would be just like slabs of bark. And there were raisins
and chocolates. You always had all you wanted if you could chew it.
People would stop and have little lunch fires — mostly for tea. Some
people would arrange to have a tea party at four o'clock or
thereabouts, near a creek. Somebody would smuggle in some cookies.
We didn't care what you took in, providing it didn't exceed the
weight. Mr. Colby always carried a couple of bottles of Cointreau
and cookies in his knapsack. [Laughter]

I'll never forget: One man came up Piute Creek from Bishop,
and he said that the thing that he really liked was beer. He
didn't have much to carry in his knapsack, and he was going to
bring in a case of beer and carry it himself. It was a terribly
hot day and going up this very steep gorge for thousands of feet
was very tiring, and this poor guy had that knapsack full of beer.
Finally I said, "Look, you'd better let me help you with that."
I had the heavy camera, and he said, "Nope, you can't carry any
more than you've got; it's up to me. I'll be in even before
midnight." And he said, "Why don't we have one now?" And I said,
"That would finish it." [Laughter] He had enough beer; I think it
was two cases. Almost a bottle of beer a night for the two weeks
he was on the trip. [Laughter] People would put out their tin cups
and he'd give them about an inch. [Laughter] It was usually rather
warm and insipid — terrible.

643

Adams: There were some people that smoked heavily and, of course, paid for
it. They were smokers down below, but in the high altitudes, it's
just dynamite! We had many people faint. Mountain sickness is a
very peculiar thing. Primarily it's a kind of faint — there's not
enough blood to the brain and you just pass out for a little while.
Then there are all kinds of secondary sickness. I don't understand
it medically, but it upsets your stomach, creates a depression — oh,
you can be awfully sick — headaches, etc.

Teiser: That goes away usually?

Adams: It generally goes away fairly fast. People come out from the East
and they have no idea at all what they're getting into. They think
about the Berkshires or something, and then they find that they've
got a four-thousand-foot or more climb the first day. Getting out
of Yosemite is about four-thousand-foot, no matter which way you go.
If you got up to Glacier Point, it would be thirty-two hundred,
but you wouldn't camp there, you'd have to go higher up. The same
with Yosemite Creek.

Teiser: You were on the outing committee —
Adams: Yes.

Teiser: — until 1937, I saw, whereupon you and Mr. Colby and Francis
Tappaan all quit.

Adams: Well, we felt we'd had enough, and young people should take it on.
It's rt lly a young man's job because it's extremely arduous. Even
then, V-. began to worry about the future of the club, because there
were all these old characters staying on and on and on. There
wasn't any new blood, so to speak.

Teiser: Well, you were at that time at the advanced age of thirty-four.
Did you consider yourself an old character?

Adams: Oh, I'd been around. [Laughter] No, I tell you, what happened

was, I had so much professional work to do and I had to go east,

and this club work was just too much,
to do the outing was almost too much.

Trying to photograph, and

More Sierra Club People

Adams: Cedric Wright took it on; he took the photography job and the

sanitary situations. He did a fine job for many years, but that
was much less arduous than mine. He'd just have to pick out the

644

Adams: site and see that the "burlap" was taken down and packed up in
the morning. He manufactured these very ingenious collapsible
latrines. They were terribly funny. He had a great sense of
humor. Ray Strong painted dinosaurs on them. It's euphemistically
called a "burlap." It was quite a trick getting it all set up.
There were at least two of them. When you get into rocky moraine
country, it's quite an excavation problem. But Cedric would be
up at four o'clock, and fuss around the commissary and get his
cameras all ready, maybe made some early pictures, and then when
the people left, he'd dismantle these things and see they were
properly packed. And then he'd rush ahead and photograph all day
on the trail and scoot into camp and get them set up again. Now,
there's all kinds of different devices. I think they're simpler,
but I don't know.

Teiser: Was he sturdy physically?

Adams: Oh yes. He was always in fine condition. He had an obsession

with chocolate. I think he lived on chocolate, and that was very
bad for cholesterol. He had a lot of family troubles, and he had
mounting blood pressure. And he had some kind of fool doctor who
never did anything about it, and it used to worry his friends.
Cedric would show the effects of it — "Oh yes, 220 over 110."
"Cedric, you know, you've got to do something." A doctor friend
told me, "This man's going to kill himself. It's serious." And
finally it got up to 300, and then he had a stroke and never
really recovered. It was very sad, and it shows what can happen
when you get out of sync with the things you need most. You don't
monkey with high blood pressure. Of course, you may not know what
you've got, but you usually know something's wrong, and a good
doctor will quickly find it out. I have what they call labile
blood pressure. All of a sudden it will hit me. I feel perfectly
fine for a long time, and then I begin to feel funny. I can
take my own blood pressure, and if it's up, I have a little pill
which brings it down. I haven't had it now for several months,
but it could come right here, talking to you. I first begin to
feel a little strange — not really dizzy. I take a little tablet,
and in ten minutes I'm all right.

But if I kept working against that pressure, it would go up
and up and up. That isn't good. And it seems that people who
have done a lot of strenuous work, like climbing around mountains
and so on, are inclined to it. Because for some reason, I suppose
the heart gets enlarged from the extra-heavy work, and then when
you ease off you've got a lot of heart muscle that isn't quite
needed, and it apparently sets up funny rhythms and causes these
effects. I'm not worried at all about it, because I know what it
is. But poor Cedric had a terrible persistent set-to with it, and
it finally put him a little bit off his rocker; he became very

645

Adams :

erratic. He spent the last several years of his life writing a
tirade on education. He apparently hadn't had good luck as a
child in school, and he was trying to reestablish his wrath — and
wrote hundreds of pages of mimeographed stuff — an absolutely
hysterical tirade.

But that's what happens so often with gifted people,
extremely gifted, and he was a marvelous teacher — violin.

He was

And he

was an extremely smart and shrewd person, but he prided himself on
being unscientific. Something like Edward Weston. He and Charis
[Wilson Weston] would berate science. And I'd say, "You're using
a sensitive film, and that's pretty much of a technical triumph.
And that lens you've got — that isn't made with a flint knife, you
know, or a hoe." Well, that kind of science I guess was all right.
It was very strange.

I got the funniest letter about this Datsun ad [a television
commercial in which Ansel Adams participated; a tree was to be
planted for every Datsun test-driven] from a man who agreed with
my philosophy of photography. He didn't see anything wrong with
planting a tree, but the fundamental dichotomy was to drive a car
and plant a tree. Now, those were two opposites of ecology, and
it simply did not make sense. "But of course," he said, "I drive
a car." I didn't know what he was trying to get at in the letter.
I'm going to ask Bill Turnage to answer it, because I don't
understand this person. His conscience is eating him in some way.

Teiser: Ask him how many cylinders there are on his car. I don't believe
there's any car that has fewer cylinders than a Datsun. You can't
have three —

Adams: You can. The old D.K.W. had three, but it really acted as six at
high speeds. It was a two-stroke engine. I had a couple of
those. It was a wonderful automobile. It was two-stroke. When
it idled it sounded like a cocktail shaker, but when it was
running, and you got to any speed at all it would buzz along, like
a watch. The engine had only seven moving parts.

Teiser: When did that come out?

Adams: That was ten, twelve years ago. Called D.K.W. — made by the Auto
Union. And then the Volvo, I think, had a three-cylinder. And
they're very efficient, but they do pollute, because the oil is
mixed in with the gas. They're extremely high rpm — 9000, 10,000
cycles per minute. So when you're going along a highway at fifty
or sixty, you purr. It was a very well made car.

Teiser: Going on to some of the other people. Aldo Leopold —

646

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser:
Adams:

He was the father of [A. Starker] Leopold who is a professor at
the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. And he has another brother.

Was the elder Leopold a member of the Sierra Club?

Oh, I think so, but I think it was pretty much before my time.
I don't remember him. I might have met him. I remember Vernon
Bailey.

Vernon Bailey?

He was a naturalist. I don't really know where he came from. He
was an important man in his field. He tried to dissuade people
from being afraid of snakes. He would show how a rattlesnake
can't stand direct sun. He had a big clearing in Pate Valley, and
he put the snake in it and kept it in the sun. It just curled over
and died. It's a cold-blooded animal — they can't stand the heat.
They live in the shade and under rocks, etc. Bailey gave very
interesting talks, at an entertaining level, at our campfires.

Sierra Club Campaigns

Teiser:

Adams :

Teiser ;
Adams:

I made a list of things that the Sierra Club was either for or
against that are recorded in the Bulletins and the 1971 Sierra Club
Handbook. Admiralty Island, off Alaska. Do you remember that
campaign?

Oh, I remember something about that.
a wildlife situation or a scenic one,
had some discussion on it.

I don't know whether that was
I don't know. But I know we

And the expansion of Death Valley. This was in the early thirties.

Yes, that was very important. As I remember there, we tried to get
the mining privileges out, and we couldn't do that because the
congressional act which set up the monuments specifies that mining
rights would be protected. But we did get the expansion in, and
the reason I think was largely a matter of desert flora and fauna
and a general rounding out of the area.

You see, you'd always have to remember that there 'd be
certain groups in the club who'd get a bee in their bonnet about
doing certain things. It's a good idea, but it, for them, became
absolutely total importance; nothing else mattered. Like saving
the tule elk, which has been a big campaign lately. You'd think it
was really saving Holland! It's one of the most really complete

647

Adams: campaigns. (They've saved them — they've got a state bill now that
assures a preserve, and 1 think they're all right.) But there 'd
be all kinds of small groups who'd go after specific projects.
Sometimes the things weren't really worthy of national attention.
And that would cause hard feelings because the main club office
would say, "We just can't! We have so many things to do. That's
a local problem." But, boy, some people have got an unbounded
energy for discourse. [Laughter]

We just have a situation now about reprinting a mountaineering
book, and this man is challenging the first ascent records. Again,
you'd think it was a major constitutional decision of the Supreme
Court. I mean, there's been reams of paper written about it and
mimeographed and circulated — ten, fifteen, twenty people involved.
And I got this stuff from Tom Jukes, and I sent it back because it
was incomprehensible. Jukes suggested we take all the registers
off all the mountains, then ask everybody to go up and make a first
ascent, because there's no previous record. And this man would
say, "I made the first ascent of Crag 12,850, which is the third
crag south of the North Palisade, and I made that ascent in 1917,
and that's the first ascent. Somebody in your book says he made
the first ascent in 1920 and that is wrong. I demand that that be
corrected." You know, that kind of monkey business, and what
difference does it make? It wasn't climbing Mount Everest. I
always say, all arguments like that are making a Montaigne out of
a Moliere. [Laughter] (That's terrible.)

Teiser: I have next Olympic National Park. It was proposed in the thirties,
and it wasn't until the fifties, I guess, that it was pretty well
completed.

Adams: Yes, we had a lot of trouble with the timber people there. You see,
lumber is the prime industry of the Northwest. They allowed the
Mount Rainier area to come in. There wasn't much forest. But the
Olympic took in quite a lot of timber. We wanted it to go all the
way to the ocean, and the timber interests objected. So it became
very "legal," with lots of lobbying and congressional contacts.
It was pretty complex. That's where people like Colby were superb,
because they had all the legal knowledge of the means of acquiring
it. It's not easy. You are asked, "What's the status of a certain
area?" And you've got to do a ton of research before you can reply.
You can rest assured the other side's done it too, and is using that
part which is favorable to them.

Teiser: In the creation of national parks, in general, would the National
Park Service be with the conservationists, or did they try to stay
out until it was — ?

648

Adams: They were usually very good. But if they felt something was a hot
potato, they'd be rather passive. Some of these things were
political hot potatoes, and that's why the director of the Park
Service has got a terrible job, because he can exist only by the
sufferance of Capitol Hill. And when our friend George Hartzog
goes up on the Hill and starts working for parks that invade timber
industry areas, bang! all the timber senators and congressmen come
right down on him and write letters to the secretary: "Let's get
rid of this destructive character." You see, it's really very
potent and very dangerous.

The Park Service may propose something and then sit back and
wait for a response. And then organizations like the Sierra Club
or the Wilderness Society and others will take it up. It never
works the same, but that's more or less the way they propose a good
idea, then see what the support is and act accordingly.

Teiser: What's the answer really? Is there any reasonable compromise on
lumber?

Adams: Well, yes, what we're doing is setting up these wilderness areas

and, of course, trying to get the Forest Service to save the prime
forests. But after all, as I said before, the Forest Service's
function is to control the flow of use, not to preserve nature for
scenic reasons. I guess the only answer is just to allow certain
areas to be recut and replanted. Now, there was great talk about
this last night because of the controversy about clear cutting and
selective cutting. I'm personally in favor of the clear cutting,
because I think it's much cleaner, and while it does leave a scar,
it depends where it's done. For instance, all the big mountains
back of Santa Fe have been burned off in the fire of, I think,
1923, and now great groves of aspens have grown up. And now I can
see conifer trees growing up among the aspens. In time the forest
will reassert itself. That had never been replanted. It's not
true to say it takes thirty years for a forest to grow. I've
photographed them — perfectly beautiful stands of young trees that
are fifteen, twenty, ten years old. For instance, this tree [outside
the window] was just up to the floor ten years ago. A Monterey pine
is one of the fastest growing trees.

Teiser: How tall is it now?

Adams: Oh, it goes up to about thirty feet, I guess.

So if they do clear cut and then immediately plant, and if
they can in some way avoid clear cutting to straight edges, then
you wouldn't have this checkerboard feeling. But the surveyors go
in and draw lines. Now, if they could just make a ragged or random
edge, it wouldn't be such an eyesore.

649

Adams: But the selective cutting — going into a forest, cutting down a good-
looking tree, cutting off the slash and taking it out — does an awful
lot of aesthetic damage. As long as you don't plant trees in rows,
like I understand they do in Europe, you will approach a natural
effect.

Teiser: We did it with eucalyptus.

Adams: Well, that was largely windbreak, and they found they couldn't
continue it, because it took too much water out of the ground.
There's very few left now; they're taking them down.

Teiser: Have you ever known any lumber men whom you thought had good ideas?

Adams: Oh yes, a lot of them. Most of them are very fine gentlemen.
They've got their business to attend to. They're mostly very
sincere. What they're trying to do is to get maximum yield. Their
goal is 96 percent yield in forest products, and it's been 50 and
60 percent so far. Now it's going up to around 70 — I forget what
the last figure is. That's using chip and slash and bark and
tailings — all the stuff that was formerly thrown away and burned
up. They use a lot of it chemically. Well, if they can get it up
to 90 percent it will be most favorable.

One of the big companies has about 180,000 acres — and they
told me, "We have enough now to keep us going indefinitely. As
soon as we cut, we plant, and when we get around there again, why,
it's lumber; but sometimes it's used for pulp." I think it's
absolutely ridiculous to say you can't cut trees. It's where you
cut them. I think, as a rule, they've been fairly cooperative. Of
course, the Redwood National Park matter was so vague that they
got mad, and they went in and they cut ruthlessly. They were
trying to prevent a larger park, that's all. While the squabble
was going on to get a larger park, they were cutting down the
timber that was hoped to be in the larger park.

Teiser: Which—

Adams: Redwood National Park. You see, as I said before, practically

every other area we think of is either Bureau of Land Management,
Bureau of Public Lands, or Forest Service land. The redwoods are
on largely private land. So it's more than a matter of
congressional shift of control. You [can] take it from the Forest
Service and put it in the Park Service. When you come to private
lands, then you have to buy them and, of course, the redwood is
very expensive. A hundred thousand acres would cost something in
the order of — I don't know — something like $25 million, at least.

650

Adams: But you see what happens is, there are things we didn't figure on.
The Rockefellers gave this big fund for the Bull Creek Flat. The
Bull Creek Flat is one of the most beautiful redwood groves. And
we thought, "Well, this is safe." Then the lumber companies work
back in the watershed and clean out the spruce and the pine (there's
little redwood up there) , and create an erosion problem. Along
comes the heavy rain storms, and the redwoods are severely inundated
as they've never been in their history. We have lost some of the
finest trees because the roots are fairly close to the surface, and
when they have six or eight feet of water around them they become
saturated, and the trees topple. Now, under natural conditions
that never could happen. But the hillsides were cleaned off; then
came the rain. With clear cutting, of course, you could have that
situation in sane places!

No matter what you do, it's — well, it has its effect!
Teiser: And if you don't do it, it has an effect. [Laughter]

In connection with Redwood National Park, there was some
controversy between the Save-the-Redwoods League and the Sierra
Club?

Adams: Yes, that's a long and unfortunate story. The Save-the-Redwoods
League did, I think, an incredible job and conducted themselves
very well, and all the people they worked with were friendly and
realistic. The League would raise, say, $100,000 to buy redwood
land timber. And they'd bargain for a good rate, and they'd acquire
it. I don't know of another way to do it. But the whole Sierra
Club attitude was that all these lumber men were just total bastards
and that they are fighting to prevent the parks. You see, there's
always this negative attitude. Actually the lumber people are
fighting to protect themselves; they don't want to prevent the park.

The first park plan, I think, had the approval of the Save-the-
Redwoods League because it enlarged many of the areas the League
had worked on. And quite a number of people thought that was fine.
Then, as I said, there was Wayburn and a few others who decided it
wasn't right, and we needed more, and that more caused a great delay
and loss of some valuable areas. So now we have a park which is
inferior to what it could have been.

Teiser: There was something about the Save-the-Redwoods League wanting to
enlarge Jedediah Smith Park and the Sierra Club wanting instead to
include some lands in Humboldt County.

Adams: I don't know the particulars of that. But the Save-the-Redwoods

League had the big plan, and what they were trying to do was to get
these nuclei established, these state parks, and then build around

651

Adams: them. You see, the Avenue of the Giants, composed of several

memorial groves, was on a two-lane road, and the Save-the-Redwoods
League, instead of buying a lot of land, bought the land along each
side of the road as fast as they could. Somebody put up ten,
fifteen thousand dollars and they'd buy a big strip, and it would
become part of the avenue. Really quite a wonderful thing to do.
But then private land began just a hundred yards or two hundred
yards beyond the borders of the avenue. The lumber people cut down
to the borders, so you can't go in any distance beyond the narrow
strip of trees.

[End Tape 26, Side 1]

[Begin Tape 26, Side 2]

Adams: This was anticipated some day, but not so soon. That meant we did
have a corridor with little depth.

Then the freeway people came along and said, "We're going to
put our freeway through the Redwood Highway area," which would have
practically removed all the trees, most of the important ones. This
would have left a very narrow band of a few trees. And the club put
up a terrible squawk on that. All power to Governor [Edmund G.]
Brown. In some way, he finagled the funds to put the road on the
other side of the river. I understand it was not really legal, but
it was very important to do it. I mean, he just transferred funds
and said, "Now, come and get me." It wasn't personal; it was for
the good of the cause. I understand it was really quite a brave
thing to do. They had to buy land, but they saved the Avenue of the
Giants. You see, it's always these problems — give and take, win
this and lose that.

Then the Save-the-Redwoods League had bought quite a lot in the
area of Fern Canyon, and the lumber company gave Fern Canyon to the
state. It is a very beautiful gorge — I guess about a half a mile
long, with vertical walls covered with ferns. One of the most
beautiful places. If you are a company and you have stockholders
with money invested, you have to protect it; you just can't laugh
it off. Eminent domain is always there, but it's expensive.

Now, another thing that's terribly important about the redwoods
that a lot of people don't realize — the labor situation. You see,
the general people were very much against the park because it cost
jobs, lumbermen's jobs. The next thing that happened: the Park
Service said, "Well, we'll employ more people in the end than the
lumber industry would in this area." Yes, but they're different
people. Lumberjacks aren't going to be rangers or concession
operators, you see. They had a terrific opposition from the
population, the taxpayers. That is still seething; I think people
resent that very much.

652

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams:
Teiser:
Adams:

Teiser:

Adams:

Teiser:

Adams :

And on various occasions, masses of people in the area will protest
a park because it does potentially cost jobs, and of course, their
jobs. A job is not abstract as far as they're concerned.

Something of that sort came up in connection with Jackson Hole.
Very much so, especially taxes.
What was the story there?

Well, you see, the Rockefellers had this great preserve. They were
paying taxes on it, and it was quite a considerable amount to
Wyoming. The Teton National Park came right down to the base of
the mountains and stopped. The people in that area wanted dude
ranches and cattle running, you see — private property — to pay taxes.
So Rockefeller then offered to give the whole area to the national
park system providing it would become part of Grand Teton Park.
Then there was a terrible roar. Well, it turned out that after
Rockefeller gave the area, the taxes were double what they would
have been, you see, from all the developments that came. The town
of Jackson boomed, as did the settlement of Moose, and many of the
private holdings, ranchers and concessioners. So the state of
Wyoming has done extremely well, because that's a very popular park.
So now they think it's wonderful!

It was a matter of taxes and not just of disgruntled people not
wanting a lot of tourists coming in?

Might have been some of that, but I think that was minor,
it was primarily taxes.

I think

I'll go back again to an earlier period of the club's campaigns.
I don't know if you were involved at all with the one against the
Yellowstone Lake dam.

Yes, we were very active on that. I just voted against it [the dam],
as I remember. I didn't get into the science of it at all. We won
on that, I think, and they found another site. Now, when it came to
the Echo Park dam, that was one of our most intelligent projects.
Because here was this extremely beautiful place, and they wanted to
dam it. And it was perfectly obvious that the district needed the
water. Well, the most sensible element in the club said the only
thing we could do was to provide an alternate. So we hired some
very competent engineers. I forget who really did this — I think
Walter Starr or somebody was active in it. And they found, after
rather expensive surveys, that there was another site. And the only
objection to that site was that it would have a higher rate of
evaporation because it was bigger. But that the cost of the dam
itself was much less. So with that ammunition we were able to save

653

Adams: Echo Park. A lot of people in the club take personal credit for

these things when it's really a collective effort. And also support
from the outside too that we sometimes don't acknowledge, and we
should. It's silly that there should be competition between
organizations working for the same thing. But that's happened
quite a few times when some want to take all the glory — it's been
a little depressing.

We are now, I guess, the biggest conservation organization,
in a sense, but there's some other very potent organizations — the
Wilderness Society, Nature Conservancy and Resources for the Future,
and others. A lot of them are not flamboyant; they work behind the
scenes, but they have a terrific pull in Congress, with all kinds
of problems in the works — timber and wilderness, etc. We have our
smoke-filled rooms just like the regular politicians'. There is a
lot of discussion and persuasion involved.

Teiser: When did the Echo Park controversy come up? What period was that?
Adams: I think that was shortly after the war, right around that time.*
Teiser: Was that part of the Dinosaur National park?

Adams: Yes, it's in Dinosaur National Monument — that's the area. Again, a
monument has only a quasi-protection. It's not as secure as a park.

Protection and Overprotection

Teiser: Somewhere in the late thirties there was a threat to both national
and state parks about oil and gas exploration — leasing or selling.
Was that ever anything more than just a threat?

Adams: One thing is very important to realize: the National Parks Act is
not in the constitution. It's only an act, an enabling act, which
could be rescinded at any time. It's perfectly conceivable that we
could have a Congress that could abandon the parks, turn them back
to the Forest Service, turn them back to private ownership, put them
up for sale. It's all a matter of congressional power. Of course,
the people, I don't think, would stand for it, but it's theoretically
conceivable. So while the regulations and rules prohibit certain
things, those things can be approved by an act of Congress, approval
of the President and so on. It's always a matter of sitting on pins
and needles.

Teiser: There was a proposal to repeal the Antiquities Act —

*1950-1956.

654

Adams: That's the national monuments. That's called the National
Antiquities and Monuments Act, I think — the full name.

Teiser: And if that were repealed, what would the status of the national
monuments have been?

Adams: Well, I suppose if they're forest, they would be cut. If they're

open to miniTig or to tourists, they probably would go to the Forest
Service and come under that administration.

Teiser: Was that a real threat?
Adams: Oh yes, it was a threat.
Teiser: Who wanted to do it?

Adams: Oh, I guess people of the Congressman [Wayne N.] Aspinall type —
pretty much determined to reduce public ownership. He's from
Colorado, and he has big mining interests back of him. It's not
easy. It's a very complex thing.

The Alaska timber situation is simply ghastly. I mean, the
Forest Service there is dangerous. I don't know what they're doing
with that, whether they'd be able to control it. But they've let
out 97 percent of the land all at once, a lot of it for cutting
trees for pulp. It can absolutely ruin southeast Alaska. There's
no really good land plan around. We have Mount McKinley National
Park and Glacier Bay and Sitka National Monuments; these are
historic. Some of these monuments are just little areas with an
old building or a totem pole — relics, you know. Canyon de Chelly
is a national monument, and that's primarily because of the great
ruins. But it happens to be one of the most beautiful parts of
America and it's really owned by the Navajos. So there we have a
double protection.

Sunset Crater National Monument — there's nothing there but a
lot of recent lava which, if its aluminum content is as it is in
Hawaii, could very easily be enticing for strip mining. Although
in Kauai they like the lava to become eroded into soil because it's
cheaper to process. I think it*s 18 percent aluminum.

I think it's just a great big game, and you have to watch
every play of it.

Teiser: Every now and again, someone wants to mine the town of Columbia in
California— go under the buildings and dig up the streets to pick
up the gold that's been left around.

655

cables.
Sentinel Rock

Adams: Well, they go over and over again Sierra foothill land with the

dredgers; they get some money out of it, and then they come along
with a better process and do it all over again. I don't think
there's enough gold in Columbia to permit that, but there are
people who'd be perfectly willing to do it for twenty bucks a
square mile, you know. It's really sad!

Teiser: The San Jacinto tramway, the one that was built finally, do you
think that was such a bad thing?

Adams: No, I never could see anything wrong with that. The club opposed
it, but I don't think more than half-heartedly because a lot of
people down there wanted it as opening possible ski areas and
recreation areas- — very seriously needed. Now, I've been down there
several times. I've only been able to see it once. It's an awful
big mountain, and when the light is right, you might see the little
It's like Yosemite. There's a power line that goes up by

and that's where I want to see the [Yosemite] tramway
go if it goes at all. You won't see it. It's much better than a
road. There's been all kinds of trouble at San Jacinto State Park,
concession trouble, and whether they wanted a restaurant or some
kind of resort, or whether they wanted to keep it natural and
primitive.

They have another cable tramway at Albuquerque, and you know
that's all public lands, but very deserty. And you can see those
cables in the morning when the sun hits them. But they go up the
southwest side of the Sandias. Apparently they give a very
spectacular ride. There's a nice restaurant at the top, and I
don't think it does any harm at all.

You see, the whole thing about tramways is that people just
have an idealistic opposition. But if you bring a tramway up the
dull side of the mountain, and you bring people to the top, and then
you have this wonderful wilderness view and you have nothing
intruding in that, then the tramway is a great asset. For instance,
you could have a tramway at Glacier Point, and people would emerge
to a great view; it could be an enormous emotional experience. It
would do very little, if any, harm.

Now, if you had one at Half Dome or one that comes up the face
of Glacier Point, then you're doing a lot of harm. That would
become serious intrusion. A lot of people have a perfectly blind
opposition, without any definition of fact at all. That, to me,
is very annoying, because we've done some terrible things that if
they had been accomplished in another way would have been most
rewarding.

656

Adams: Then, of course, in ten years time you're going to have all kinds of
changes in transportation. I think the tramways are being improved.
The helicopter, short-take-of f-and-landing planes, can bring people
to the edge of things and leave the wilderness inviolate. Or if
you're going to have a pack trip into the mountains, you can take
all the supplies for the entire trip in, with a helicopter. A half-
an-hour flight in, and a half an hour unloading and half an hour out;
you've saved the damage of thousands of mule days.

Then the other idea, of course, is just closing off the areas.

There's people that want Yosemite to be completely closed at El

Portal. You would have to walk in. To me, that is totally
unrealistic and totally selfish.

Teiser: It's a long walk.

Adams: You see, there's always the groups that say the wilderness exists
and everything should be open for all our citizens, because after
all, we all own it. Well, they don't realize that that would ruin
the wilderness if it is fully open. You'd automatically destroy it.
Then there's the extreme opposite group which says only those who
are capable of back-packing or arduous work should be able to go into
the park. Politically, that's absolutely impossible, so it's just
silly to talk about it. The only way you'd do it would be to
establish a dictatorship and by imperial decree set it all aside as
the emperor's garden, or something. {Laughter] You never could
possibly manage it in a democracy, and I don't think you should try.
I think people should have the privilege of seeing as much as they
can and experiencing as much as they can, providing it doesn't do
any harm.

Part of the wilderness devotee's idea is to leave things go.
If a bridge falls, you never build another one; if a tree falls
across a trail, you never take it out. Well, that effectively just
bottles the areas up, closes it, and you might as well consider it
as a specimen on a shelf.

I don't know what kind of emotional hysteria and paranoia
they're solving by these attitudes, but they sure exist.

Teiser: What's the difference between a wilderness area and a primitive area?

Adams: Well, you've got me there. These definitions are so complex.

Primitive area is where its occupation and use is primitive — perhaps
like an old mining town. It might have a road in it, but there's no
new development. There's no hotels. Nothing contemporary goes in.
I mean, things are kept as they were.

657

Adams :

Teiser :

Adams :

Now, I think possibly Cades Cove in the Great Smokies — that might
be called a primitive area, because people continue to farm and
live as they did a century ago. Well, I think they'd have a
television set somewhere. But there's no paved roads. The old
log cabins are there, and the old way of life.

Mineral King, as it stands now, I would say would be a
primitive area. There is a very difficult road going into it, and
a few shacks, maybe a mine — I just don't know what its status is.

But a wilderness area is where you have no culture, as we call
it, only the most essential things, like a trail or a bridge, or a
fire station.

The Gila Wilderness Area — it was established at Aldo Leopold's
suggestion as a primitive area and then became a wilderness area
1952.

Well, you see, there were people living there — the natives. And I
think that was just a step to attain the objective, but not doing
it too devastatingly quick. Then of course they want to put in dams
there, on the Gila River.' And you find people now who think Lake
Powell is the most beautiful thing they ever saw. They go out in
boats — go up all these gorges, which were formerly canyon cliffs,
They never saw the canyon before; I never did. They think it's just
marvelous filled with water. It's a matter of taste!

That Eliot Porter book, The Place No One Knew, is expressing an
ideal. And it's fortunate, perhaps, that very few people knew it,
because it couldn't have stood heavy traffic. Even the Grand Canyon
will suffer from the traffic, but not as much as others. The beaches
will get rather dirty and cluttered. A lot of people in there cause
sanitation problems — but of course they have occasional floods that
clear it up for a while. But the dams on the Colorado River are
already really silting up.

We don't realize what's going to happen, say, to Boulder Dam.
It's not very many years before it will be a great big mud plateau.
I don't know how many freight trains of silt are coming in there
every day. And of course the water below that now is absolutely
pure — almost pure — because the silt is taken care of. So while the
Colorado used to run muddy red into the Gulf of California, it now
has very pure water, because it has a series of dams. And each one
of those dams is acquiring the silt and silting up — getting shallower
and shallower and finally it'll just be quicksand, and the water
will pour over the face of the dam, and that's the end of that.
Because the Colorado carries down a tremendous amount of erosion
material. And the interesting thing about the Colorado River is that
the river cut at about the same rate that the land rose. The river

658

Adams: has the same altitude that it had a million years ago. I don't know
the exact figure, but the river still flows at about the same
altitude as it always had!

I remember in that country you'll get a heavy rainstorm, and
you'll see the mud running. In twenty years, say in Monument Valley
and certain other areas, I can see the profound difference, and all
that mud's gone somewhere. It goes into the streams. In the
natural course of events, it would get into the Gulf of California.

Of course, you know what happened in the delta of the Nile —
boy, that's a controversy'. Because the Aswan Dam has now stopped
the water, and all the nutriment which came down to nourish the Nile
delta doesn't come anymore. The farms are going and there's all
kinds of agricultural problems, but there's plenty of power. But
apparently it just upset the whole economy of the country.

Teiser: How was Glacier View Dam stopped? Was there any special thing?

Adams: I don't know. I think these things are just a matter of how much
power is on the other side. You have to get the philosophy of the
Corps of Engineers clear, which nobody seems to be able to do. The
Army Engineers are kept going as an organization because in time of
war they're terribly important; they set up the military earth works
and all that. But they now have "civil" construction, huge projects.
And it's often been proposed that they abandon this work and private
contractors be brought i'n. The Army won't hear of that. But while
we're in peace time, the Corps of Engineers has to be kept busy —
channeling rivers and building dams. They have to do something to
keep the staff alive and knowledgeable. They love to get their
hooks in any construction work they can. They're channeling rivers,
like the Napa River and many others, which from a flood control
principle is wonderful, but absolutely ruins it in the natural sense,
And the flood control is because there's a lot of people around.
There 'd be no need for it if there weren't so many people.

In the Los Angeles area, in the San Fernando Valley, and in the
San Joaquin Valley, you see these tremendous areas excavated for
flood control dikes. In case of an extreme flood the river's kept
in bound. Well, now they've got so many dams, the danger of a big
flood is not so great. But say they have the sudden threat of a
heavy storm at the Oroville Dam area; they have to store an awful
lot of water. Well, then they hope they can move that into other
storage areas. When the storm comes it may fill up the dams. If
the dam's already full, it no longer controls the flood. The water
goes over the top of the dam and may raise Cain below. So now they
try to anticipate these things — lower the dam in advance so it will
take it, and put the water somewhere else. It's quite an amazing
business.

659

Teiser: The big fight over Dinosaur National Monument started in about 1950,
I guess, and I think the Sierra Club put out a special issue of its
Bulletin.

Adams: Oh yes, they had a big campaign on that. Wallace Stegner wrote a
book on it. Yes, that was quite a campaign. I didn't realize it
was that late.

Teiser: Did you take special part in it?

Adams: No, I just voted against the dam, put it that way.

Teiser: Were you in agreement with the Sierra Club's actions?

Adams: Yes, I think so, especially with the one of finding alternate sites
and going about it in that intelligent way. Philip Hyde did some
beautiful pictures of it.

Teiser: And that was a thoroughly effective campaign?

Adams: Very. Well, that was well organized. It was done with a lot of
dignity, and there wasn't much ruffled feelings, and there was
logical persuasion.

Citizens' Campaigns

Adams: I think it's like when we got rid of the Humble Oil plant, up here
at Moss Landing, an example of laying the cards on the table. And
the president of the company and Tom Hudson and myself — Bill Kramer
and a few others — we're all on pretty much a first-name basis. We
just told them that we didn't want them and it would be very
dangerous for the farms in the Salinas Valley, which was about the
only clear farming area remaining in the state. The refinery would
invite big industry and it would be very bad for their image. They
pulled up stakes and went to Benicia. Of course, what Benicia
thinks of us is not polite [laughter], but they already had many
refineries, and that's a more appropriate setting. But Tom was
really wonderful because, with his own money, he would fly to Texas
to see the president and sit down and have a couple of drinks with
him, or go out to dinner and talk. And he would say, "You know,
we're talking about real values — scenic value, cultural value, and
now you people come along, and you start a trend which will
completely ruin these values, and it will not be good for your image.
You don't want to do that, do you?" It worked.

660

Adams: The same with the PG&E, when they put in that huge plant at Moss
Landing. This just shows you how crazy it can all be sometimes.
They started up the plant and, my gosh, there's a plume — pollution!
And the citizens of Monterey, they walked down Alvarado [Street]
protesting. They got everybody up in arms. PG&E put a big ad in
the paper saying that this was as much a mystery to them as it was
to anybody else: this was the largest plant of its kind in the
world, or one of the largest, and no matter what it costs, we're
going to stop the pollution, you can be rest assured of that. But
they hadn't found out what was causing it. A chemist from Santa
Cruz wrote a brilliant technical, scholarly-sounding paper for the
Monterey Herald, in which he decried the use of sulphur-bearing
oils — have no need for it in these days. And PG&E was really
criticized for this use of primitive fuel. But they weren't
burning oil; it's all natural gas! There wasn't any oil in the
place. They have a stand-by tank; in case the gas line breaks,
they have enough oil to put in for a day or so, but not for regular
use.

Well, what happened was that in the old plant, which burned
natural gas too, the fire-box heat was such that the combination of
oxygen and nitrogen — it's too complicated for me to try to explain
it technically — did not take place. But in the new plant the heat
was so intense that this association, this nitrogen effect
unexpectedly took place. When it went up the stacks it was a
combination of nitrogen and I don't know what, but it wasn't what
you get in sulphur-burning oils. I don't think there's any sulphur
at all in it. But it cost them an awful lot of money to reconstruct
those fire boxes and prepare the gas before the oxygen went in.

Teiser: They would have done it without the citizens' protests.

Adams: I think so. PG&E has been very cagey about this. I think they've
done wonderfully in many ways. They know they can't do it all, and
they always have been pretty good. They've been wrongly accused of
milking the public, but they work under controlled rates. They have
to put a lot of money in plants and future prospects. Well, when
you get that big, no matter what you do is considered wrong; they
just accept it. I think they've acted splendidly in this — no matter
what the cost, the official told me, "We mean to correct it. It
might cost $20 million, but we can't afford pollution to come out of
a natural gas plant! This chemistry is confused. I don't know hov
we made the mistake. Somebody just left off a cipher somewhere."
It's a $160-million plant, you see. You should have seen those fire
boxes when they were building them; the cooling tubes that go out to
the ocean are twelve feet in diameter. The amount of concrete
that's used is fantastic.

Teiser: What does it do to the ocean? Did people complain about that, about
raising the temperature?

661

Adams: The temperature of the ocean changes about 5°, up and down, over the
year anyway. The outfall is sufficiently far out that there's no
perceptible effect.

Teiser: There seem to be a lot of fishing boats still around there.

Adams: Well, in fact, raising the temperature a little would probably help
the fish. In some areas, raising the temperature as much as 10° has
brought in a whole new set of sea life. We don't know why the
sardines left Monterey. I guess they just got tired or scared of
the tourists! But it's conceivable that if the temperature went up
or down, then they might come back. We don't know yet. So long as
the outfall is far enough out, and so long as there's no real
pollution going out of the stacks, we have little to complain about.
They are building great cooling towers at many of the inland atomic
plants. I think it all relates to the third law of thermodynamics —
I think it's the third law — you just have to get your water back to
a low temperature. You think you've got all this hot water; why
don't you just put it through and heat it up a little more? But it
just doesn't work that way. I never could understand why, but it
doesn't. I was told — I think here the pressure is, oh gosh, it's
unbelievable, and the temperature is about 1200° F. It's called
"live steam;" you can't see it, it's so tremendously hot.

The Sierra Club and Its Chapters

Teiser: Tomales Bay State Park I guess was a local problem?

Adams: Yes, that vas local. We must give credit to the chapters for many,
many wonderful things that happened at the local level. And my
personal hope is the club would become sort of a federation of
states like the government — a federation of chapters with a central
office that is professionally staffed. And these chapters then act
as entities. Their delegates would comprise a senate and the senate
would run the club as a whole. If that came to pass, we'd get out
of these very complex politics that's plagued the board ever since
we grew to a large size. There's been ego trips and struggles to
be president and lots of back-of-the-scenes pulling — that's one of
the reasons why I got out. I just couldn't take it any longer. It
seemed a horrible waste of time.

Sometimes the chapters would just go ahead and tend to their
own knitting. They were having their own troubles, but they
accomplished a great deal. The San Francisco chapter, the Los
Angeles chapter — the Midwest chapters have been wonderful. And
the Eastern and the Kentucky chapter, Southeast — I forget; we've
got so many of them now. They've all had real accomplishments.

662

Teiser: They have increased in recent years?

Adams: Oh yes, we have one or two chapters accepted at every meeting.

Teiser: It's interesting that it was a western organization that they came
into, rather than establishing separate ones in the East.

Adams: Well, there was the Wilderness Society, but they never wanted

chapters. And the National Parks Association — they didn't want
chapters either. We first had the San Francisco chapter and the
Los Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club because that would better
control the state. Then there was a great fight against other
chapters. They didn't want the club disintegrated. And then came
our Mother Lode chapter. I don't know how it really developed,
because there was a great opposition to chapters in the beginning.

Teiser: Why?

Adams: Well, they didn't want to dilute the club's power, you see. And
I can see that from a certain point of view. But then when we
became national and a lot of the membership is outside the state,
that's another matter entirely. The Atlantic chapter did a great
deal of good protecting the Hudson River.

Brower moved his allegiance to the Atlantic chapter and then
put a barrier up against any information. The Atlantic chapter is
now broken down into several smaller ones. But when Brower
transferred his allegiance to the chapter, he prevented any basic
club information being published in the Argonaut, which was their
paper. In all this controversy there wouldn't be a word about home
policies, etc., and he even got the New York Times to write as he
dictated! And we had one terrible time getting information over to
the members. It was really a dictatorial coup. You talk about a
Hitler situation! It was simply dreadful. I never want to go on
record as ever getting soft about Brower or anything he did,
because it really approached disaster. In fact, it did. I think it
almost wrecked the club. I don't think we will ever be able to
recover full prestige, because we got into such a bind of opposition
feeling.

Teiser: Well, perhaps a shift to a chapter system is in order.

Adams: Yes, and I think the chapters will support that. They were the ones
that were very mad and very unhappy when all this trouble came out.
Some in the East were terribly disillusioned when they found out
this information had been withheld. But the CMC, which is Concerned
Members for Conservation — it cost us $12,000 just to reach the
membership of the club. We published a mimeographed sheet and
addressed them to the 120,000 members, and with the postage it came
to $12,000.

663

Adams: We have now twelve hundred members of the Friends of Photography,
and we were talking the other day about the budget, and every time
they send an announcement out it's $125 for postage and printing.
Well, we have four shows a year, or five, right away there's $1500
cost for announcements. Bigness has certain advantages, but also
the administrative costs are high.

But when you want to reach 120,000 members, you've got a
$12,000 bill — it's the cheapest way of getting to them. Now [1972]
a postcard would be 6c, and printing the postcard would probably
be one cent; so that would be ?C each I It's frightening when you
think of all these things. The amount of letter writing and the
amount of mimeographing and duplicating and Xeroxing — it gets to be
absolutely tremendous.

When I joined the club, Nell Taggart was running the whole
thing by herself with a few volunteers out of a little office in
the Mills Tower. Now we have computers and a big staff and high
rent and all kinds of equipment.

I remember Dr. Land saying, "Oh, the good old days of Polaroid
Company, when you knew almost everybody in it." It would be a few
hundred people; now there's twelve thousand Polaroid people in
Cambridge alone. And then he gets worried, you know, and he says,
"It's about forty thousand people in all, with the families.
That's quite a city to be mayor of I And if I make a mistake, it
affects that number of people. It isn't just my money or the
company money. But suppose some mistake is made or sales go down
and we have to lay off a certain number of workers, here's all these
people to be responsible for." Well, of course, he's a humanitar
ian. I don't think many of the big companies are too conscious of
that sort of thing. Oh, they have to give some thought to it, I
guess .

But the club membership is now, I think, 130,000. It was
1AO,000; I think it's been losing a little. The pendulum has been
going the other way. I think that's because there are so many
other local and national organizations starting up. When I stop to
think of all the organizations I have to support just because I'm
interested, I can't possibly afford it or justify it. But I have
to do the best I can. I don't mean I can't afford it. I can afford
some of it. The checks don't bounce. But it's all out of
proportion. We have the Friends of the Sea Otters, we have the Save
the Bay Association. Now the Friends of the Sea Otters, started by
Margaret Owings , is a wonderful organization. They're trying to
keep the abalone people and the sea otters in balance! Then we have
the Carmel Highlands Association, which is to protect this area.
Then, of course, the Ventana chapter of the club. Well, I belong to
the club; also to the chapter. Then there's the Native Plants

664

Adams: Society. There's the Wilderness Society; there's the National Parks
Association; there's the Tule Elk Association; there's the Save-the-
Redwoods League; the Society for the Prevention of the Sonic Boom;
there's the Environmental Foundation of Saint Louis — we've gotten
up to twelve, I think, and there's about twenty. I've been having
to turn some down lately; I just have to say I can't do it.

[End Tape 26, Side 2]

[Interview XXIII (Sierra Club Interview IV) — 13 August 1972]
[Begin Tape 27, Side 1]

[At this interview, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall and Helen M. LeConte
were present part of the time.]

Teiser: When you were on the board in earlier years, was there ever such a
conflict as there developed in the sixties? Were there ever
factions?

Adams: Nothing like that, no. There was a great Southern California

faction, which wanted more development because they were so far
from recreation, and they were talking of seceding from the club
and forming their own club. But there was nothing that wasn't
controllable, if you know what I mean.

We got the Clair Tappaan Lodge [near Donner Summit]. That's
in memory of Judge Clair Tappaan, and that was built with club
funds. And I think some of the southern people resented all that
money going into a big place for skiing for Northern California
people. And then a lot of the Southern California people were all
for the Mineral King development because there just isn't any skiing
really closer than Mammoth, which must be three hundred and fifty,
four hundred miles away. And to a lot of these people, skiing is
very important. Of course, there's the Desert Peak section, and in
wintertime they climb the desert peaks. But I don't think it's too
thrilling, except when they get up into the Ruby Range. I think
the Southern California group are all for us now, and we have
several other chapters around there. I never can remember them.
There's the Los Padres chapter out of Santa Barbara, the Ventana
chapter here, the Desert something chapter, then one down in San
Diego. I never can remember them all. Really, I think there's
nearly fifty of them, all over the country.

Teiser: I think you once proposed ejecting the Los Angeles chapter.

665

Adams: Well, now you're bringing up an important point. I'd forgotten

about that. They wanted to publish books under their own imprint,
and the Sierra Club felt that the Sierra Club imprint should be on
all books put out by the Sierra Club. And the chapter could be a
secondary — get full credit. But they didn't want to see a book
published by the "Southern California chapter of the Sierra Club,"
because that would open all kinds of uncontrollable situations,
where a book could be done by the "Bejeezus Chapter" in Nebraska,
and there's no way to control it. And the bylaws read that
publications and so on go through the central publications
committee. So they got very nasty and insisted, and I said, "Well,
if they insist on doing that, I propose that we rescind their
charter." I was persona non grata for several years down there.
But most of the stalwart members agreed; it was the hotheads which
put up the fight. They are now the staid establishment. [Laughing]
It's been thirty years, you see, at least.

Teiser: When you first went on the board, you were thirty-two years old
only. Do you have anyone that young on it now?

Adams: No, I don't think quite that young — pretty close. I think some of

the women say they're that young. [Laughter] We're after intelligent
youth! But the trouble is, you see, that a board member now is in a
very difficult position, because it's no longer a small organization.
We have a budget of about $3 million, and the people on the board
have to be "in the know;" they have to have some experience. You
can't just have somebody come in with random ideas. In my case, I
know so little about finance, and law and lawsuits, that I was not
very effective. And I think that's why the chapters got together
and developed what is now the council, to which they send delegates.

When you join the club, the service charge to get your name on
the club is almost equivalent to an initiation fee. You know what
it means to get your name on all these lists. It goes to publication,
it goes to chapters, it goes to the groups you're interested in, it
has to go to the accounting office, and it all has to be referred
back and forth, you see. Once you're defunct, then it all has to be
changed, and that's why the computer techniques have been so helpful.

Teiser: Did you ever have any doubts about the value of having the club grow
so large?

Adams: As a club, yes. Farquhar and the others felt that was very bad. It
should be an elite club with a definite purpose. We should tend to
our knitting, stay with the Sierra Nevada, not get into things like
population control and political involvement in problems like
pollution.

666

Adams: There are certain other organizations that are really tuned to do
certain things — the Society for the Prevention of the Sonic Boom,
for instance (I forget the exact name), and other outfits. Our
relationship to them should be warm support and contributions, but
we shouldn't spend our time worrying about the sonic boom, because
other people are doing it. We should support the opposition, but
that is a different thing from opening an office for that purpose,
you see, putting major emphasis on it.

Estuary control — there's several organizations that are very
potent, especially in the East, on estuary control. Well, I think
our function is to support them. But we don't have to get mixed up
in it, as long as it's being taken care of. And I think that was
the basis not so much of the growth but of the scatter. Any
individual and any organization can scatter just so much and
survive .

Teiser: What does the Wilderness Society do? Does it narrow its functions?

Adams: The Wilderness Society is a great enigma to me. They're a wonderful
bunch of people. It was established by Robert Marshall. You see,
Louis Marshall was a great New York lawyer — civil liberties — one of
the great characters. People equated him with Brandeis. He was
quite a man. He had three sons — George, Robert,* and I forget the
name of the other one who is now keeping the firm going. George
Marshall dedicated himself to conservation and civil liberties.
The sons got about equal division of the estate, which was about
$15 million, so they were all perfectly happy and could do what
they wanted. They've made wonderful contributions.

Teiser: Do they have a large membership?

Adams: It's fairly large. It's fairly elitist. They just concentrate on
wilderness. They have representatives in Washington. I would say
that 90 percent is directed to wilderness protection programs.

Teiser: Do you feel it's done valuable work?

Adams: I think it's done probably very valuable work, but it has that

peculiar static quality which has no power at all to excite people
except those who are already in the know. And the same for the
National Parks Association. Its publication [National Parks and
Conservation] is about the dullest magazine that was ever put out.
The Wilderness Society's isn't much better. But all the experts can
read it, and it has wonderful text and articles. There's no "lift"
to these things. You look at that magazine and you really don't
want to join. You don't have any incentive as you do with the
Sierra Club. The Sierra Club has been flamboyant, and before it
was flamboyant it was very positive and scholarly.

*who died in 1939.

667

Teiser: But still understandable to most people?

Adams: Yes, and I think very inviting, where 1 frankly don't think the

others are. And yet in their way I guess they do marvelous work.
The National Parks Association is primarily out to help the parks
and criticize them. But the Sierra Club gets into everything,
almost everything.

Sierra Club Publications

Teiser: Was Brewer's concept that it should be a "people's" club?

Adams: Well, it was that to a certain extent, but Brower just decided that
we had to increase membership. So I guess then we became a people's
club on account of the appeals, which were very good. That's a
very interesting analysis. We were showing about a 14-percent-a-year
increase in membership, and Brower said, "This is entirely due to
the book program." Well, all the other organizations went up about
the same rate. Maybe the books stimulated it; we don't know. We
know that we got a lot of members through the books, and we sold a
great many books and we lost an awful lot of money. But I think
the books did a certain amount of good. I think the first book,
This is the American Earth, and the first Porter books really had
an impact. Again, they're elitist books, at $15 to $25 each. They
reach people who are usually already sympathetic. They offer
confirmation of ideas and ideals. Now, when the paperbacks came
out, the books reached another audience and much larger. I was
pleading for paperbacks for years. Finally they did it.

Teiser: Didn't they come out ahead financially on the paperbacks?

Adams: Paperbacks are a very simple thing: the club gets 6 percent royalty,
no costs of production whatsoever, and 3 percent of that goes to
the authors and 3 percent goes to the club. And I pleaded with them
when we started the American Earth. I said, "This is fine for us to
do it; we've got backing, we've got money." The McGraw Foundation
gave $15,000 and a $12,000 loan, and we put the book out, gave
copies to congressmen and the legislature, and people bought
thousands of dollars worth. That was fine. But I could see right
away that we had no machinery for publishing, and I tried to convince
Brower, who knew a little of publishing, that his projections were
quite unsound financially. You start out to do a book to sell for
$25. You only get $15 for it, so you have to keep your cost down to
$4 or $5, and you add 5 percent for publicity. Well, when it all
ended up, the costs went up to $7 or $8, and the publicity was 10 to
15 percent.

668

Teiser:

Adams:

Beaumont
Newhall:

Adams :
B. Newhall:
Adams:

In those books were the authors and photographers paid regular
commercial fees?

No, that was a very sad thing. Brower would not admit need for a
contract. There was a great struggle to get any kind of a royalty
at all. There's two bases for royalties. The ideal royalty is 10
percent of retail sales. • In other words, if the book sells for $10,
the author gets a dollar. Well, at present, in many cases they pay
a royalty called 10 percent of invoice, which means the publisher
takes in so much, and you get 10 percent of that. Well, it usually
comes out to about 5 percent of the retail sale price. So there's
a big argument there. Certain books certainly should have 10
percent, low-cost books that have big sales. But when you get into
these very elaborate things like the Sierra Club books, the cost
already is so high that it would make the retail price excessive.

Ansel, for the record, you and Nancy are getting 10 percent list
price on This is the American Earth.

Well, are you sure of that?
Yes.

Well, we held it on that, then,
and printed and printed.

But of course that's been printed

The cost of producing a book should include the cost to the
author or photographer. Now, for the Glacier Bay book, Dave Bohn
got a $7500 advance to go to Glacier Bay for several trips and do
the book. He spent about all of that, because it's pretty
expensive going out for a couple of summers, flying, etc. When the
book was out, he said, "Well, everybody's happy. It's one of our
most beautiful books, so I certainly would like to get some
royalties. I need it." Dave [Brower] said, "But you did have some.
You had $7500 advance royalty." It wasn't that at all. The $7500
should have gone into the cost of the book, and then partly
controlled the sales price of the book.

If Nancy goes around and researches on a trip and spends $1000
or $2000 out-of-pocket expense, that shouldn't come out of royalties;
that ought to be downright expense. Then a studious, scholarly
person working in a library or at home, he has much less expense.
But still, he has stenography and all of that, and I claim that
should go into the book production costs and be perfectly free of
royalties, which is what you get for your time. Does that make
sense to you?

B. Newhall: It makes sense, but you never get it — never.

669

Adams: Well, it depends how you insist on it. The danger is — if you

insist on these things, they say, "Well, we'll cancel the book."
This Authors Guild is a marvelous organization. They're something
like the ASMP in photography; they go to bat for you. But the
Sierra Club never had good contracts, and we had a lot of trouble
with that. The earlier books that were published were just for an
honorarium, you see. People would write for the Sierra Club Bulletin
and get ten copies of the Bulletin. It wasn't a commercial thing.
But when it got into doing books for public sale and getting
professional people, then you had a very different situation, and
one that's been fraught with all kinds of trouble.

Teiser: Your photographs and those of Cedric Wright had appeared in the
Bulletin. Were you paid at all for them?

Adams: Oh no. Those pictures in the Bulletin were all gifts. And pictures
in books and things were all part of the obligation, based on the
fact that it wasn't a commercial organization. It was private, and
it was small. It's like if the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences wanted a picture for an annual bulletin or some special
thing, I would give it to them. It would be a donation. I wouldn't
charge them $25. Although, if it was something I didn't belong to,
I'd say, "What's the budget?"

But for the Sierra Club — people like Philip Hyde have just
worked like dogs and with great expense, and I'm sure he's never
gotten back what he deserves on it.

Teiser: You went on the editorial board of the Bulletin in 1928, I think it
was, under Francis Farquhar as editor.

Adams: Yes. Well, I was supposed to look after the picture end of it.

And of course we had terrible photographs to contend with — you know,
snapshots. People would go on trips and make snapshots, and they
all might have historic interest. And they'll be "Stephen T. Mather
at Mather Pass" — some lousy out-of-focus snapshot. Well, we had to
pick the best ones. But in those days, the club — you have to make
this distinction — it was in a sense an elite, private organization
that was composed of dedicated people, and those who ran the club
had adequate means.

We were talking about the number of young people that were in
the club in the twenties and thirties that dedicated themselves to
it. They didn't all have means. People like Lewis Clark, for
instance, worked eight hours a day for the Telephone Company and
spent their next eight or nine with the club. Nathan Clark, his
brother, was that way too; he was a scientist. And other people now,
like Will Siri, who's a professor of biological physics at the
Donner Laboratory. He works so hard for the club that the head of

670

Adams :

Teiser;

Adams :

Teiser:
Adams:

his department just had to give him a little warning that he was
spending too much time and energy and mustn't forget that he's got
a professional job.

When David Brower came on the editorial board, and that was in the
thirties, I think, he was working at the University of California
Press, was he?

He was at the Press. He was absolutely dedicated to the whole idea
of the club, and he said he'd like to have a job in the club. Of
course, the idea of a $6000-a-year salary was an extravagance which
we never had even dreamed of. I remember urging it over and over:
"If we get this man, it'll pay for itself." Dick Leonard supported
me, and Dave gave up the position at the press, which had tenure,
and took a very considerable cut in salary, with a gentleman's
agreement that it would be raised if possible.

Well, as Dick Leonard would say, for the first several years
he was simply marvelous.

As editor of the Bulletin?

Oh, everything — just sort of running the club. He was executive
director.

Teiser:

Adams:

Oh, this was in the fifties,
until then.

But he'd been editor of the Bulletin

Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser:

Adams:

Oh, he'd been very important as the editor of the Bulletin. And he
knew enough about printing to be very, very valuable. And remember,
he was a very prominent mountaineer and climber, a very active
person.

You'd known him since he was a youngster?

Yes. And he was a great climber, one of the really great rock
climbers. And he did skiing. A true extrovert, and had great
energy and everything that goes with it.

He was earlier a publicity man for Yosemite Park and Curry Company?

Well, he went up there for a year or so because he thought he could
get into Yosemite and do something, but with the perfectly ghastly
advertising and publicity setup they had there, he was thrown out
pretty quickly. They didn't care any more about conservation than
you do about the eradication of snails in the Gobi Desert. [Laughter]
The man that was appointed advertising man after him was the one who
was selling toilet tissue, napkins, and paper goods for Zellerbach.
The agency recommended him as a good salesmanl That's the way the

671

Adams : company thought . I took this man to lunch one time and talked a

little bit about our problems. He just frankly said, "This is all
beyond me. My job is to sell accommodations and make money for the
company. I don't know what you're talking about."

On the other hand, Dr. [Donald B.] Tressider would have a two-
faced put on — you know, he'd be the patron and everything on one
side, and then turn around and be an extremely cold-blooded and
rational businessman on the other. That did a lot of damage to
Brower. I think that's one of the things that probably made him
lose faith in institutions. I thought of that several times. Of
course, they have to make money or they can't exist; you can't give
away rooms. But you're supposed to be controlled by the government,
and you're supposed to try to work with the Park Service idea and
make money within that framework. Well, they weren't, and I think
that was maybe a trigger. Those things happen, you know. I know I
had a terribly sour attitude towards Yosemite people for years.

[End Tape 27, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 27, Side 2]

Teiser: You were talking about Brower being disillusioned.

Adams: Yes, I think he was just like I was. But of course we were

disillusioned because of the troubles we had with them in Yosemite
with our concession, and also in their general attitude. But I
think Brower harbored an idea that nothing mattered except his
ideals. To be rational is more of an effort than some people can
take. You know what I mean by that. There are certain techniques —
Carry Nation and the hatchet — which undoubtedly get results, like
Ralph Nader. But in the long run I often wonder. Maybe they
stimulate action, but the action doesn't continue if it's not
rational.

Zoning

Adams: I'm so scared of the backlash, which you see coming now, in many,
many ways. Zoning is being questioned, for instance. There's a
development in Southern California which is suing for millions of
dollars, for zoning decisions. That scares me, because zoning may
not be based on sound constitutional grounds. It's almost a
permissive thing, and it's always open to variants. If you can
plead hardship, you may get a variant. We see that here all the
time. The artichoke field here may be 160 housing units some day.

Teiser: This tract is between here and Carmel?

672

Adams: It's the tract that's on the east side of the road. (The west side
of the road is going to be in the state park area; it ought to be
the section near the hills.) But we think we can stop it because
of the sewerage situation alone, and the tax structure of the
schools. I mean, it may not be big enough to justify a school, but
too big for the existing schools.

Teiser: Has there been some zoning at Big Sur or has there been contemplation
of zoning down there — ?

Adams: Oh yes, Nat Owings and others did a perfectly magnificent job in
what they call "The Big Sur Plan," and it did relate to land
preservation. In other words, if you have property on both sides
of the road, and you do not build on the one acre on the ocean side
of the road, you can have two or three dwellings per acre on the
other side of the road. They can't tell you not to build. A lot
of people have cooperated and some haven't; some have been very bad.
The Monterey County planning commission comes in and gives a ruling,
and the next thing, the local supervisor is besieged with letters
and threats from the opponents. The board of supervisors hearings
are always open, and people with rulings against them come in with
tearful pleas of hardship. So the board, which is usually one vote
over the edge toward business conservative, grants a variance. If
there were just one vote the other way, we could be assured of more
protection.

You see, south Monterey County (inland) is oil. Then there's

the Salinas area, which is largely agricultural, but some people

want to make it industrial. And the board is pretty smart there;
they don't like that.

Then there's this Monterey Peninsula side, which serious people
think should be a separate county. Our aesthetic and protection
efforts here shouldn't intrude into the sound business progress of

the larger area of the county,
checks and balances.

It gets very complex, with many

Well, the Sierra Club was always interested in this type of
legislation, but they never got into specific zoning problems until
lately.

The Sierra Club Decision-Making Structure

Teiser: I think at some point Walter Starr made a study of the organization
of the club.

673

Adams: Let me assure you, there have been many studies of the organization.
None of them have gotten anywhere. There was an organization
committee. As far as I'm concerned, it was a flop decision —
nothing happened. One report was made by the man who was the
treasurer of Duke University; he's a nice man, smokes a pipe, and
he's very slow and doesn't have too much imagination. I guess Duke
University is all right, but I saw things go on that I couldn't
understand how our financial expert couldn't see himself. He just
didn't notice them. I hate to say this on the record, because he's
a nice man and absolutely honest. But Lewis Clark, Nathan Clark,
and a group made a scientific analysis of the club. I think Tom
Jukes helped in the analysis. One man who worked for the PG&E
or the Telephone Company statistical department, very prominent in
the chapter — he made a mathematical analysis and a chart of what we
should do. There's nothing that's ever really come to pass about
it; the response has been, "Well, it'll be nice to do it, but..."

Teiser: How was the decision made, then, to have a full-time director?

Adams: Well, the fact that the club was growing and we just couldn't leave
it to voluntary help. Colby was getting out, and I and others had
no administrative ability. People like Lewis Clark would come in
and do something valid and would be joined by others. All would work
on a fragmented basis. Dick Leonard was tending to everything he
possibly could, but he realized we had to have one good man to be
responsible.

The system is this: there's a board of directors, and they
appoint the executive committee. The executive committee can make
very important decisions, but they are all subject to review by the
board. Theoretically the executive committee actions could be
criticized by the board, but that has very rarely happened. There's
been a couple of times when the board questioned some actions.

Then, under the executive committee are the other committees —
the publications committee and the outing committee and the
mountaineering committee. They are responsible to the executive
director who, in turn, submits their decisions to the executive
committee, who makes the final decisions, which are then subject to
the final approval of the board, which is given at an annual meeting.

Teiser: Was it the board who decided upon the fact that there should be an
executive director, or was it the president, who was then Leonard?

Adams: No, I think the executive committee agreed and the board supported
their action. We did a lot of things by telephone in the early
days. We'd call up and say, "What do you think?" and if there 'd
be an obvious majority, we'd go ahead. Now, that's not entirely
legal! In the Friends of Photography, we must address every

674

Adams: director by mail and get a letter back from all, to make an action
binding. If it's a simple single proposition ("Should we raise the
salary of the janitor?"), if we get a majority of letters back saying
saying, "Yes, we should do that," then we can say that's as effective
as a meeting. But the Sierra Club's never been able to do that —
legally. They haven't done it at all lately, but when the club was
small, they would just take a consensus over the telephone. It was
perfectly good. You know, they'd call me up and they'd say, "Such
and such a thing has come up — what do you think about it?"

"I'm all for it."

"We'll put you down 'pro'." And if they got a majority of
pros, they felt safe to take the action.

Teiser: So it was still really a small community that was acting —

Adams: We were all considered gentlemen, and no political shenanigans were
going on.

Teiser: Brower had been on that board just before the war for one term, I
think. So he knew how that worked.

Adams: Well, the board was like no other board that I've ever heard or

known of. Leopold* used to get so absolutely furious (I would too)
that instead of sending out all the agenda data in advance so the
board members could think about it, we'd just start out from
scratch and spend hours nit-picking. People would come from the
East and the Midwest and the South and the North, and spend two
hours on a little point that the assistant director should be able
to handle with prior dispatch.

Teiser: Has that been changed in recent years?

Adams: Not too much. They spent five hours trying to select the president
this last time. Larry Moss was politicizing — trying to be
president — and Judge [Raymond] Sherwin was being supported as
incumbent. He's a very fine gentleman and I think he didn't speak
up as he should have in his own behalf. But they spent all these
hours of wasted time. Finally he got in by two votes. Well, Larry
Moss is going to be president next year. Maybe he wants to get
Brower back. If that happens, I'll resign from the Club. Then
it's — I no longer want anything to do with it. It'll become kind
of a political thing like the Democratic National Convention — or
the Republican. [Laughs]

*A. Starker Leopold.

675

Leadership Conflicts

Teiser: When Brower was going well, so far as everyone knew, in the fifties
and early sixties —

Adams: He was going e'xtremely well. And that's the tragedy. He was an
extremely capable, intelligent and forceful person. And I
recommended him.

Recently I put up a terrible fight that he shouldn't be
honorary vice-president of an organization he probably wrecked. And
I would not receive my honorary vice-presidency if he got his.* I
just couldn't see it. But I still proposed him for the John Muir
Award, which is an objective appreciation of work in conservation.
Some people can't see that makes any sense. But one is an objective
thing for what he did, which was tremendous. And the other relates
to the organization, and I just couldn't agree to it.

Teiser: In about '65, I think it was, Joel Hildebrand was going to resign as
honorary vice-president. And Alexander Hildebrand and Richard
Leonard offered to resign from the board because they thought the
finances were —

Adams: That was it — the finances were getting very bad. You see, at the
board meetings we have often what you call a caucus, which is a
meeting which has no power and is off the record. In other words,
it's just people getting together and making decisions to avoid
later argument of the board. We find out, how are we going to vote
on this? Let's get the arguments thrashed out now. And so we'd
fight it all out and find that it would be five to seven, or eight
to four, etc. So when it comes up before the regular board, people
vote accordingly. We've already discussed it.

Well, Leonard told us about the finances and the certain
things that had been done like putting up restricted funds as
collateral, which is not legal. And that every director, at that
time, was responsible for about $60,000 in cash, as a trustee of a
public fund. Well, I've heard lawyers talk back and forth and say
it's not true; but Leonard declares that in a public trust like the
Sierra Club, which has taken public monies, the directors are, in
effect, trustees and are personally responsible.

Teiser: Alexander Hildebrand was offering to resign from the board, and

Joel Hildebrand was offering to resign as an honorary vice-president.

Adams: Yes. Well, they just didn't like the ethics involved, which was
very shady in many cases. It was a real fracas! I don't really
blame them. The club had meant something to them, and now it was

*Ansel Adams refused the honorary vice-presidency in 1971 and 1974,
accepted it in 1978. David Brower was elected honorary vice-
president in 1971.

676

Adams: getting to be a kind of problem, you know, financially and otherwise,
and they didn't want their names on it. They wanted me to get off,
and I didn't see that I should. I said, "Well, somebody has to stay
on the board."

Well, then it came out that, seeing as I had gone on the record
at the meetings for three years in opposition to the fiscal policy,
in case the club did collapse I would be free of obligation — I and
a few others — because we had opposed this policy. Which meant that
the ones who had favored the policy would have that much more
obligation. [Laughter] We're talking about $100,000 apiece there;
it was really pretty serious.

It got to a point where it might be going to the attorney
general. In fact, I was in favor of cleaning it off. Couldn't do
anything with Brower. The president was too weak. He wouldn't
control him. Wayburn said, "If I oppose Brower, why, the member
ship will rise up and put me out of office." I said, "Well, look,
you've got to do your duty, and if that's what the membership wants,
that's not your problem." I said, "I'd be very glad to be thrown
out of office if I am standing up for a principle." It's a strong
ethical point. And a whole year went by when Brower just went
berserk, and Wayburn finally had to make some directives. It
wasn't the opposition he expected at all — only about 10 percent.

Teiser: That was the directive to take fiscal responsibility away from
Brower?

Adams: Yes. That was first taken away, and then he was just discharged.
It should have been done two or three years earlier. Firm action
might have helped, but nobody did anything.

You have the term "ostensible agent," which is a very tricky
and very involved thing. Suppose that you have an organization and
I'm working for you, and I have an executive position in it, and I
go out and spend money and buy and sell, and it goes on for
several years, and there's no opposition. I'm not restrained in
any way. It's assumed that I represent you. Therefore, anything
I do, you are responsible for. Leonard simply said, "Well, on the
principle of 'ostensible agent' the club is responsible. Let's
face it." That was the thing that was very nerve-wracking, because
we were then nearly $400,000 in debt, which is a lot of money,
especially when some of the collateral for it shouldn't be applied.
It was a pretty serious business. It's a very complex thing.

Brower has great charisma, and he has an army of devotees who
think he's just the second coming. Bill Turnage was up north
recently trying to talk to somebody up there and explain the
history, and the man said, "You're just crazy. You're influenced

677

Adams: by Adams. You work for Adams, and Adams is absolutely wrong."

Turnage said, "I have read into this in great detail and from many,
many sources, and my opinion is not based on Adams's opinion."

Teiser: Do young people who are emotionally involved with ecology, do they
admire Brower?

\dams: A lot of them, yes. A lot of them just go to the spectacular —
and the Christ, the Messiah element. And the Messiah involves
doing away with all worldly things, so then money means nothing.
Material things mean nothing. Thoreau was a perfect example,
although he was far more practical-minded than a lot of people care
to imagine. He had a hostile, paranoid situation, and he withdrew
from the world; he became a hermit. But he went back to Boston to
get food every so often and tend to his affairs. I'd never trust
him around the corner.'

I think Muir was very naive. But as somebody pointed out,
Muir married a quite well-to-do woman, and could run a nice farm
and do what he wanted to do. George Marshall is another example of
somebody who's just marvelous and lives in a world of abstract
theory, and he can afford to. But the nitty-gritty of it is, if
you're going to do this, it is going to cost so much money, and
where does the money come from? The thing that gets me absolutely
in a state of panic is that this Christo gets $700,000 to put that
curtain up in Rifle Gap. Why don't the conservationists start
yacking when he covers the rocks, takes half a mile of seacoast
rocks and covers them with a plastic, and gets hundreds of thousands
of dollars to do it?

Teiser: Brower himself, on the other hand, I gather, led quite an ascetic
life.

Adams: His own personal life — family — was all right. But he certainly

would fly first class, build up bills at restaurants. He took two
of his staff first-class to the Frankfurt Book Fair. He was running
up a $700-a-month bill at the Alley, the little local restaurant.
Anybody comes to town, he'd take the whole staff out to lunch, put
it on the chit. Dick Leonard was acting treasurer and began to see
these things come in. Oh yes, then he had a contingency fund, which
was raised to $20,000 — shouldn't have been that much. It was
$12,000, then went to $15,000. I remember then it went on to
$20,000. He just took $5000 of that and founded the John Muir
Institute, of which he became president — which was an awful thing
to do.

Teiser: That's still in existence. Is that still his — ?

678

Adams: Oh yes. That's still his baby. The Friends of the Earth has gone

in the red, but the John Muir Institute is apparently the nest. But
that was founded, apparently, with Sierra Club money. So you see,
the whole thing is very questionable —

Teiser: You said, and other people said too, that Brower alienated people
who could be helpful to the club —

Adams: That was the greatest loss we had.

Teiser: If he alienated those people, whom did he entertain?

Adams: He entertained activist conservationists, individuals who were on
his side. But the people that you have to work with, like the
lumber people and the power people and the government, and so on —
the National Parks and Wilderness [Society] people — he alienated
those; they wouldn't talk with him or the Sierra Club. We were
completely out of communication for quite a few years. They simply
wouldn't talk to us with that man Brower at the helm; they didn't
want to be insulted.

Teiser: He was personally insulting?

Adams: Oh, he was terrible. He'd make accusations that were just
absolutely uncalled for.

Teiser: How did it happen, do you think, that he changed so?

Adams: Well, he got bit with the power bug. Somebody probably instructed
him in activist method — which is a very common method. It's the
method of dictators, the method of people like Nader and Carry
Nation and maybe William Jennings Bryan. They're just absolutely
ruthless. The end justifies the means, put it that way. You don't
get anywhere by being polite, says Brower, so you just go out and
raise hell. Well, that isn't exactly true. It might be super
ficially true, you see. You might cow people into certain responses,
but it doesn't —

Teiser: Who in the club was for him?

Adams: The majority of the board were for him for several years. The man
from the Northwest chapter. There was Larry Moss. Martin Litton
was one of the most dynamite characters. He's absolutely — well, I
don't want to be libelous — but he's one of the most irrational
people I know of. And Will Siri would vacillate, one side to the
other, which I never could quite understand. Wayburn would vacillate
one side to the other — politically involved. I'm just trying to
think of these other people. Well, there was a majority. There was
eight people, always, that Brower could count on, and that's a
majority if you have fifteen directors. Of course, the point was
that some of the ideas were terribly good.

679

Adams: August Fruge was always much on our side. I can think of our side
as being August Frugl and Dick Leonard, Lewis Clark — Lewis Clark
took a year or so to come around — of course myself; I think the
treasurer was pretty much. But the thing that bothered me was
they weren't quite definite, which meant they really didn't know
all the things. I'll have to get the board of directors list to be
able to pinpoint them. Do you have the list here?

Teiser: The last one I have here is '63.

Adams: Well, there's lots of names on there I can —

Teiser: [Reading] Edgar Wayburn, Nathan Clark, Charlotte Mauk, Clifford V.
Heimbucher, George Marshall —

Adams: Marshall vacillated, although he was finally very much against.
Mauk was always torn because she always admired Dave as an
individual that climbed, and it was very hard for her to realize
the truth. You know, you have people that are old, old friends.
Nicholas Clinch was somebody that had to finally agree. He was
just stretching it, trying to say, "Well, the man — you can control
him. He's all right." Then when he saw the figures he finally
said, "I can't — I have to vote against him."

Who else do you have there?
Teiser: Pauline Dyer. This is '62.

Adams: Dyer was very much pro-Brower for quite a while. I don't know
whether she's ever changed.

Teiser: Jules Eichorn was on the board in '62.

Adams: Yes. Well, Jules Eichorn was involved for quite a while on a
matter of principle. Then he shifted.

Teiser: Leonard. Bestor Robinson —

Adams: Bestor Robinson was absolutely on our side all the time.

Teiser: R. Clifford Youngquist.

Adams: Youngquist was all for Brower, as I remember.

Teiser: Randall Dickey.

Adams: Randall Dickey was first for him, and then I think realized what we
were up against, and he was very valuable in the CMC procedures.

680

Teiser: Harold E. Crowe.

Adams: Crowe always was on our side.

Teiser: And Harold C. Bradley?

Adams: Bradley was on our side.

Teiser: Phil S. Bernays was —

Adams: Bernays was on our side.

Teiser: Francis Farquhar. Where did he stand?

Adams: Oh, he was always on our side. Colby just said, "Brower is going
to wreck the club" and so did Farquhar and Heimbucher.* They both
had analytic minds and they could see the direction in which it was
going.

Well, just to give you an idea, he put out a color flyer (what
we call a "flyer" in printing, you know — it's an advertisement that
goes to book dealers), he put out one of several pages, 250,000
printed, and it cost about $48,000, but it came out after the
bookselling period. You know, books are sold to dealers primarily
in July and August, and this came out in September. Spending money
like that— $40,000, $50,000— that kind of stuffl

Publication Problems

Adams: But one of the techniques that Brower would have, was applied when

he put through the Galapagos book [The Flow of Wildness] with Porter —
I don't know how Porter feels now. I think he must be pretty much
ashamed of supporting Brower so strongly. But he's off the board
now.

Brower wanted to do the Galapagos, and the publication committee
said it was outside our field, too specific. They turned it down
two or three times. And then it was taken to the executive committee
and they turned it down. Finally Brower went to the board of
directors, reporting on what he was doing, and so on, and said, "The
Galapagos book is now underway." And they said, "Well, Dave, that's
never been approved." "Oh," he said, "I thought it had been," which
is an absolutely bald-faced lie. All the records showed there was
no possible approval.

*Clifford V. Heimbucher.

681

Adams :

Teiser:

. - ams :

"Well," he said, "I don't know what we're going to do. The plates
are made." And that was the time when we should have said, "We are
sorry, David; we think that's your responsibility." And then Dave's
supporters said, "Oh no, no, no. The club is responsible." That's
the time we unfortunately didn't crack down. We should have cracked
down terribly hard and just said, "All right, no matter how many
thousands, it's not authorized, so it's your responsibility." But
then came the "ostensible agency" fact; he ordered them and there's
nothing we can do about it. So after $40,000 or $50,000 have been
committed, we weaken, and he brings out a two-volume book — a complete
flop and a terribly expensive thing. But that was his technique.
He'd say, "Oh, I didn't know. I thought that was approved." In the
meantime, he's had the work done.

Was there one point at which you started doubting all this, or did
it just gradually come over you?

No, I think — he came down here to Carmel one day, and I told him
that I thought the way he was doing things, he was headed for a fall.
And the trouble we had with the Glacier Bay man — Dave Bohn —
we'd had a standard meeting of the board up at Tappaan Lodge, and
Dave Bohn had brought his lawyer in and threatened a suit of
$100,000 unless the agreement was followed through. He had a
contract [for the book GlacierBay ] ; he laid it on the table.

directors were aghast. He had all the records,
contract with Dave Bohn without delay.

The
So we fixed up the

Then it seemed that a family that lived in England and Arizona
(we don't knc . yet what they're citizens of — they must be citizens
of America now) gave the Sierra Club $80,000, I believe. (Mind you,
all these figures are subject to exact analysis. It might have been
$78,000 or $82,000. Say $80,000.) They gave it to Dave in London.
Well, he put it in the bank. It never went through the club
treasury! We don't know yet what the tax situation was. There's
still a potential crackdown — who gave who to what, and whose was it?
Who received it? Dave received it in the name of the club and put it
in the bank. But Dave had previously gone to London and set up a
London office, and the directors knew nothing about it until we
suddenly found out that we had a London office!

I think it was Dick [Leonard] who called me up and said, "Do
you know we're in London now?" I said, "What do you mean?" "Well,
I've just been informed we have a London office with a staff." I
said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, Dave decided that was
necessary."

Teiser: What had Brower come down here to talk to you about?

Adams: Oh, that was I think in relation to the Dave Bohn book. I think that
was it. It was a bit vague.

682

Adams: But then this English thing went on, and then the interesting thing
was that Dave published several books in the name of the club, using
this money, which had never gone through the club treasury, you see.
He never embezzled anything for himself.

Teiser: Was the check made out to him?

Adams: The check was made out to the Sierra Club, and he simply endorsed
it "Dave Brower, executive director" and put it in the bank.

Teiser: Whose account?

Adams: Barclay's in London.

Teiser: But I mean, what account?

Adams: A special account; just a Sierra Club account.

Then he got these new books underway. And we said, "Well,
what's going on? What's all this funny business? We'll have to
straighten this out. What are you doing with the money?" "Well,
we're publishing books." "What books?" Well, one [of the books]
we knew about; the other one we didn't know about. 1 think it was
Lewis Clark who said, "Dave, this is worrisome. We've got the
contracts, I hope." Dave said, "No." "Well, what document have you
got?" He said, "Oh, I've got plenty that will document it."

He had only a Xerox copy of the first page of the estimate!
That's all he had to justify all this stuff. In the meantime, they
had received a letter from a friend in London who had understood
that a certain printing house was going to do these books. The
friend said, "Look out for them. They're tricky as they come." So
here we were with the idea of spending money which we didn't have —
in our name, by our ostensible agent, without any knowledge of tax
situations, and no firm contract. There's been no trouble over it
yet, but it was a highly irregular procedure. That's the kind of
thing we had to contend with.

Teiser: Of course, his background was in publishing, so I guess he saw

publishing ventures as an important activity, but didn't he also
take considerable part in conservation projects?

Adams: Oh yes. He involved the club in many things without authorization.
Some of them very good, some of them very questionable.

683

Conservation Conferences

Teiser: I think there was a whole series of biennial meetings on
conservation at the —

Adams: The Wilderness Conference — I think that that was suggested to Brower
by the board, but was formulated pretty much by Peggy Wayburn. That
was a very fine concept, and I think it's been as successful as
anything of that kind can be. You wonder what happens. People come;
they all agree. I suppose it's like a medical convention, but at a
medical convention people learn a lot about new techniques and
everything. I suppose the Wilderness Conference did give construc
tive reports, but I attended two and they were the dullest things
I've ever been to in my life. [Laughter] Stuart Udall gave a pretty
good talk at one. At the last one they had, I think Rogers Morton
spoke, which was a catastrophe because he wasn't prepared for it.

Teiser: So you don't feel those were very valuable activities?

Adams: I don't know! The exhibits were terrible. Such meetings are

composed of 90 percent sympathetic people talking to themselves.

Teiser: I think Norman Livermore suggested the first one in 1949, called the
"High Sierra Wilderness."

Adams: Well, that's perfectly possible. But that was not — that related to
High Sierra wilderness, which was a specific thing for the Sierra.
But the Wilderness Conferences were nation-wide, even world-wide.

Teiser: In '35 you had sponsored a —

Adams: Oh, we had a little thing called the "Wildflower Festival" up
in Yosemite, which was on conservation. And it was called the
"Wildflower Festival" because it was the time of year when all
the flowers were out. We had a very good crowd.

Teiser: Did you talk about conservation?

Adams: Yes, whole new ideas of conservation. Virginia must have the
proceedings somewhere. Pearl Chase of Santa Barbara was very
enthusiastic about it. We had quite a number of people attend.

Teiser: But it must have been one of the first things of its kind —

Adams: I think it was one of the first things in the West of its kind, yes.
We took people on tours, and we had botanists and foresters talk,
helping to wake people up to the Sierra Club principles of thinking
in those days.

684

Adams: Pearl Chase is a dynamo. She is an absolute vocal firebrand. I've
never known anybody who could bring forth more names, more facts,
more dates, and with a terrific amount of energy. Just unbelievable.

Mrs. [Emily] Pope is somebody of that type — the Small Wilderness
Group lady. It's just like winding up an electric fan. She gets
things done. She saved the fine oak grove near San Luis Obispo. I
haven't heard from her recently. Maybe she's exhausted. But she
really accomplished a lot.

Teiser: Militant women do get things done.

Adams: Yes. They go right in and sit down opposite a businessman's desk

and say, "We want this." You know, it's pretty straightforward. I
think Justin Dart gave some money for that; this beautiful oak grove
was going to be a trailer park. She was able to save it.

Gifted People

Adams: It's very important never to underestimate what Brower has

accomplished as a conservationist. When all the brouhaha is over
and history comes to the fore, ten or twenty years from now, and
the financial situations are forgotten and all these other things,
his actual accomplishments will loom very large. And that would be
good. I'm not criticizing that. I'm criticizing the ethical,
moral, and practical procedures in relation to the Sierra Club.

Teiser: Too bad he couldn't have gone along on an even keel, isn't it?

Adams: Well, maybe people like that can't. We have the same in some
people in the sciences. Look at Linus Pauling. Is he twice a
Nobel Prize winner? He certainly must know scientific procedures,
and yet he goes out and talks about vitamin C as if he's absolutely
gassed. The doctors are uncertain because there's no available
tests as to what the side effects would be. But it's the great
Linus Pauling, and he espouses causes like Russell* did. Some of
them were absolutely irrational and had nothing to do with his
extreme rationality in his field.

I know Dr. Land talks about wonderful gifted people that are
the absolute apex in their own field and just plain damn fools when
they get into other fields. Why don't they know enough about
themselves to know they can't do that?

[Calls across the room to the Newhalls and Helen LeConte] How you
all doing over there?

*Bertrand Russell.

685

Voices: Just fine. Just starting. We've been looking at an early Adams

album [of photographs of a mountain trip with the LeConte family],

Adams: Oh, my gosh. It's probably faded. [Laughter]

I think I'd like to say something about Cedric Wright again.
We didn't quite complete that. Cedric never gave money to anything.
Cedric was extremely tight financially. 'Now, maybe he was so fixed
with trust funds that he couldn't, but he was really penny-pinching
when it comes to cash, but extremely generous in time, pictures, and
effort. And his book, which I got through the club with considerable
opposition — the little volume, Words of the Earth — has been quite
successful. It still sells. Apparently it's sort of a handbook to
a certain type of — what we call "flower children" type. The more
tranquil, philosophic young people just love that book and its
rather naive writing. But the This is the American Earth still is
the one that carries a real impact.

Teiser: And it's been said to be more important than any other single book
in conservation — I've heard people say that.

Adams: Well, it started the series. Now we're trying to think about doing
another edition, which is awfully complex. You don't rewrite a bible
after it's done. The original stands and it may have its faults.
It has some superficial assumptions in it, but the important thing
to me about it is, it's truly poetic. And most conservation
material is anything but poetic; it's the driest, dustiest,
dismalest collection of prose writings you can possibly imagine.
Just read reports I I'm not talking about Muir and Thoreau, although
I don't think they were true poets. I think Wordsworth had it all
over them. But the average conservation text of today — it's just
terribly hard to get through it. It's like a tract or a legal
statement. And how they ever expect to arouse public interest and
excitement with that particular style is beyond me.

But what Nancy did in This is the American Earth is really a
poem. Beaumont calls it a synergistic relationship; I call it
synesthetic — the relationship between words and pictures, in which
the pictures do not illustrate the text, and the text does not
describe the pictures; it simply goes together. And she did the same
in Time in New England with Paul Strand. It's an approach we need
very much, because it can be accurate and at the same time emotionally
exciting.

[End Tape 26, Side 2]

686

Conflicts, Continued
[Begin Tape 27, Side 1]

Teiser:

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams :
Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :

Do you remember sometime in the sixties Fruge made a study of the
editorial activities of the club —

Yes, he did. And I recall he came strongly out against us publishing,
because he could not see any economic justification, and he said that
that was not our field, but that we could initiate ideas, texts,
pictures — put things together. But we really should allow the
publishing to be done by a designated publishing house who had the
experience and "machinery." Because we didn't have the "machinery."
What I mean by "machinery" is the fact that any good-sized
publishing house has several hundred items and the whole business of
production, publicity and sales at their command.

Did he suggest any specific publishing house?

No, I don't think so.

Was there any movement to have that done then?

Well, I suggested the University of California Press, but they can't
do certain things. There's always that bugaboo of competition between
them and commercial publishers. They're supposed to be limited to a
specific field. He didn't feel that the University Press had the
machinery to do what we wanted to do. Paul Brooks of Houghton-Miff lin
was a vacillator between Brower — between the ideal and the practical.
They, Houghton-Miff lin, never wanted to get burned by the books. He
kept out of it. Several people wanted to publish, but their
standards weren't good. I can't remember all the history of it.
But Fruge was always very rational.

Oh, and another director who was all for Brower in the beginning
and for whom it was very painful to have to come to a negative
conclusion was Phil Berry. They were climbing companions, and it was
all a very difficult personal thing.

Who are the ones left now in the group?
group that's for him?

You say there still is a

Oh, I would say a good part of the board is still — I think both women
on the board, and [Martin] Litton. He so dominated the Atlantic
chapter that the people there still hang out for him. I don't really
know. I think that, being out of it as I have been, I shouldn't pass
judgment on it ethically and because I really don't know. I'm just
an ordinary member now. I may not be even that long, if things
continue.

687

Teiser: Would it be conceivable that they would bring Brower back into the
club?

Adams: Yes, very conceivable. It's also conceivable the club would go into
total bankruptcy, which then means it would be taken over by the
attorney general of the state.

Teiser: At one time I think you suggested that perhaps members of the Sierra
Club who objected to Brower should resign and either affiliate
themselves with another organization or create a new one.

Adams: Yes, I said that if the club had no future, then it was necessary for
the people who believed in what we were doing to get together. But
it was not a very practical thing because forming an organization of
that kind and doing anything fresh requires a great deal of money.

Teiser: I think there was some suggestion of joining the Wilderness Society.

Adams: I didn't do that. I think it was a matter of diverting funds. How
much funds have you got? How much money and energy and time can you
spend? Now, if you want to spend it constructively — I did everything
I could in relation to the club, and now I just can't do it. One can
do just so much!

Teiser: Was the Concerned Members for Conservation started first, or was the

Committee for an Active, Bold, Constructive Sierra Club started first?

Adams: The ABC was the Brower one.
Teiser: Which came first?

Adams: I think the Brower came first, knowing that opposition was brewing.
Dick Leonard can give you the basics on that. But, you see, Brower
could use club funds — did use club funds — to propagandize this
organization.

Teiser: Oh, he did!

Adams: Yes. And we couldn't so we had to raise funds; we had to raise at
least $12,000 to reach all the members. Brower would not allow any
of the dissertations or discussions printed in the Argonaut in the
East. He got the New York Times over to his side. Dave's a most
compelling person. He can tell you that two and two is five. If you
don't watch out, you may believe it! So this is a rankling thing
with me still, that the club funds were spent in this way. There's
some statement they weren't, but I think the books show otherwise.

Teiser: The CMC was advocating election to the board of you and Clinch and

Fruge and Maynard Munger, Jr., and Raymond Sherwin and Wayburn. Does
that sound right?

688

Adams: Yes. Wayburn was my protest candidate; I didn't really trust his

point of view on it. Hunger switched over completely, but lost out
on the board in the last election. [Raymond J.] Sherwin is still
president and is, I think, quite rational about things.

Teiser: Mr. Leonard gave us these Xeroxes when we were talking to him. He
pulled cards out and sent them out to be Xeroxed. They're the
results of the board elections for '67, '68, up to '72.

Adams: [Reading the Xerox of the 1972 election] [William] Futrell is the
one that took my place when I resigned, but he apparently has gone
back to Brower. [Paul] Swatek I don't know. Fruge is in, and I
don't know [John] Ricker. Hunger's out. [Edwin] Royce, [Kent] Gill,
Matthews and [Anne] Van Tyne are out. Van Tyne was a very active and
very good lady down in the Santa Barbara area, and yet she lost
heavily.

[Reading the Xerox of the 1968 election] Let's see, Siri.

[Eliot] Porter was all Brower, [Laurence I.] Moss was Brower,

[Phillip] Berry was and then changed. [A. Starker] Leopold was and
then changed. [Charlotte] Mauk wasn't — she didn't run. [David] Sive
was very much Brower — he was the East. [Sanford] Tepfer was Brower.
Nathan Clark was no [against Brower], [Raymond J.] Sherwin was no,

[George] Marshall I think was no, [Philip] Hyde was for Brower.

[James P.] Gilligan I don't know. But Hyde didn't get on.

And '66 — [Frederick] Eissler was very much a Brower man, and
[John B. ] Oakes.

Then you come to '71. [Alfred S.] Forsyth was Brower; Berry,
no; Siri vacillating; Moss for Brower; [Claire] Dedrick I think for
Brower; and [June] Viavant I think for Brower. In 1970, [Richard C.]
Sill was very much against Brower, but rather difficult in getting a
decision out of him; Brooks would go with Brower; [Charles] Huestis
I think was against Brower; Litton was very much on Brower's side;
[Patrick] Goldsworthy was for Brower but lost.

In '69, Wayburn was Brower; Muncheimer* I think was for Brower
but withdrew; Brower didn't make it. Sive was Brower; Eissler was
Brower; [George] Alderson was Brower.

It still is a pretty close business. Now, of course, Leonard
goes off this year. I would have gone off this year, just by the
rotation law.

Teiser: That means that he cannot go back on again?
Adams: He can, after a year, I think.

*Kurt H. Muncheimer.

689

Teiser: When Brower lost the election in 1969, did that indicate then a very
definite split between the directors and the membership?

Adams: No. See, you can go on the board with a petition. You have to get
quite a number now, but if you get those names, you can go on, and
he just didn't make it. He was petitioned all right.

Teiser: But the board didn't take it as any indication that the membership
and board were basically out of joint?

Adams: You see, the nominating committee was named by Brower, and they threw
me off. They called me in Cambridge and said, "I just hate to tell
you this, but the nominating committee put all of the older members
together, and they realized — well, it's nothing personal, but we need
new people, and we did not renominate you." I said, "That's fine,
that's the democratic process." Well, BANG — somebody started to put
my name on a petition, and I came in with I don't know how many
thousand votes. And of course Brower could do the same thing. I was
perfectly happy to get off.

Teiser: Yes, Leonard said you'd been trying to resign for years, and he'd
been urging you to stay on the board.

Adams: Well, I didn't feel I was very useful.

Teiser: Was that after the Brower difficulties began, or was that even before?

Adams: Well, before that. But when Brower was finally canned, I figured,
"Well, I've done my part. I'd like to resign." Leonard and others
said, "No, you can't do that, because the Brower forces are too
strong."

Teiser: You said something the other day, off the tape, about once being in
Cambridge and addressing a chapter meeting. Was this at this same
time?

Adams: Well, it was during the Brower regime. The New England chapter
wanted me to express my opinions on the club, and I primarily
expressed the opinion that the chapters should really run the club.
But I found very considerable opposition. In fact, at least a third
were rather violent. As far as they were concerned, I was just an
old fossil; didn't know what it was all about.

Teiser: Are you considered a reactionary by some?

Adams: Oh yes. Sure. [Laughs] Very much. Doesn't bother me, because I
don't think I am. All of this is a relative matter, you know. I
think my record is reasonably clear. I might have done crazy things;
I don't think I did any definitely bad things. I know I must have
made bad judgments sometimes.

690

Preserving Wilderness Through Legislation

Teiser: In 1963, you were given the Muir award. Was that for specific things?

Adams: Just general conservation. That's quite an honor, and I retain it
because it was given at a time when it meant something. I wouldn't
accept it now from the club.

Teiser: In the meanwhile, while all this was going on — I guess this was after
the Wilderness Act was passed, wasn't it? Was the club pretty united
behind the Wilderness Act?

Adams: Oh yes. We worked very hard for that; that's probably one of the
strongest projects we have on hand.

Teiser: Were you satisfied with it?

Adams: Yes, except that again we couldn't talk directly, so we had to fight
through Congress. The Forest Service people would not talk to us
because of Brower. We could have accomplished a great deal more if
we'd been able to be in direct contact.

Teiser: Is that right? There were some provisions in it that I think were
not entirely reassuring.

Adams: Oh no, it was diluted and weakened. We had scrapped to get provisions
back that were vital. But, on the whole, I think we got a pretty good
thing.

Teiser: Then during this same period (I don't know how everything was going
on at once — the publishing programs and the campaigns) the Northern
Cascades National Park was being fought for —

Adams: That was important, and that involved the Forest Service, and it
involved the Kennecott mine. The beautiful view of Glacier Peak,
which is the trademark of the Northern Cascades, with this big lake
in front. (I don't remember the name of the lake.) The Kennecott
people are planning a copper mine situated just over the brink of
this lake, placed on a lower plateau. And we fought very hard against
that. I don't know what's happened to it. I don't know whether they
have withdrawn temporarily. The main problem was the Forest Service
cutting. Because, as I understand, the Forest Service would leave a
little canyon wild but then cut the slopes around it. So many of the
canyons and gorges of the Cascades that do have very fine timber
could be simply ruined by even moderate cutting above. So the
problem was how to establish an adequate national park.

691

Adams: You remember that the Kings Canyon park was developed with an

"enclave" as it's called — reserving the whole floor of the Kings
Canyon for a dam, from Cedar Grove on up, and I think Tehipite
Canyon too. The only way we could get the park was to leave these
areas out. Now, whether that's been resolved or not, I don't know.
But we never could have gotten the Kings Canyon Park through if it
hadn't been for this concession to [the Bureau of] Reclamation.

You see, Reclamation is under the Department of the Interior,
just like the National Park Service. So you've got an internal
squabble there that is really almost unbelievable — forces pulling
against each other in the same department. If it were the Forest
Service, you could understand, but when it becomes an intra-bureau
situation, then you're in trouble.

[End Tape 27, Side 1]

[Interview XXIV (Sierra Club Interview V) — 8 September 1972]
[Begin Tape 28, Side 1] [During this interview, Nancy Newhall was
going over photographs in a nearby area. ]

Teiser: Last time I lost a piece of the recording tape. We were talking
about the Grand Canyon campaign. It seemed to be such a crucial
kind of thing in various ways. You were all for trying to save it
in some ways, I believe you said. What ways?

Adams: Well, it's very, very complicated because there were several factors.
I'm not too clear about many of them. There was a series of dams to
be built in the Grand Canyon — in the lower area — and the water would
back up into the Grand Canyon proper. I remember us making a
statement one time that "you wouldn't flood the Sistine Chapel so
you could see the ceiling frescoes from a boat." [Laughter] And of
course that happened to be a very gross exaggeration in relation to
the Grand Canyon, because it would be very hard to see the water at
all, except in a few places. But it would, of course, ruin the
effect of the free flow of the river. Instead of many great rapids
in the lower areas, there1 d be a series of dams with their extensive
lakes. I don't know yet how far up they would reach. I imagine they
would go up under Hopi Point or even Bright Angel Point. But they
would be very hard to see from above. So it wouldn't have been a
matter of filling the Grand Canyon, like a bathtub, to the top.

Then the other plan was to divert the Colorado from near the
Navajo Bridge — the eastern end of the Canyon — from a fairly high
elevation, and with a very long tunnel bring it down to the lower
end to, I think, the Havasupai area. There'd be these great
waterfalls — power-producing falls. That would take the water out
of the canyon proper, which would be very bad, and the lakes would

692

Adams: begin below that. I think that was probably the greatest

desecration. There was a very belligerent campaign, and Dave Brower
was extremely vociferous in it. The club, of course, was all against
it; as is the case of many other organizations and individuals of
considerable power that were fighting it too.

I think we did ourselves a bit of a disservice by not giving
credit to all the people that really worked on it. This is a thing
I've often felt — as with the Save-the-Redwoods League. The club
simply would never mention the Save-the-Redwoods League, and yet that
was the backbone of the whole redwood preservation movement. This is
a kind of organization ego which I never could quite accept. I mean,
not that we didn't do a great deal, but I don't think you could ever
say that one person or group did it all. But, in any event, the dams
are temporarily stopped.

Now, there's other dams in the Cameron area above the Grand
Canyon that are planned and, I guess, many more that will serve as
settling dams. You see, there's a lot of silt, sediment, alluvial
soil, etc. The amount of silt is tremendous at Boulder Dam. There's
something like seventy-five freight cars a day (somebody said seventy-
five freight trains) pouring into it by the river flow. Anyhow, this
enormous amount of material is going into Boulder Dam and silting it
up. It won't be so long as they originally thought — I think they
figured two hundred years, and now they say it's less than half that
time, before the Boulder Dam will be just a nice sandy plateau with
a wall -at one end and the river pouring over it.

Of course, what that does, as far as power is concerned, is not
so bad. It does do a great deal of harm to water storage. As the lake
becomes shallow, you can't store as much water. Of course, the water
below that now is relatively clear. But they're thinking of putting
what they call settling dams (and I think they have a few now) up in
the eastern areas of the Colorado. But those are going to fill up
too! There are already pictures of quite a number of dams in that
sandstone country that are absolutely filled up — just plateaus. The
future is a scary thing to think of.

You see, with a place like the Hetch Hetchy in the Sierra
Nevada, where you have granite rock, you have very little silt. You
have some. The Hetch Hetchy will fill up with silt some day. When it
draws down, we see mud, but that probably is more local than otherwise.
Because there isn't much dirt carried down by the Tuolumne River,
even in high floods. But the Colorado is always running with thick
reddish silt.

Teiser: Were you implying that you thought a low dam might not be very
destructive in the Grand Canyon?

693

Adams: [Thinking] No, no. Well, a low dam at the western end would

simply not bring the water back as far, but then it would be very
uneconomical; it would fill up very quickly. Putting in a dam that
wouldn't work for long would be worse than putting in a bigger one
that would for a time. It would be very hard to destroy the visual
impact of the Grand Canyon, but you certainly could damage the
quality of the bottom of the canyon itself — it would be ruined. But
that's the basic problem now everywhere — how to preserve the .
integrity of the rivers. We have the Wild River programs, to leave
rivers alone for boating and rafting and just for themselves. But
the water power people in the West are very much against that,
because they claim that damming up a river and using it for power
and agriculture is of much greater benefit to humanity than just
having it available for a few river-rapid runners. That's just the
eternal balance for numbers — I mean, what is a true benefit? If you
just put it on a physical basis, of benefit for the majority, why,
then you could wreck everything because what's the use of having an
opera if only six thousand people go and there's a million people in
the area? Why spend the money? Or an art gallery — how many people
see it? You know, you can just carry that to absurdity — equating
quality with just quantity use.

Teiser: The Grand Canyon campaign was what lost the Sierra Club its tax free
status. Is that right, or is that oversimplifying it?

•

Adams: Well, no. It was due to the fact that he — the Internal Revenue law
clearly states that any public organization that uses funds to
influence legislation loses its tax deductible status. That's the
law. Well, we did put out some advertisements on the Grand Canyon
which clearly stated, "Write your congressman against this." We
were obviously influencing legislation. I think what did it was the
final redwood advertisement along the same lines.

Now, I was told on very good authority that the IRS tried to
work with Brower, telling him how he could do this and not yet run
afoul of the law — get another group to do it in some way so it would
be legitimately safe. But he just had a great scorn for the IRS, so
he rejected the idea. Then there was nothing else to do for the IRS
but let the axe down.

We had fortunately anticipated this, and we formed the Trustees
for Conservation and later the Sierra Club Foundation, which by the
way took in $400,000 last year. They're doing wonderfully. And of
course we can then disperse the funds to the club for purposes not
influencing legislation — education and lawsuits, publications and
properties, etc.

Teiser: All those years the Sierra Club had been influencing legislation by
inviting a senator to lunch, talking with congressmen, all kinds of
things —

694

Adams: Oh yes, but it wasn't done obviously.
Teiser: Nor was it done with any large expenditure?

Adams: Sixty thousand dollars, a hundred thousand for one of those ads,
you know that's pretty considerable amounts.

Teiser: Did the club back Brower in those ads?

Adams: A lot of people were very much scared and tried to dissuade him,
because they knew what was going to happen. People like Leonard
would say, "Well, if it happens, we have the foundation."

Teiser: Did they like the idea of the ads themselves?

Adams: Well, I think they liked the idea of the ads if they worked, and I
think they certainly did work.

The Sierra Club Foundation

Adams: We got a lot of support, but the tragedy was that when the axe fell
and'we were declared non-tax deductible, then Brower wanted to fight
the IRS. So for a whole year he would just say it's costing the
club $5000 a week in donations; but never once would mention the
foundation, which could have received all these donations, until
finally President Wayburn ordered him to stop such statements, which
he should have done a year before.

That was a very strange, vague, mixed-up period, because it
didn't make any sense. If we hadn't had the foundation, then it
would have been disastrous. But instead of our urging, "Well, let's
try to change the law" and spend time and funds agitating for a
change in the law, we just defied it. In the meantime, the money
could have gone to the foundation. But Brower just wouldn't come
clean with it, and of course that cost us a great deal of money —
for a year.

We really did lose, because when people heard of the foundation,
they were just aghast — "Why didn't you tell us it existed?" "Well,
Brewer's mad at the IRS." It was a monumentally stupid procedure.
So I had no sympathy with it and can't understand that kind of
thinking.

Teiser: What was the Trustees for Conservation?

695

Adams: Oh, it was first set up as an organization that would receive monies
that were not tax deductible — for certain gifts that might help the
club. But that didn't work, because the club itself was still tax
deductible, and the IRS said, "You're fooling yourself. You should
be tax deductible." So they granted the Trustees for Conservation
a tax deductible charter. But we didn't influence legislation
directly, you see. I don't know really what we did; it's one of
those rather vague things! The foundation, on the other hand, has
done just marvelously.

Teiser: What sort of people contribute to the foundation?

Adams: Oh, everybody — individuals and organizations. I don't know the list.
But it's been very successful. Then they give grants to the club.
But then, you see, the club has all these lawsuits and is in great
danger now of a counter suit for many millions of dollars, which
some people are worried about, because we have made I think very
unnecessarily harsh statements and have caused considerable
financial loss through injunctions and actions that might amount to
libel. We are now being sued for — I don't know what it is — $10
million or something. So the club transferred all its property and
holdings to the foundation.

Now, for instance, Tuolumne Meadows. The Soda Springs there
was owned by the Sierra Club and was part of Tuolumne County and is
real property. So if the club had been sued and had lost the suit,
those assets would have been taken over and sold to the highest
bidder. So you could have a developer trying "monkey business"
right in the park. We just figured it's just something that the
club should get rid of, should unload for its own safety. So all of
the properties of the club, I think with the exception of the Clair
Tappaan ski lodge — which I don't understand because it is a very
runnable thing that could be turned into a valuable operation — the
foundation has taken that over, and the club is working out a
considerable debt, plus a considerable threat of suit.

Teiser: If the club should go under — I think you mentioned it could go broke—
the foundation could just keep on?

Adams: The foundation is independent.

Teiser: That foundation is a good thing?

Adams: Yes, it's the only thing.

Teiser: Are you involved closely with the foundation?

Adams: No. Except — well, I'm close in a way. I'm not on the board; I

didn't want to be. Again, it's an "expert" situation. You have to
know far more than I know about finance and law. Wayburn's the

696

Adams: president of it. Dick Leonard was. Dick Leonard is really the
moving spirit. It's a terribly good thing, probably the saving
thing for the club. Of course, they wouldn't be in a position to
bale the club out. If the club goes under, it goes under, and
probably the attorney general takes over and administers the
remains. Any organization that is built on public funds, if it goes
broke, the state has to take it over. A bank can't. A bank could
take over physical assets, but members' dues and funds, perpetual
funds and all that, they have to go under the administration of the
state. I don't know the legality of it in detail. But I'll be
honest — it had gotten so bad there, that I almost threatened to say
the attorney general should take us over. They did that with the
Gold Star Mothers, who were terribly mismanaged. They took money
from the public, very considerable sums, and it was so mismanaged,
the state had to step in and control it. It wasn't anything really
crooked. The state, you see, is responsible for the public funds —
in a sense, the government protects -your funds.

And there's a very interesting legal thing: If I want to do
pictures for advertising, as I've done in the past — use a family and
get the model releases from mama and papa and children, and then
the parents sign releases for the children — those releases are
really not valid, because if anything was done that would work to
the detriment of the children, the state remains the guardian of
the children and would step in. The father, who was a lawyer, was
signing the release, but he said to me, "I know you're all right.
I know this photograph is perfectly fine. But if something
happened where someone misused the picture of these kids, my release
wouldn't count at all, and the state could come right in and I'd be
in trouble for even permitting it."

All that is very complicated I I'm not a lawyer. But I'm
always surprised to get certain legal truths. Things that come out
with planning and zoning and contracts.

Dams and Reservoirs

Teiser: Another of the great early battles that the club fought, the Kings
Canyon one — I think you mentioned it as an example of how an
organization must compromise in order to accomplish things.

Adams: Well, we were very anxious to put over the Kings Canyon National
Park, next to Sequoia. I did my little stint — I went east and
talked to congressmen and senators, presented the book —

Teiser: This was in the thirties.

697

Adams: Yes. They heard it pretty favorably, but the water people, you see,
have great power, so the congressional committee would not allow
this park to be established unless the canyons of the middle and
south fork of the Kings and a few other areas were reserved for
reservoirs. So Cedar Grove, the south fork valley, and the middle
fork of the Kings Canyon technically were out of the park. That
made a lot of people mad, but we had to convince them that if we
didn't give in on those we weren't going to get a park. So they
said, "All right, we'll give in," and it was all right. We got it.
And now I think there's no longer any claim on it. The Bureau of
Reclamation has now given it up. I think it's reverted to the park,
perhaps subject to emergency use. But hydro power is so relatively
expensive now that I don't think it will be used.

As far as water storage, they've got much greater areas. You
understand that some areas can be turned into great dams but do not
have much depth; therefore they do not have much fall of water and
don't produce much power, but they can hold a gigantic amount of
water. The San Luis dam is one of these huge storage reservoirs.
People don't realize what it is — the water is pumped into it from
the Sacramento. In fact, the water that flows into it is practically
nothing — that's a very arid area. There's this huge lake, I don't
know how many square miles; then, as they release the water, that
water goes into the forebay, but it first goes through a power house,
so it produces power at about half the cost of getting the water up
there in the first place. It doesn't break even, but it does reduce
the basic cost. From the great forebay, by computer, it is directed
to the different aqueducts leading south to San Diego.

Teiser: Have there been any examples of made lakes being abandoned, let go
back to nature?

Adams: Oh, I think a few small ones. Now there's a very ridiculous movement:
Some people are saying we should take out the Hetch Hetchy project,
take down the O'Shaugnessy dam and let the valley revert to nature.
Well, it's the craziest thing I've ever heard of, because there's no
other provision made for San Francisco to get that much water. The
power situation there is highly illegal, to sell the power to the
PG&E. The Raker Act does not permit it, but we've always done it.
The alternate would be to have two separate power systems in San
Francisco.

I don't think there's any major dam that has been abandoned
that I know of. But there have been many small ones. They just
become a "plateau." Unless they take the dam down. Which is quite
a business. You see, the San Luis dam is an earth dam; so is the
Oroville dam. An earth dam is just a great pile of rock and earth.
Whereas Boulder Dam is a cement dam.

698

Adams: They had a terrible time with a dam in Italy. They had tested the
rock as being a very firm type and built the dam on it, but they
didn't know that the rock would gradually yield to the pressures.
Finally it gave way and the water began to leak out, and once the
water starts going, the dam goes down.

A dam is a very interesting thing in hydraulics. A very
strange formula is involved. It's like an aquarium. You have an
aquarium six by six feet, and you have to have a very thick piece of
glass. Now, if you had that aquarium a mile long, but only six feet
high, the same glass will still hold, because the water is subject to
to gravity. It isn't all pressures against the glass. So when they
build these dams, the dam itself very seldom goes out; it's the
contact between the dam and the earth that goes out. I forget the
formula. I've never really known it; I've just seen it. It's
pretty complicated. And after a certain distance in the length of
the dam, it doesn't make any difference, because the weight is
supported by gravity on the ground.

Teiser: You were mentioning the Hetch Hetchy — was the Sierra Club ever
involved in Crystal Springs?

Adams: I don't think so. But we've always been interested in preventing

unnecessary developments. Of course, there's a big dam there above
Hillsborough in that canyon that people don't realize. The Crystal
Springs lakes were relatively small when they were first discovered,
and then they put in this dam which raised them. a hundred feet, I
think.

Teiser: It is always considered an earthquake hazard, isn't it?

Adams: Oh yes. If that dam goes, I've been told, it's going to be awfully
bad for part of the Peninsula.

Teiser: The Sierra Club did play some part in the Point Reyes National
Seashore.

Adams: A very important part. We made a very important effort in that and
we had some unfortunate things happen. We did a very good book
[Island in Time], and then later a movie was made of it. For some
reason or other, Brower adapted the movie, edited and changed it,
and created great animosity. He used this movie and didn't give
credit. Poor editing; it's a very sad story. There was great
animosity there when there shouldn't have been at all.

Teiser: Who made the movie originally?

Adams: I forget the name. It's quite good. But Dave wanted to take all
the credit. Just a habit, you see, of acquiring as much credit as
possible for everything that everybody did, which I think was a
psychological attitude. It's just hard to understand.

699

Teiser: Do you feel that Brower underwent what's known as a personality
change?

Adams: Yes, I think he definitely did. I think about three years after he
took the position of executive director, during which time, as
Leonard would say, he was simply marvelous, he suddenly was bitten
with the power bug, I guess you would say, and really went through
a very definite change, because some of the things are so illogical
and so irrational that it's hard to conceive of them.

Teiser: He would not have been capable of doing them earlier?

Adams: I had a feeling he would. He had always given us the feeling of
being most brilliant and clever and capable. But, it's a strange
thing. It's like people that have fanatical religious convictions —
logic doesn't exist. And unfortunately, history shows that many of
the "movers and shakers," as Mabel Luhan called them, were
extremely difficult, irrational, illogical people. But they were
so convincing that a subsequent generation, or even their own, made
something out of their convictions — made use of them in some way
within themselves. The Calvinist doctrine itself is something
that's pretty hard to understand.

Transferring Properties to Public Ownership

Teiser: Brower fought effectively, however, for Point Reyes?

Adams: Oh yes, he fought effectively for a great many things. And I want
to make it clear again that his total effect has been tremendous.
And for that I was very anxious to see him get the John Muir Award,
which was a straightforward recognition of conservation. I didn't
think he should be honorary vice-president of an organization that
he nearly wrecked. I wouldn't accept that position myself because
of him; I couldn't, in protest. I could understand the John Muir
Award. As somebody said, the railroad association could give
Mussolini the gold medal for making the Italian railroads run on
time, but you'd hardly appoint him to the hall of fame as a great
human being. [Laughter] Or as the savior of Italy. I don't think
Mussolini would really deserve being an "honorary vice-president"
of Italy. [Laughter]

But anyway, you come across those things in business. I think
a very good example of destructive belligerence is George Meany in
labor. He has the ability of practically irritating everybody, and
I don't know what he's gaining. I'm just aghast.

Teiser: Has organized labor ever stepped up for conservation?

700

Adams: Yes. Walter Reuther was marvelous. He was one of our great
losses. He was really a very understanding, balanced, very
intelligent person and very sympathetic. He had big plans, but he
was killed in that unfortunate accident. His union had a place in
Michigan, and one of the men who was operating it — a high man in
the Yosemite Company — would go there and assist him in their
recreational studies. He was just on the edge of really making a
great contribution.

Dr. Land thought he was one of the great important forces in
the country. He went to his funeral in Chicago. He felt it was
little enough to do. Then Land had another great loss with Whitney
Young of the Urban League. They were trying to solve that South
African problem and some people from Polaroid were in Africa. He
apparently had a heart attack and drowned. That was a great shock,
because all these people were interested in a better life for
people, in the out-of-doors certainly.

You see, the out-of-doors to the easterners means something
different than to us. It's not the wilderness mystique. We have
to understand that — we have an awful problem now with the ghetto
and the urban problems and the underprivileged and the rural
attitudes — the rural people are really land-users and exploiters
who enjoy hunting and fishing. But the elitist group which enjoys
the so-called "wilderness mystique" is in a pretty precarious
position. They're diminishing. They're growing in number but I
think diminishing in proportion to the population. Every time the
space program or the wilderness preservation or anything like that
is proposed, you find a big bloc coming up and saying, "Well, why
don't you spend these millions to improve the urban blight?" etc. —
which is perfectly sympathetic. You see enough in San Francisco to
realize how perfectly ridiculous it is to see these great skyscrapers-
super slick, with imperial grandeur — and just a few blocks away
there's rundown buildings and quite poor people.

I went into the Clift Hotel — a very nice place — and right
after supper I walked down the street past shops of postcards,
posters, books — real porno places. Horrible stuff, really. Just
bad, not even funny. And full of people poring over this stuff.
And out in the street a guy had passed out with drugs on the corner —
his knapsack spilled in the gutter.

Teiser: You took the wrong turn. You got into the Tenderloin.

Adams: I was right on Geary Street I And then in the afternoon I was going
down the same street and there was another man passed out on the
sidewalk. People just standing around. Apparently no action. We
see them right here in Carmel. This gorgeous glamor of the San
Francisco scene; it is a wonderful glittery place. New York's got
bigger buildings, but it really doesn't have the flare. But it's
got the other side too!

701

Teiser: The Golden Gate headlands park — *

Adams: Well, that's very important, because — let's see, about 1950, I

remember, I was very active in getting letters out, writing, thinking
about Fort Point as the nucleus of a national monument. Somebody
suggested that I carry it on and include the whole Golden Gate area.
But I didn't really organize it properly. Then under Wayburn, in
the middle 1950s, he and I worked very hard for the extension of the
monument. Even before that, I remember Newton Drury and a few
people, we thought about making a great state park, even taking over
part of Sea Cliff, buying out the houses on the cliff, which wouldn't
have been too much in 1950 (now it would be impossible) and taking
in the whole coast from Point Lobos out near the Cliff House all the
way down to Bakers Beach and Fort Point, and then all the way over
from Fort Baker on the other side to the military lands around Point
Bonita. And north to the Tennessee Cove. Well, that fizzled;
nothing much happened.

Then Wayburn and I tried to get the national monument going,
and then all of a sudden the real estate development was planned —
a huge highrise project called Marincella. Then it [the park] came
to life again, and now a lot of people — Wayburn and others — have
really done a great service in effectively expanding it. So now it
goes from Point Lobos south through part of the Presidio, across the
bridge, to a little east of the bridge on the Marin side, west to
Point Bonita and quite a ways north. So where all that development
was to be, is now included in this area. It's really very wonderful.

That's what usually happens. Something is proposed; it gets
a big pat on the back, but it's not "realistic." Then it's finally
approved, but there's no funds to implement it. Then in the mean
time, the developers move in, and the property values raise, and
when the time comes it may be too late. It's like the Point Reyes
area. That was absolutely approved and established, but no money
was appropriated! So these developers came in, and while it was a
de facto establishment, it wasn't bought by the government, so they
started developing. The instant you put a house up, the property
value rises. There really should be a fundamental law which says
that when an area's selected and approved to be a government area,
the prices should then be frozen at that level until it's actually
purchased. The big organization in the East that buys land is
holding them for park purposes — they buy it by the acre. It might
cost $100,000 or $1 million, but they hold it, and when the
government takes it over, it pays that money plus the interest,
which is 5 percent or something. But if the government just refuses
to take it over, they can sell or develop it. They have to — they
have to turn it over, because they can carry the burden for just so
long a time. It's all very logical; makes a lot of sense. If I was
a capitalist and had a lot of money, I could say, "Well, sure, I'll

*Created as the Golden Gate National Seashore.

702

Adams: put up $250,000 to save this property and hold it." If I'm getting
5 percent a year, I'd earn a lot of money in total until it sold for
that amount. Might do just as well as if I had it in stocks or
bonds, but the prime inducement is there. Then of course, after a
given time, if the government says, "We don't want it," then I'm
free to sell it and do something else with it. It's certainly a
very important attitude and one that has brought a great deal of
very valuable land into public ownership.

A lot of people don't realize just exactly what this means. It
can be done. Because it's stupid just to say, "I'll buy the land
and hold it." You should get prior approval of agents if the state
thinks they're interested because it is of state park or national
park standards. The Audubon Society has done that; there's been
some very good things done. But if the government just says, "All
right, we're going to take this seashore. We approve it and we will
establish it, and we will put a superintendent there in a little
area, but we don't have any money to really acquire it," the whole
thing can blow up.

Teiser: On the other hand, sometimes it's hard to get the government to
accept some land that people want to give them, isn't it?

Adams: Well, there's problems there, you see. There has to be some reason

for use. Now, there's perfectly beautiful things — look at this hill.
Mr. McGraw and I would just love to protect this area here. But the
county won't take it because there's no way to use it. It has to be
tied in with something. Then it goes off the tax rolls, which is
something that people don't like. (Putting it in a scenic easement
might solve the problem.)*

Teiser: Then the county has to maintain it if it accepts it?

Adams: They have to maintain it. Oh, it's a very complicated thing.

There's a little property down here. We're trying to get
Conservation Associates and other people interested in it. It's a
beautiful old house, one of the earliest in the area, and the
property goes down to the beach. But when you look at it, what use
has it? It's like a little memorial that somebody wants to give,
but such takes it off the tax rolls and it has no use. Now, it could
be attached to Point Lobos, you see. You could have a green belt
that went all the way to it. That would be something. But it is not
valid as it is. You see, the state would say, "Yes, we'll maintain
it if somebody will put up the funds."

*We did in 1976. A. A.

703

Adams: It's like our Old Capitol Club in Monterey which is a beautiful

old adobe, Casa Amesti, which was given by Mrs. Frances Elkins to
the federal government. She was a very great decorator, thirty,
forty, fifty years ago. The National Trust accepted it, but there
was no money to maintain it. The Old Capitol Club, which is a
group of leading citizens, a lunch club, took it over. It is used
for lunch, and they maintain it. It has to be open to the public
one day a week. I think it's open more than that now, but then, who
else has the funds to run it?

So to show you how this works — for a while the initiation fees
were going to the National Trust and were tax deductible. The
understanding was that that money would then go into the major
repairs to the house when needed, like a new roof. Oh no, it just
went into the general fund. So now we don't turn it over to the
government any more. The $700 or whatever the initiation fee is,
goes into the savings account fund to take care of earthquake cracks,
painting, and general repair. We come out about even, but we do
maintain it. Now, if we didn't exist I don't know what they'd do.
They'd have to raise money somehow to keep it, and believe me,
keeping a place like that in security and keeping the garden up is
a real task.

Teiser: I want to ask you a little more about the Wilderness Act of 1964.
You were reasonably satisfied with it as it came out?

Adams: I think my reaction was that I was more satisfied than I ever

believed possible. We had a terrific battle on it, and everybody
pitched in. Now, the difficulty is in defining the wilderness
boundaries; again, it's subject to many variances. The interesting
thing is that the wilderness concept goes right across forest and
national park lands. You think of national park as being
dedicated to wilderness, but it really isn't. The wilderness sets
certain rigid restrictions that stop many developments, you see.

You could, for instance, put a road up to the base of Mount
Lye 11; you could do all kinds of things which would be intrusions
but might be justified from the park point of view. But if it's a
wilderness area, once established, it takes an act of Congress to
make any such changes. It's a very healthy thing. And we have
what they call "enclaves" or existing service areas, such as the
hikers camps, which everybody agrees should be maintained. Well,
they have become enclaves in a wilderness area. Like the Tioga
Road in Tuolumne Meadows. I'm plugging very hard for two more High
Sierra camps to make the system complete. And now that's caused a
little battle. I say at least one at the top of Yosemite Falls
would ^ open up that whole area for hikers and wilderness use. And
I don't see anything wrong with that, but the die-hards say, "No,
we can't have that, we can't have anything now."

704

Adams: And there's one class of devotees who claim that when a tree goes
across a trail you don't cut it, when a bridge goes out you don't
replace it. Which means closing off the country completely, which
to me is completely ridiculous because you don't have to go that
far. But absolutely no new roads and no elaborate trails and no
ski installations and no hotels should be built. When we were
writing up the plan for Yosemite, we were trying to keep sensible —
Half Dome has a fixed cable up the east side so you can climb up by
hand. That wouldn't be allowed in a wilderness area. The wilderness
area should go to the top of Illilouette Ridge, but the ski people
want to reduce it so they can ski down the east side. There's
always a definition of the borders. You see how complicated it gets.

[End Tape 28, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 28, Side 2]

Adams: Well, so I think we have to bear in mind that the wilderness concept
is really one of the great steps, and of course every one is being
resisted and subject to hearings. However, we have to bear in mind
that the democratic process really includes the concept of logical
variance. If enough people go to a hearing, and if there's enough
protest, then the protest is bound to have an effect, and there may
be a variance to the basic ideal plan. And I think there's no other
way we can do that unless we have a dictatorship, which would have
repercussions in other directions.

You get awfully mad sometimes and you say, "Well, why in the
world don't they just take these valleys like those in the North
Cascades and put them in the park?" Well, timber industry and the
Forest Service power is too great. We couldn't have the park unless
we have full consideration of the variances. And sometimes they're
absolutely anti-aesthetic. They're just recorded as percentages of
areas on maps. And remember, a wart on the face of Venus really
does a lot of harm to the whole face. It isn't a matter of area.
[Laughter]

Teiser: One of the things that you've mentioned is the position of the

Sierra Club in relation to the Save-the-Redwoods League. Did Brower
antagonize Newton Drury of the Save-the-Redwoods League?

Adams: Well, yes. But Newton Drury is a very big man, and the Redwoods

League is composed of very big people, and they were very sorry that
they had this very stupid opposition, which again was based on ego.
And the Save-the-Redwoods League operated on a basis of raising
money and buying redwoods. On a realistic basis, the redwoods are
private property. As long as you live in this particular system,
you just don't appropriate private property. The government can do
it under eminent domain, but even then its value has to be proven
and paid for. So the Save-the-Redwoods League started many, many

705

Adams: years ago. Colby was terribly important in it. They would raise
money. They'd go to a lumber company and say, "Well, we want to
buy Bull Creek Flat. How much?" That whole area was worth several
million dollars. They go out and they get the money, a very
considerable amount. It's called the Rockefeller Grove. Then they
found that the redwood lumber people really yielded a little and
said, "Well, if you're going to buy the whole thing — yes, we'll give
some," because they were just suddenly realizing a good amount of
capital. The redwood forest is not a reproducible capital. When
they cut out a redwood forest, they plant other trees, you see,
fast-growing trees, because it isn't economic to cut out a redwood
forest and then plant redwoods and wait a hundred years. But the
other trees are ready to harvest in twenty, twenty-five years.
That's why the Monterey pine is the mainstay of the New Zealand
lumber industry, because it's harvestable every twenty years, I
think, for pulp and twenty-five to thirty years for timber.

The Save-the-Redwoods League really made the great, monumental
contribution.

A Western Club or a National Club

Teiser: You mentioned Mr. Colby. In the 1950s and '60s, did he become

somewhat out of patience or out of sympathy with the Sierra Club?

Adams: Well, yes. I think in about the sixties he felt that we had a
particular job to do and we were diverting from it. And I used
to say, "Well, I think the diversion to the chapters is a wonderful
idea." He said, "Well, let other organizations do that." He said,
"I think we ought to stick to our guns and be concerned with the
Sierra Nevada and the western areas; we shouldn't concern ourselves
about the Everglades, because we just can't spread ourselves." Now,
I think he was wrong in the sense that what we have now is like a
United States of America. We have all these chapters, and I would
like to see them all send delegates to the "senate" and have the
"senate" run the club. I think it'll have to come to that. The
"senate" would appoint top people as executives.

In an organization the size of the Sierra Club, the president
should be in the $40 ,000-a-year class. We could have someone like
Russell Train or — I don't know the new names that are coming up.
But it really is a terribly complex thing because you have to be in
constant contact with the pulse of Washington, and in theory we
should move our headquarters to Washington. That was suggested, and
that bothered Colby because he was conventionally a westerner. I
think, in the objective sense, the Sierra Club should be based in

706

Adams: Washington, and let the chapters take care of the regions. Most of
our environmental suits, which are many, are all over the country.
So why should we be in San Francisco as a head office? We ought to
be right in Washington along with the other groups and have a
western regional office.

Otherwise, we just stay as a club, which suggests a group of
privileged gentlemen who like to go on outings. Many of them had a
lot of money and they could help in larger things, but I wouldn't
want to go back to those days; that would be futile. The American
Alpine Club, for instance, and the Appalachian Mountain Club. They
very seldom do anything except just titillate their own members,
have lovely banquets, outings, and birdwatchings. But they have
little force in the national scene that I know of, unless they've
suddenly changed lately.

Protecting and Administering Public Lands

Teiser: In the Everglades matter, I think the club, again, was quite active,
wasn't it?

Adams: Very active. There again, a chapter was very effective — the

Southeastern chapter. And I think Audubon helped in that. But the
Everglades to me, and I hate to say this, seemed to be kind of a
losing battle. It isn't the Everglades that are being affected,
it's the surrounding area that feeds the Everglades. They'd have
to make about one-third of Florida a national park to protect it.

You see what happened. Again, it's a terribly important thing.
We got the Rockefeller Grove, and we have all these beautiful things
in Northern California. Bull Creek Flat — a great place, but we
never thought that the present logging tactics would clean off the
land in the watershed all around. Tremendous logging went on. Then
the first heavy rains appeared and there was fantastic erosion, and
there was six to eight feet of water for the first time in history
in the redwood rivers. So these great trees would topple, and it
was a great loss. And that was due because of our inability to
control the surrounding environment.

So if we had really known what was going to happen, we would
have bought up everything all around, which of course wasn't all
redwoods. It was all kinds of lumber. I guess spruce and chaparral.
I don't know what else grows up there — I guess some pine. And they
clear-cut the whole area, so the erosion was fantastic.

707

Adams: In the areas north of the Everglades they have taken water, and
things are drying up. There are fires. It's awfully hard
sometimes to define what JLS_ a national park. Yellowstone to me
is a daisy chain of national monuments. And the whole Sierra
should be a national park. It should be one great park — Tahoe,
Yosemite, and Mount Ritter and all the way down to the Kern River,
and call it Sierra National Park, with Yosemite Valley a part of it.

Now, there's no need to have two national parks in Hawaii, and
they're talking about three. Why can't they have Hawaii National
Park in three sections? But it's political, you see. The different
islands these people live on have national parks. Hawaii National
Park in itself is really marvelous. And Haleakala is the top of
one great volcano. It could just as well be a national monument.
But it could be part of the park as a section, which is all right.

Now they want a national park at Kauai, the northern island.
And why have a whole separate national park, when it could be a
part of the big Hawaii National Park? But the people there demand
that, and the tourist industry wants as many national parks as they
can get, because they think that attracts people. Just to have one
national park, although it covers three great areas, is not as good
as having three national parks, with all the attendant costs. A
national park's a very complicated thing, with all the water rights
and all the operational details. It's complex and expensive. So
if I were a dictator, I would have Sierra National Park and include
Sequoia, Kings, and Yosemite districts in one great area.

Teiser: Are there other big campaigns that the Sierra Club has waged that
we haven't thought of?

Adams: Oh, we've had a lot — we've had Olympic Park, and of course Cascade
National Park, and very satisfactory too. Now we're very happy to
hear that we've partially stopped development in southeastern
Alaska, probably saved that for a while. But the Forest Service
did a terrible thing — they turned over 95 percent of the forest
land for cutting, and a lot of that lumber is going direct to Japan.
Southeastern Alaska's one of the most beautiful places in the world,
and here it would just be cut off, and for a very low grade of

timber. It isn't really good timber, you see.
chiefly good for pulp.

It's scrub — I think

708

The Alaska Pipeline

Adams: Now, of course, we're putting on the big fight on the pipeline, and
that is something that I believe has to be very well thought about.
The oil proponents say the Middle East is liable to blow up at any
time, and South America can go communist (the Rockefellers are
holding Venezuela together). If they deny us oil and say only the
communist countries can have the oil, then we're cut off from very
important supplies. So, they say, we'll have to take the north
slope oil. Well, the north slope is very vulnerable, but it is still
under our control. Now, how to get the oil down here? No matter
how they do it, it's potential pollution. The best of all would be
huge air tankers, because if they did crash, they'd burn in one area.
Submarines and ships could pollute. So the club has fought the
pipeline. And I think we forget that Alaska is huge, and the pipe
line is small. We're accustomed to seeing a map with a line down it,
which is probably actually two miles wide on the map, you see. So we
could have pollution along the lines by breakage (they do have
cutoff valves rather frequently) . But if there were any international
trouble or any sabotage, the whole pipeline could be demolished in
one day with a few high-flying bombers, even low-flying machine-gun
jets. And there would be a lot of pollution in that particular area.

But I don't think that would be as bad as the pollution of a
big tanker grounding. You're really on the horns of a dilemma.
They're trying to put it through Canada. Well, that still pollutes,
and how do you know you're going to get the oil? Suppose you have
a terrorist group — like at the Olympics, which was an awful thing.
They could come in there when that pipeline is up; they could
completely wreck it. Just hire a jet and drop a series of small
bombs — blow up the pipeline in about twenty places. You'd have a
terrible situation. You'd have pollution in a small restricted area,
but you wouldn't get the oil. Whether the Sierra Club is the
organization to get into this kind of thing is still a question for
me. I don't know whether we're taking on more than we can possibly
handle. In other words, there should be groups, anti-pollution
groups that really should lead, and we could support them. But
whether we should take the lead on that and on population control,
I don't know. It seems like riding horses in all directions at once.
Whether we'd ever get them back to the corral is — [Laughter]

I'm not trying to be negative; I'm just trying to be realistic.
The chapters are doing a wonderful job. They have local problems
they spend all their energies on, and they do well. What can we do?
We get a plea from a group, and that goes through a committee, and
they say, "If you'll put that on the next meeting," and that's one of
fifty items, and it probably won't get heard until the third day when
everybody is in a state of collapse. So we pass a resolution saying,

709

Adams: "Yes, we agree." So then what?
the head office agrees." Fine.

Then the local people say, "Well,
It's a year late. By that time, the

whole thing's gone. It's like the Red River Valley in Kentucky and
all kinds of problems such as the Indiana Dunes. I just don't know.
The problems are just fantastic, and should really be passed on to
younger and more knowledgeable people than I am.

"The Conscience of the Board"

Teiser: I think we quoted to you before that Dick Leonard said you were the

"conscience" of the Sierra Club board. And you said, I believe, that
you weren't sure what that meant.

Adams: I think Will Siri really said it. I really don't know what they mean,
except that I was always standing up for matters of quasi-principle
as against fact. They were talking about controlling hunters, and I
said, "Why should there be any hunting today? It's a barbaric — I'd
forgive anybody to go out and kill game to eat. But just to go out
and destroy a resource — " And they all shook their heads and said,
"Well, you're not realistic." So I was always more or less anathema.

Then I shocked them all by saying certain things that they feel
is a deviation of their conscience, like favoring a tramway instead
of a road. That to them is just a kind of shibboleth statement, you
see. They don't realize that a road does a thousand times more
damage than any tramway will do. So it becomes a matter of, I guess —
the difference between free love and motherhood — [laughter] I don't
quite make out the idea in some of their arguments. I was victimized
myself in not supporting the cableway to Glacier Point. And then the
first time I saw the road I realized I'd really made a profound
mistake. The road did so much damage, and the cable railway could be
little more than a power line.

Teiser: So it was that sort of thing that gave you the reputation of going
your own way, at least?

Adams: Yes, yes. I went my own way. But that's a little exaggerated.

Teiser: Leonard said that your vote was a crucial one in the Kings Canyon
road fight. And I think he said that was one of the things he'd
told you in order to try to get you to stay on the board.

Adams: Well, that whole road business is very complicated, because when I

first went on the board, the Lone Pine-Porterville road was a pet of
the chambers of commerce and the highway department. It would be a
very dangerous invasion of real beautiful wilderness country. The

710

Adams: alternative was the Minaret summit road. We made a gentleman's

agreement with the highway department that if we supported a Minaret
summit road, they would pull off support from the Porterville-Lone
Pine road.

All of a sudden the club shifts: they're against all roads.
So I said to Wayburn, "Look, how about all these people from
Bakersfield and Fresno that are counting on this."

"Oh, let them go up the Sonora Pass."

Well, it's that kind of thinkingl It's like what Brower said,
"The country down here is getting too populated. Stop the people
coming down to the Big Sur." I said, "Well, how are you going to do
it?"

"Well, stop them. I don't care how you do it." [Laughter]

It's still the United States of America; you're still not going
to put barricades on public roads, you see. This is the crazy think
ing. It's so glamorous, and it excites a certain kind of emotional
response. But you can't do these things, you see.

So I blew up on that. And then the Tioga Road was developed.
If we'd had the trans-Sierra road at the Minaret summit, the Tioga
Road would have not been developed to its present state. The damage
in the Leevining Canyon — they just simply went in there and slashed.
I still claim that if they had held to the original plan, it would
really have put a handsome four-lane parkway right over the Minaret
summit with no immediate access. It would have solved the highway
problem. Nobody else would have had a leg to stand on.

Teiser: That is the one that you said would have cut the John Muir Trail.

Adams: Every time I fly across the Sierra, I'm cutting the John Muir Trail,
believe me.

Tuolumne Meadows — two years ago, at my workshop, I was there
from eight in the morning until six at night, and I counted thirty-
two transcontinental flights going over the Sierra. I'd recognize
some of the planes — DC8s, 747s, 707s — back and forth. Well, if you've
got anything to do with the wilderness mystique, that's quite a blow,
especially at night in the sleeping bag. I remember one time, many
years ago, I spent the night — oh, toward the end of September, I
guess it was, at Tuolumne Pass. I remember there were two of us — Mr.
Holman and myself. We put the donkey down in the meadow below us.
We were in the sleeping bags up there and the stars were wonderful —
no satellites and no planes. And the silence was absolute. There
wasn't a bug, there wasn't a mosquito — you know, there wasn't the

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711

Adams: sound of water, there was no wind. And I'll never forget it — it's
impressive (and sometimes depressive). Finally Mr. Holman said,
"My God, it's quiet." I said, "Yes, it's getting me a little. Can
you sing?" [Laughs]

Now you can't possibly have that situation. You have airplanes,
and you have satellites. You lie out in the open and look up at the
sky and hear planes and see things. Of course, you see them several
hours after sunset, the lower altitude ones. But all the way to
midnight, you see really high-altitude satellites. They're in the
sunlight when they're passing. Then, when you're up [in a plane] at
thirty-eight thousand feet and look down on the Sierra, it looks like
God has stumbled on the rug. You have to look very carefully to see
Mount Goddard and Muir Pass — the days of your youth when you spent a
week just going over this much small area!

So the wilderness mystique is getting harder and harder to
support and justify as far as the people are concerned. In a sense,
it's a serious situation.

Well, don't let me ramble on too much. Keep to your questions.

Teiser: Back to the board of the Sierra Club — I don't know if this is an

appropriate question to ask you or not, but can you assess what your
chief contributions were over that very long number of years that
you were on the board?

Adams: In the beginning, you see, the emphasis was much more on

mountaineering, the outings, the Bulletin, and problems immediately
relating to the parks. I think that I was probably effective with
the photographs, and the pictures were used to very good advantage in
the publications. I think the greatest contribution I might have made
made was the idea of the exhibit at LeConte Lodge. I said I had a
friend, Nancy Newhall, who was awfully good at exhibits, and she said
she'd help (she doesn't know we're talking about her). So we put
together this exhibit called "This is the American Earth," and instead
of two weeks for completion, it took six weeks. We had a terrible
time getting $1600 out of the club to do it.

Teiser: You took only six weeks putting that together?

Adams: The exhibit, yes. She was a fast worker, and the club was small — you
see, the reason for that whole thing (this is very interesting) was
that the government had a museum — a very good one — and they quite
rightfully said that the LeConte Lodge (it is now known as the LeConte
Memorial) was not serving any particular function. All we had was a
few isinglass sheets with dried grass in them and a few books. They
wanted to use it as a geological museum, which was very sensible.
They could have had a valid geological museum — [Joseph] LeConte was a

712

Adams: great geologist. But I felt that the club should be represented in
Yosemite as a conservation organization to the public. So I got
hold of the directors (as a director, you see, I could do this) and
I said, "For God's sake, let's try to do something to keep this
lodge going as a 'front1 for the club. We need an exhibit of our
whole conservation approach."

So I got through $1600 at a meeting and secured Nancy, and we
did it. Well, then when this exhibit was up, it made quite an
impact, and we made, I think, three more [duplicate exhibits] for
overseas and the East. And then Brower said, "Well, why don't we
make a book of it?" That started the whole book idea, because we
took the theme and many of the pictures used, of course, and added
quite a number — and put together This is the American Earth, which
was a great definitive job.

So it's that contribution that I'd like to be remembered for
on the board, as much as anything, because I don't think, if I had
not been on the board, I'd have been as effective in doing it.

Teiser: Did you initiate some projects and ideas for the club to follow?

Adams: Yes, we had albums of pictures, we had much to do with developing
the first wilderness conference. I had the Wildflower conference
[Festival] in Yosemite.

You're a director, so they expect certain things of you. But I
must say that an awful lot of the members, who were never directors
or members of any committee, really did tremendous things, which is
the way it should be.

The transition from a quasi-elitist, outing-mountaineering
kind of literary organization into a front-line legal and political
organization in the late sixties and seventies was a complete change
of character. In fact, the name "club" is a very bad term. It was
a club, but it's not a club now by any stretch of the imagination.
I can't conceive of a club with a hundred and something thousand
members.

Teiser: Mr. Leonard told us that you had wanted to resign from the board

before you did, and he had urged you to stay on longer. Why did you
resign?

Adams: Well, I felt I was absolutely ineffective in relation to what a

board member of the organization should have been, as it was at that
time. Before that time, we were confronted with simple things like
outings and internal matters and the Bulletin, membership, how to get
money for the Tappaan Lodge, and all kinds of little recommendations
for this, that and the other thing. But when it came to the fact of

713

Adams: conducting lawsuits and trying to make decisions on nuclear plants

and handling a multimillion-dollar budget, I just felt more and more
out of it — not being expert on those things.

Teiser: Did you feel that the other members of the board were fairly expert?

Adams: Many were, but I think a lot of them weren't, but they should have
been; a lot of people should have resigned and given place to other
people that could really function. On the other hand, you can't
resign and designate a particular person to take your place!

Then I was getting tired, I had my own creative work, which was
piling up. And living down here in Carmel — to fly up to San
Francisco and attend a "yak" meeting which accomplished practically
nothing was tapping my energies. I felt I'd be of more value off
the board than on. Besides, I couldn't stand the whole Brower
administration, and Wayburn's weakness in controlling Brower, and
the terrible impractical loss of prestige and cooperation with
agencies. All that was very distasteful to me. I had many friends
in these agencies. They'd look at me and they'd say, "What the
hell's going on?" And I'd say, "Well, I wish I could tell you.
We're taken over. We've got a poltergeist." [Laughter]

It's a very difficult thing to define, except that I knew that
I had no right to be on the board, especially with capable young
people coming up with the whole new philosophy.

I'm sorry to say that the present board doesn't please me at all.
They're a bunch of political activists working for internal glory.
They spent hours arguing out who's going to be president, fighting
for the top power. What's the sense of it? I consider that thing
being reasonable in high finance, but in the club you're supposed to
be there to support certain ideals, and why should you have to fight
to be president? Factions arise, and some people want Brower back.

I remember a long time ago when Joe [Joseph N. ] LeConte left.
He got fed up many years earlier. He knew the club was developing
beyond...."! don't care what they do. I't s a new world for them.
I want to spend my declining years doing what I have to do." Well,
he was quite brutal and frank about it, and there's a little bit of
that in me too. I have my books and exhibits. Seeing that I've
spent all of my time in the last two years just working with prints
and things, I don't know how I could have possibly had time to do
anything but give the most "hummingbird wing touch." [Laughter] And
just sitting there and saying, "Yes" and looking wise with a beard —
[Laughter]

714

A Publications Program

Teiser: What do you think the club now, in its present state — what its
publications program should be?

Adams: I've got very definite ideas on that. The old Sierra Club Bulletin,
as edited by Francis Farquhar, was a very distinguished journal. It
could be related to the bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. It was a very worthwhile thing. It contained beautiful
articles in general, notes, and carried out a good tradition. It
also did not have what we call "popular appeal." Again, it was an
elitist publication. Now, the club puts out a magazine — bulletin —
and it's finally got advertisements in it, which pay for a good part
of the cost. I think that the club should put out a handsome
magazine like the Audubon, which is filled with advertisements — of
course, always related to the subject; should not advertise [just]
anything. There's all kinds of things, books and boots and
equipment, things that are appropriate. And it should have the
best color reproduction, good writers — I think we could do it.

But I think the chapters should also put out good publications
which would relate to the local scene of the chapter, which would be
a little coffee table thing. Things that are standard 8 1/2 by 11,
with fine cover, something that one would leave out with pride, and
encourage new members.

Teiser: Are the chapters big enough to finance that kind of publishing?

Adams: Well, many of them are. The point is they don't realize their power.
The Ventana puts out a mimeographed thing all full of newsy news,
about what members are doing and trips they're taking and splurges
on big and little things.*

So the club itself, I think, should subsidize the chapters to
at least do a beautiful cover. And then these things can be sold —
if they're good enough — and they might pay for themselves or more.
Plus the fact that they give a certain prestige and could bring in
more members .

We're losing members now. We're on the decline. I think it's
because there's so many things going on. People have only so much
money. After all, the members of the Sierra Club, as they exist now,
are in a very median economic class, and a lot of them spend more
money than they should.

*Now, 1977, vastly improved in style. A. A.

715

Teiser: Do you think the Sierra Club should put out practical handbooks for
hiking?

Adams: Oh, fine publications — marvelous. Those are the things which really
will pay. And then getting our big books, which never went into
many more than ten, twenty, thirty thousand copies— get them into
paperback up into million-copy editions. When the American Earth
came out in paperback, it had an exponential increase in its impact.
You see, when you get a book for $6, instead of $15 or $20, $25, you
just reach a totally different and expanded audience. All these
young people today are really dedicated and working terribly hard to
accomplish something. But they can't afford $25 books. I can't
afford $25 books. I've got a limit. I should have all of the
Sierra Club books, but I simply can't afford it. A third of them
are, I think, rather unnecessary. It's an awfully complex proposition.

Of course, we went into the situation of being a publishing
house without experience, and the publishing of the books is what
really wrecked us in the financial sense.

Teiser: Would Brower have had enough experience in publications to handle it
correctly if he hadn't had other things to do?

Adams: No. I think we should have immediately allied ourselves with a top

publisher. We should have provided the book — contents, illustrations,
design, etc. — and have had it published and priced so that the club
and the author would get a royalty. Suppose we got 20 percent net of
sales, and the author got half of that, and the club got half of
that — we'd have been sitting pretty. We would have had more books
out, we would have had more impact, and more cash in the reserves!

We lost about — it's safe to say — a dollar on every exhibit format
book we published.

The little books like On the Loose, guides and climbing booklets,
they've done wonderfully well. Then when we released the books to
the publishers, like Ballantine for paperbacks, they just did
wonderfully too. We get, I believe, 6 percent — the author gets 3
percent and the club gets 3 percent.

But Dave was saying that all authors should turn their royalties
back to the club!

Teiser: What for?

Adams: For the benefit of the cause. But unfortunately the authors and

photographers have to make a living too. It's an interesting thing
that the paper people get their money on about a fifteen-day credit,
and the printer gets paid on a thirty-day limit and so on. The
author should get his, too!

[End Tape 28, Side 2]

716
[Begin Tape 29, Side 1]

Adams: I don't like to just sit here and castigate Brower, who I think is
very difficult, gifted, and somebody that I wouldn't want to touch
with a ten-foot pole now as far as ethics are concerned. But while
he did a great deal, he practically wrecked the club. One of the
reasons Colby left the club was because he recognized that Dave was
going to wreck the club. He warned every one of us that you can't
continue his tactics, you can't continue his internal level of
management. You can't say that you're above the board of directors.

I understand the Friends of the Earth are a quarter of a million
in debt. In the meantime, the good old Save-the-Redwoods League is
perfectly solid and continues to get its thousands, hundreds of
thousands, and acquires redwoods, runs its office, and everybody's
happy and on a first-name basis.

The Future of the Sierra Club

Adams: The whole thing [the Sierra Club] is just so big now that it's going
to take a tremendous volunteer effort of hundreds or thousands of
people and all the chapters getting together. I don't think we have
anybody now on the board who's big enough to really put it over. If
Dick Leonard was a younger man, he could do it. I'm not trained to
do it. But I really think the future of the club is in a very
precarious state. We could blow up at any point. And now we're
losing members. The pendulum's bound to swing. The membership is
based on member services and member excitement. And believe me, a
lot of young people are not going to be satisfied to just read legal
briefs about "friends of the court" — amicus curiae — on some obscure
power line business in Tennessee and so on. This is sort of going
out of the sphere of public excitement.

We did have, when all the books were coming out with all the
flamboyance and publicity, we did have great excitement. I know that
if I even ventured logical thought about it, I had great hostility:
"Oh, you're dead. You don't know what you're talking about. You're
an old fogey. You're not out there fighting."

Well, now the fighting doesn't exist any more as such. It's
down to hard-boiled, nitty-gritty legal considerations.

Teiser: There was a certain excitement in the old Sierra Club Bulletin when
it told about new climbs that daring people made.

Adams: It was perfectly wonderful, but again it was an experienced outfit,
not a theoretical one. When I use the word "elitist," I'm not mean
ing high society or wealth, I'm meaning a certain number of people

717

Adams: who have very high-minded dedication, which has nothing to do with
whether they've got one dollar or a million dollars. Walter Starr
was one of those people, Bob Price of Reno — a big lawyer up .there —
and Judge Clair Tappaan. I can think of any number of people who
were dedicated, and it had nothing to do with the amount of money
they had. If you had a lot of money, you gave money, and if you
had a lot of energy, you gave energy. But you gave it on a basis
that was very self-abnegating — is that the word to use? It wasn't
ever for your own advancement. That's one of the things about our
place in Yosemite — we confounded the National Park Service. We were
always thinking of the park first, where the other concessioners
were thinking of their pocketbook. We knew perfectly well that if
we'd got to thinking about our pocket books, that would be the
quickest way to lose prestige and money.

It's a very interesting life. I wouldn't have missed it for
the world, but I'm glad I'm out of it because, as I say, I'm not
entirely functional in many ways. In fact, I'm, say, "minus-
functional" because the demands on a director today are so complex
and so knowledgeable in certain areas, that the board of directors
should be composed of highly trained people; the others are simple
decoration.

Teiser: You suggested that a president be elected by a senate of the —

Adams: Well, I think the fact is that the club is so big, and the

obligations so great that we cannot possibly count on volunteer
services to be effective. Now, we have volunteers; everybody's
a volunteer except Mike [J. Michael] McCloskey, who's completely
snowed under. He's the executive director, and he's got so many
problems! He's got people helping him, but it's not enough. I
think that, well, to put it very bluntly, the club should be run by
the chapters, which means the membership. Each chapter should send
two delegates. They should be paid delegates — I mean, expenses and
per diem. [They don't have to be salaried people, although some
chapters are big enough to have salaried directors.) They should
then direct the club and should appoint the very best people in the
world to be president, treasurer, and secretary, and maybe vice-
president. And pay them a full handsome salary, because when you
have a hundred and something thousand people a year, you're getting
an income of about a couple of million dollars. These people should
be experts in their field. Policies should be laid down by the
senate and carried out by the trained high-power executives. The
chapters should be given an autonomous position by which they support
their local problems.

And the local problems are now, believe me, about twenty for
every chapter going, at least. But to have to refer all of these
local problems back to a central volunteer board is absolutely
ridiculous, because we don't have that human energy available.

718

Teiser: I think you have members at large now who are not chapter members,
do you?

Adams: Oh, there's a few.
Teiser: Not very many?

Adams: No, very few. You automatically belong to a chapter. If I live here,
I'm in the Ventana chapter. If I don't want to be, I have to say,
"No, I don't want to be a member of the chapter." But I think that
means practically nothing. It would be silly because what would you
do? You just pay dues, make contributions, but have no direct
contact.

Teiser: There would be no board of directors as such under your plan, just
these delegates?

Adams: Well, there would be the senate, then there would be the elected

executives, then the president would appoint an advisory board. You
see, that would be his business. Like the President of the United
States appoints a cabinet —

Nancy

Newhall: [Bringing photograph] I wanted them to see an early Ansel Adams.

Teiser: That's a lovely picture. [Interruption]

Adams: Well, have you another question?

Teiser: I think you were saying that the president —

Adams: To recapitulate: you have the chapters, which would really be

membership representation, and they're little organizations on their
own. They have their boards and so on. And they would send
delegates to the main club, and the delegates would comprise the
senate, who would then elect or appoint or hire, which is a more
practical term, the top executives, which would be the president,
especially treasurer, and probably a secretary. Now, just what that
group would consist of would be up to the senate. But the president
then would have the obligation to appoint an advisory board, like a
cabinet — a top expert in nuclear power, a top expert in land use, a
top expert in forestry and law and so on.

And we would have this big resource of the best people we could
get, and run the club on that basis. And I think that is going to be
the salvation of the club. Because for many years it has functioned
very poorly as a volunteer organization at the level of the
directorate, because there was just too much to do for a few human
beings to handle it.

719

Adams: Now, the committees and the chapters and the library committee and

the mountaineering committee and the Clair Tappaan Lodge committee —
those are volunteers, and they work well at that level. But when it
comes to the really big problems of the club, it cannot be volunteer
because the president of the club is a judge of the Superior Court
of California at Vallejo. He has his whole career and life to
operate. How can he be president of the Sierra Club and carry these
additional burdens?

Will Siri is a very important man in the Donner Laboratory, a
radiation laboratory division. How can he possibly do both jobs?
Dick Leonard, who's an independent lawyer, spends at least one-third
of his time with the club. Colby spent at least a third to a half
of his life with the Sierra Club and still was the top mining lawyer
in the world. And also ran the state parks. So in some way he
spent one-third at least in conservation.

Then comes along a person like Lewis Clark, who's an engineer
for the Telephone Company, who has to put in eight hours a day. He'd
put in another four or five for the club for many years. Even that
now isn't enough, you see.

And the treasurer of the club is at this time also the treasurer
of Duke University. He spends thousands of dollars of club money a
year flying back and forth to meetings. But how is he going to give
the required amount of time, no matter how good he is, and do a good
job at Duke or for the club? We need an absolutely full-time top
executive treasurer at at least $30,000 a year. That's the only
approach that's going to save the club. Because we're not the. little
old elitist group that used to go out and go on outings, climb
mountains, write good literary treatises and notices for little rock
climbs. It's a totally different thing now. And terribly important.

Teiser: The early treasurer's reports were very simple indeed.

Adams: Well, a very peculiar thing has happened. We have a treasurer; he's
supposed to establish policy. Then we have a budget. Then the
finance committee, and the board of directors — everybody — approves
the budget, and then it is up to the comptroller to see that it's
handled. Well now, for some reason or other, the comptroller is not
able to control the funds, because somebody from up above said, "Oh,
we'll take a thousand from here, and so on." Well, the comptroller,
not being too forceful, has been kicked upstairs to treasurer's
assistant or somebody. But I just think of the comptroller of the
Polaroid Corporation, which is a multimillion-dollar business — you
can't go one cent over your budget without being called on it. That's
his job. The comptroller is somebody who plain and simple controls
the budget. It is what we need in the Sierra Club.

720

Adams: But Brower would say, "Oh, pay it" and would take it out of another
account. He was down here one day, and Virginia got so mad at him —
I've never seen her so mad. She said, "Well, how much is it going
to cost?"

"Well, about $2500."

"How much have you got in the account?"

"Got about $500." I said, "I guess we'll have to have a meeting
of the committee." "Oh no," said Brower, "I can shift it." And
Virginia says, "You can't shift it. What do you mean, shift it?"
I said, "Dave, I think we really should have a meeting on this."

"Oh, we don't need one," etc. Those are the kind of things
that really led to financial disaster.

Teiser: How could he do it?

Adams: He just did it, and nobody called him on it, you see. This is the
exasperating thing. For a whole year Wayburn would not, because he
was afraid the membership would rise up in wrath and throw out the
board of directors. I used to say, "Well, Ed, if the membership is
going to do that, then we should be thrown out. Suppose we are
thrown out; we've at least done our duty. We have to stop this
thing." "No, they'll just throw us right out and wreck the whole
basis of the club."

So I've had all I want of that kind of stuff. But I think that
as I live more, I find that we're not the only organization that has
suffered by this, and a lot of great big business organizations have
also had their troubles.

Now let's make a resume. In the sense that when I first knew
the club, it was a small group of people, very dedicated. I call
them elitist in the full sense of the term. And we were doing a lot
of good by the force of our personalities and importance in the
community. Many members of the club were really very important
people — judges and senators. We had a big influence on the Forest
Service and the Park Service and the state, and they respected our
influence, and while they had no obligation to follow what we thought
should be done, in many, many cases they did. And it was all at a
very high level of integrity. We had a low political profile and
high integrity profile. And then as we got bigger, well, we found
that we were getting political pressure, without consideration for
the people that really could have done something. Then in the
sixties, it suddenly blossomed out into an activist, belligerent
organization, which lost contact with the people we should be very
close to, at least in discussion. Then we became really belligerent.

721

Adams: I guess we did save something. I'm always thinking about the things
we could have saved if we had applied a different approach. And
that's my feeling about it now: God bless it and God help it.

[End Tape 29, Side 1]

Recent Exhibits

[Interview XXV — 19 May 1974]
[Begin Tape 30, Side 1]

Teiser: You've had two large exhibits since our last interview, first at
the San Francisco Museum of Art, opening in October 1972.

Adams: Well, I felt very good about the San Francisco exhibit. The little
catalogue that came out with it was very distinguished and seemed to
attract a lot of attention. Of course, I'm always a very great
problem to the critics because I bewilder them a little bit, being
interested in nature, and it's very hard for them to translate
between subject emphasis and expressive emphasis. But the public
seemed to respond, and the entire exhibit was purchased by donation
of three anonymous individuals.

Teiser: For the museum?

Adams: For the museum. With the exception of the original Polaroids, and
Portfolio Five, which was not in my personal collection. That
exhibit was very handsomely framed and crated and is being
circulated by the USIA (I believe you can call it that; it's some
cultural division of the Information Service) through Central and
South America, and then on to Europe. And in a couple of years it
will return to San Francisco as a permanent acquisition.

The Metropolitan show took quite a time to work out.
Teiser: That was very large, wasn't it?

Adams: Well, no. The biggest show I had was over 530-odd items in 1963,
at the de Young Museum. That was by far the best exhibit, because
the galleries were more intimate and the show was designed by Nancy
Newhall around these nine galleries, and it was a very stunning
setup. It never looked as well in other areas.

Teiser: The San Francisco Museum's exhibit was pretty well displayed, wasn't
it, this last one?

Adams: Fairly well. The trouble with museums — well, let me get to that in
a minute — I want to finish something on the big show in 1963 that I

722

Adams: mentioned, the big one at the de Young. It had too many, five
hundred and something units, and that is far too much. It was
circulated, but then it was broken into two parts, and then each
part was broken into two parts again, and some of it's still going
around the country, one-eighth or one-tenth the original show. The
rest of it has either come back here or scattered. The big prints
are at the Amon Carter Museum at Fort Worth, and now some of them
are at the World's Fair in Spokane.

The [recent] San Francisco exhibit was just about the right
size, but the Metropolitan exhibit [spring 1974] posed a problem.
They wanted to show the big prints as well as a portfolio in what
they call the Blumenthal Patio. It's quite a huge space, which is
a reconstruction of a medieval patio, which is stone, and there were
five big pylons, painted grey, on which these big forty-by-fifty (or
more)-inch prints were mounted, all framed, and were lit by what they
called "semidif fuse" spots from the ceiling. Well, they were overlit,
but got light on them, at least, and that was a relief.

In the balcony, around the patio, were the portfolio prints.
They were fairly well illuminated, some better than others. There
were thirty-something prints there. Then in what they call the
prints and drawing gallery was the main part of the show, which
consisted of 16 by 20s and 11 by 14s — all the prints in the 16-20
category and smaller. In the center of this room were three cases
which contained the forty original Polaroid prints. They were very
well protected, each print in a frame, and the whole thing covered
with another frame. It was quite a diverse show, but the trouble is
there that the lighting isn't adequate. I mentioned, I think,, in
other parts of this interview, the problem of illumination theory.
The total reflected light in the environment has a great deal to do
with the impression of the prints.

Now, prints and drawings, etchings, lithographs, sketches, and
so on, really look best in a rather low light level. It seems to
enrich the value. A photograph, as it has a reflective scale of
about one to ninety to over one to one hundred, is very critical in
that respect. If you have a high-key environment, that is, a total
environment more than 20 or 30 percent reflectance, the prints look
dark.

Well, they helped just a little by putting the prints on a grey
panel against a white wall. But the light ceiling and the general
environment was such that the prints looked just about one step
lower in value than they should have. Also, the necessity of having
plexi-glass creates reflection which makes it a little hard to
clearly see many of the images. But that's typical of all museums.

Teiser: Plexi-glass? In front of the prints?

723

Adams :
Teiser;
Adams :
Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :

Teiser;
Adams :

It's in the frames, with a cutout over-mat over the prints.

Why?

Well, the prints could be destroyed, vandalized, scratched.

For protection.

Right, it's essential. The big prints are shown in a different
way; they're covered with a very heavy varnish, which can be wiped
off.

But they're not covered with plexi-glass.

No, they're too big. The Polaroids are covered with plexi-glass,
and then a second plexi-glass cover over those. Plexi-glass is
marvelous in that it's clearer than glass, but it does scratch. But
that doesn't hurt the print, except for appearance.

So the whole problem is just one of getting the right amount of
light, and the museums are built with circuitry that'll take just
so many amps, so many watts of current. They load it up just as far
as they can go. They practically doubled the illumination on the
walls, but even then it wasn't enough. Except at the ends of the
gallery, where the lights were closer, therefore more intense. But
it was rather an effective show, and many people came and Dave
McAlpin gave a banquet afterwards for about twenty-eight people. It
was a very festive occasion.

That show is all beautifully framed and cased and will go on
tour. The plans now are it's going to Indianapolis, then it's going
to Washington at the Corcoran Gallery, and then it's going to the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London (maybe a couple of places in
this country before it goes to England). So I'm satisfied with that.

There are some funds that McAlpin put up to put this show on.
And anything that's left over the costs of the show will be used for
acquisitions. So maybe somebody will come up and buy the whole
thing!

Did you choose the prints?

Yes. Of course, in a case like this, you choose many more prints
than you use. You line up prints that you think will work, and then
you give them a choice.

Teiser: Were you there at the time of the installation?

724

Adams :

Teiser:

Adams :

Teiser:

Adams:

Teiser:

No, that's one thing we try to do is to keep away from the curators!
We think those people are experts and it drives them completely
batty to have the artist coming around dictating the hanging. The
artist takes his chance, but that's their field.

When Paul Strand put up his show at the museum he drove them
all nuts by shifting everything around. They tried to arrange
things in sequence, but he didn't like that. It just drove them
crazy, so I swore that I'd have nothing to do with the hanging.

You didn't have anything to do with hanging the last San Francisco
show either?

No. We may put together a few categories just as suggestions in San
Francisco. We had the photographs divided into a Yosemite gallery
and a Southwest gallery and a San Francisco gallery. That was their
decision. As we supplied them more prints than they used, that gave
them a certain flexibility.

So now the next step is going to Aries in July, and I can stay
only a short time because the [new] book will not be fully printed
by the time we leave on July 11. My contract reads that I have to
stay around the press room when the book is being printed.

Which book is this?

The New York Graphic Society book, the big one.

What's the title of that to be?

Adams: It's just Ansel Adams, Images 1923-1974.

Virginia and Mike and Jeannie [Dr. Michael Adams and his wife]
and one of the grandchildren are going to Europe with me, and they'll
stay over several weeks.

Teiser: What is the event?

Adams: It's a festival of the arts, and they have photographic workshops
and exhibits.

Teiser: I see. Are you going to participate in a workshop?

Adams: I'm participating in some kind of a workshop with translators — I speak
no French. I better speak English I [Laughter] I don't look forward
to it with much pleasure; it's going to be hotter than hell. Oh yes,
everybody tells me that it's just like Fresno. [Laughter] It's a very
hot place. They'll say it isn't, it may not be at night, but it's
very hot in the daytime. It's inland —

725

Polaroid Prints

Teiser: Let me ask you a question that just came to mind while we were

talking. Your Polaroid prints, of course each one is unique, but
do you have record copies?

Adams: Yes, there are a lot of copies. There are copies now in reproductions
in a little book called The Singular Image, which is just the
Polaroid prints that are in the New York show. They really belong to
the Polaroid Corporation.

Teiser: I see. But somewhere there are some kind of records of them, so that
if one were destroyed, you'd have a —

Adams: Yes, but it's pretty hard to get a good thing. It's very hard to

make copies because the Polaroids have what is called a linear tonal
scale. No other photographic material has such a linear scale. What
you see in the image is practically a "straight line," a proportionate
increase in tonal values the mind recognizes and responds to.

Teiser: Do you ever do these on p/n material?

Adams: Oh yes; I have about fourteen 55 p/n enlargements in the exhibit.

But most are original Type 52 prints, long before there was 55 p/n.

Teiser: Is that a field for research, making adequate copies or duplicates?

Adams: Yes, I think it is. I think there are two big things to work on.
One is to make adequate copy negatives of fine prints, so that you
would be able to duplicate them in as true scale as possible, and
the other problem would be to prepare a treatise on what the lighting
of objects of art should be; different mediums require different
levels of lighting.

Lighting Pictures

Adams: But a very interesting thing. Mrs. Carlson had a modern French
painting with a rather somber, rich feeling, in a room in her
apartment in Carmel. Her new apartment at Pacific Grove is about
three times as bright, and the picture seems quite different in
effect. But still, it looks good (only different) in either
condition. This light here in our gallery is very beautiful for
photographs now. But I had to drop the flood lights by over four
feet to bring it up to the required value. I should have installed
a light rail, but that would have been very expensive.

726

Teiser: But the skylights and —

Adams: That was all worked out together.

Teiser: How high is the ceiling?

Adams: Sixteen and a half feet.

Teiser: And the lights are now at about what angle to the photographs?

Adams: A fairly acute angle to avoid reflection and about five-six feet

from the prints. The room in San Francisco was nineteen feet high
and twenty-three feet wide. This is sixteen feet high and wide;
everybody thinks this is bigger than the San Francisco room. It
is bigger in square footage but less in height than the San
Francisco room.

Plans

Teiser: And what next?

Adams: Going to have a big lecture and reception at the Corcoran Gallery,
and then I have to go to England in 1976 and give three lectures
for the Royal Photographic Society, because I got into an awful
mix-up with them by promising them a show and then had to have it
at the Victoria and Albert Museum because of the Metropolitan
Museum's plans. We had to go through some big maneuverings with
the Royal Photographic Society to get out of this conflict. And
they agreed, provided I come over and give the three lectures.

Teiser: When will that be?
Adams: Seventy-six some time.

Then the new plan is that the prices for my photographs go up.
They all go up to $500 on September 1. If you order before that
time, they'll be at the present price. The result is that galleries
will send in enough orders to keep me busy for an awful long time.

Then, on January 1, 1976, I don't take any more orders. I'm
finished printing "to order." I can make sets of work which will
have institutional acquisition. We already have some leads. From
anywhere from $25 to $100,000, depending on the size of the sets
they may take.

Some of the negatives that I haven't printed, if I don't print
those things before I go to the happy hypo baths, it will be
terrible. So I must get busy and print! [Laughter]

727

Adams: I have a lot ahead. Then I have Portfolio Seven coining out next
year.

Teiser: Has all this high degree of organization come about through
Turnage?

Adams: Oh yes, he's done a wonderful job.
Teiser: Has he made out this time schedule?

Adams: Yes, he's made out all the schedules, raised all the prices, and
made the business arrangements. The Turnages really made the
Yosemite gallery work out beautifully.

Teiser: But your print time schedule, and prices and so forth — since he's
worked that out, you don't have to bother with them in the future.

Adams: I just have to do the work.
Teiser: That leaves you free for the creative work.
Adams: Presumably — more than now, at least.
[End Tape 30, Side 1]

Art Festival at Aries

[Interview XXVI — 23 February 1975]
[Begin Tape 31, Side 1]

Teiser: Last time we talked was before you went to France last year.

Adams: Yes, that's right.

Teiser: So would you begin with your exhibit in Aries?

Adams: The trip was really short, and it is very foolish of me to try to
give any description of France with such a very short and hectic
stay. It seemed that the government had arranged for the exhibit
to be placed in one of the Aries museums while I was there. It was
quite handsomely hung and opened on Bastille Day, and great
fireworks were going on the other side of the river, so it was quite
a celebration. [Interruption]

So I came in at the tail end of the French group with a little
interim of a few days, and then started at the beginning of the
American group.

728

Teiser: Was it a conference on photography and the arts?

Adams: It was called the "Art Festival at Aries" and it presented all

media. There were marvelous tapestries, and there was music and
opera and ballet. I didn't attend any of these things but the
tapestries — I preferred the extraordinarily good cooking! Some of
the events were held in the great ruined abbey, just east of the
town, and then I was driven on to Les Baux, saw that pretty
thoroughly and had dinner at a very elaborate and famous
restaurant near there.

Then the day I left I flew to Paris from Marseille in the
morning, made a pilgrimage to the Louvre in the afternoon.

Teiser: Before you leave Aries — you were there with a number of French
photographers. Did you all discuss photography together?

Adams: Oh yes. Also the Whites from Stanford who actually ran the

American workshop. They were in charge of that particular phase
of photography. We had a few field trips, lectures, discussions
of photographs — others' prints as well as a discussion of my
prints as were exhibited in the museum.

Teiser: Did any clear divisions come out between the American attitudes
toward photography and the French attitudes toward photography?

Adams: Yes, there was always a great difference between the European

approach and the American approach, because most of the Europeans
have little or no interest in what we call "print quality." That
lack of interest in print quality, of course, is I think probably
the dominant difference. The European is interested in — I call it
"observation." Very few people in France buy prints as such. They
mostly are concerned with events, observation, journalism, and so
on.

Teiser: I think the French photographers there were Lartigue —

Adams: There was I Jacques Henri] Lartigue and Brassai. My sponsor was
Lucien Clergue. Then there were many that I can't remember the
names of. But those were the prominent influence — Brassai,
Lartigue, and Clergue.

Teiser: Wasn't Cartier-Bresson there?

Adams: Cartier-Bresson came down for a lunch. But he's a very peculiar
man; wished to be totally incognito, but somebody recognized him.
It upset him greatly to be recognized, so he disappeared very
quickly. But he contributed nothing to the festival that I know of.

Teiser: The gentleman with the — [looking at photograph]

729

Adams:

Teiser:
Adams:

Teiser:
Adams :

That's Brassai. The gentleman with the white hair and very noble
face to my left there is Lartigue. Lucien Clergue did not show in
these pictures.

You have a wonderful portrait of Brassai.

Yes, and I also have a beautiful portrait of Lartigue, which I did
at Aries. In fact, the only decent picture I made. I find it very
difficult to photograph, both because of the light and the peculiar
feeling that everything had been done and was old and had many,
many centuries of restorations. I just could not get very excited.
I suppose I would have to go back there and live quite a long time.
I can understand more now the French approach to people, events,
situations —

But you don't like it much?

No, I was very glad to get home,
looked good to me. [Laughter]

After Paris?

I have to admit, even Los Angeles

I was terribly disappointed in Paris — the highrises. Another thing
that bothered me was the untidiness of the landscape; people
littered. I think the outstanding events of the trip were meeting
some of these wonderful people; the ride on the Mistral (the train
from Paris south); the incredible food; and the gorgeous view of
the east coast of Greenland on the way home. [Laughter] That alone
was worth the trip.

Images, 1923-1974

Teiser: Then I guess the next big event was the publication of the New
York Graphic Society book.

Adams: Then I came back from Europe in time to continue supervision of the
pages.

Teiser: Tell a little about the production of that book which involved you
so heavily for so long.

Adams: Well, it was designed by Adrian Wilson. He and I and others went
through hundreds of pictures and chose the ones that would "flow"
properly. Of course there's always many left out that I regret but
can't help, as there's a limit. There are a few in the book that I
would like to have placed differently now that I see it actually
finished. Wallace Stegner did a great job with the text, and you
know George Waters did the printing.

730

Adams: Adrian's job, of course, was not only the layout and design of

the book, but also the production of the mechanicals. That means
the drawings of the pages where every image is accurately scaled
and then bound together so there's no error in page number. It is
the general dummy production of the book.

Then George Waters made the reproductions to Adrian's
specifications. There's a new system of proofing, what they call
the "two-pass litho" — two separate plates that can be proofed
together. You really see in these wonderful new proofs just about
what the final plate's going to hold. But of course that doesn't
control the inking .

In any event, many of the plates had to be made over several
times, and it was all mutually agreed that I would supervise that
and they would be made to my specifications. No matter how good
the craftsmen are, it's very difficult for them to anticipate
just what the artist would like in terms of relative values and so
on.

When the mechanicals are made and the original proofs are
finished, the engraving negatives are made (long-range and short-
range negatives), and they are mounted on the big sheets by what is
known as "the stripper;" he's a special craftsman. He mounts
these up with great accuracy and inserts the type lines.

Then his make-up is photographed on aluminum plates, which of
course are chemically treated and then developed on the basis of
an aquaphobic and aquaphilic process, which means the areas that
reject water and the areas that love water. The aquaphilic relates
to the spaces between the dots that do not accept ink, and the
aquaphobic are just the dots, with no actual raised type in the
litho process. The aquaphobic are the spaces that accept the ink
and transfer it from the roller to the blanket and then from the
blanket to the paper.

How's that?

Teiser: Fine. {Interruption]

Let me ask you, how did the book start?
and ask you for it?

Did they come to you

Adams: No, an agent in San Francisco decided it was about time that there
was a big definitive book of my work done. So I said, "That's
great." He said, "I'll act as your agent and try to place it."
And he almost placed it with several big publishing houses. They
finally backed off because they were afraid of the costs, which
were pretty terrific.

731

Adams: Then he got to the New York Graphic Society, and they were quite
crazy about it, but they also said, well, they were in a
precarious position. They changed managers, so there was one man
who had it just about going and then another man came in and held
off.

So finally another man moved in as managing editor and
director, and Bill Turnage saw him and arranged for the book. He
convinced him of the merit of doing it and also pressed the deluxe
edition concept, which of course raised the value of the book
rather severely.

Then they full-speeded it ahead. I said I'd like to
supervise the printing, so George Waters being in San Francisco
was the logical printer, and we worked with Adrian Wilson. Adrian
Wilson wasn't too well, increasingly debilitated — his heart pacer
was not acting right. (He's all right now.)

At any event, there were some delays. The problem involved
in that is that once the plates are made, and you've accepted the
proofs, you still might find defective images in proofs from the
press. So sometimes you have to go all the way back and make
another plate and go through the whole process. It is a pretty
costly business. And of course George anticipated all that.

These plates were printed on the Miehle two-color press.
They're very carefully aligned so the two images are accurately
imposed one on top of the other, and they come rolling out at about
fifty-three sheets a minute; that seems to be the optimum time for
the ink.

You have to remember, the ink passes from the inked plate to
the blanket. One of the plates is inked with a warmer color than
another; that's worked out so that we get the proper "color" of
ink as we call it. There's a very small percentage, 3 to 5 percent,
brown added to the black in one plate. One plate is the extended
range, which takes the full range, and the other is the short
range, which just takes the extremes. That means that the effective
exposure range of the process is increased, because it's very hard
for them to work with a full-scale photograph which may have a
reflection range of one to a hundred, and they're limited to about
one to thirty-five.

So I have to make prints softer than I would ordinarily, even
for that process. Otherwise, either the whites or the blacks would
be lost.

732

Adams: They have to run up to five hundred copies for "running in" the

ink. They do that, of course, on sheets that have been used many
times; you don't waste all that paper every time, although there
is a very high wastage on a book of this character.

And then it's my job to say, "Well, the ink on this side needs
a little support, a little more, I think." Or, "It's a little bit
too heavy here." Of course, if we would have what is called "four
UP>" you'd have four plates on a sheet. So when you'd adjust the
ink on one, you're also affecting the one above it, the one that
comes in afterwards, you might say. So there's always a certain
compromise to make. We printed "eight up" on a sheet.

A collated book, such as the My Camera in Yosemite, My Camera
in the National Parks, etc., are all printed one or two up, and
they're adjusted so the inking for one plate is the same as the
inking for another. The sheets can then be cut and perforated
and collated separately, but you're not subject to this problem of
four up or eight up.

After the impressions are approved, then if the pressman is
an honest man — and this man was remarkable — he'll stop the press
immediately if a defect appears. Once in a while defects do appear;
they can't watch every sheet. When they find a defect, they
immediately stop the press, clean off the plate, try to find the
numbers of sheets that are bad, and discard those. Some do get
through; we do have a few troubles. But after they have stopped
the press and cleaned the plates, they still have to run through
quite a number of blank sheets to reestablish the ink flow again.

So sometimes I would take the seven o'clock plane from
Monterey and be met by George at about seven-thirty, drive in to
San Francisco and go to work. Sometimes we'd get it done to the
point where I could take the two-thirty plane home, sometimes I'd
have to wait until six-thirty, sometimes I'd have to stay overnight
and continue the next morning. But very often we'd go right
through and suddenly find there was a defect or something had
happened. And then a whole new plate would have to be remade, and
that would mean a whole afternoon, and we'd get it back that night.
Occasionally they ran a night shift when we had a very simple plate,
especially the text pages. The printer would set them up and the
night shift would come on and follow through. The whole level of
the printers' union is very high — they're very exacting.

Teiser: Was the format of the book decided upon before the contents?

Adams: Well, it all comes together. We decided we were going to do a big
book. I said, "Let's do a horizontal book because then we won't
have any double trucks," as they call the divided plates, which are

733

Adams: terrible. Most of my important images are horizontal anyway, so
this gives it a wonderful chance for scale. And the vertical
prints don't suffer at all by it.

However, a horizontal book of that size bound on the short end
gives some terrific binding problems. We had an awful time finding
a binder who'd come within reason. Finally, the Killer Binding
Company in Salt Lake City did it. They have a tremendous plant
and they handle things very well, but they did some sloppy work
for us.

Teiser: The book has now gone through several printings, has it?

Adams: No. The first edition was eighteen thousand, I think; that was the
first planned edition. Before they had really finished half of
that, they realized they needed another ten thousand. Well, we
finished the first one, then we were able to make a few corrections,
and the next should have been called the second printing, but it
wasn't, it was still called the first printing. So twenty-eight
thousand copies constitutes the first printing. Technically, it
should be one and two, but there's not enough difference between
them. The third printing will have thirty corrections, and that
will take place some time this spring; the paper's already ordered.
We hope that will be another ten thousand copies, but it may not
come to pass.

Teiser: What sort of corrections were needed?

Adams: Oh, dates on pictures, for one thing. A few typos. You get them
no matter how carefully you handle it. I wanted to shift the
position of a couple of plates — I think ending with Mount McKinley
would have been better than our present ending. But you can't
worry about that now—

Teiser: The special edition, I suppose is all gone.

Adams: The special edition is practically all gone; there was one

thousand copies made. We had trouble with that, with difficult
binding casings. We had a terrible time finding good cases to
hold both the print and the book sturdily. And the book is bound
and the trtd's leather, and I think it should have been mostly all
leather.

I don't think there's enough apparent difference between the
editions to justify it, except that there is an original fine
print with the special edition, and a special case.

There were five hundred made, with one to five hundred Arabic
and one to five hundred Roman numerals, and one of twenty-six
letters, and most of the lettered copies had serious defects that
we had to reject. So far I haven't found any bad deluxe editions.

734

Teiser:

Adams:
Teiser:
Adams :

Teiser:

Adams:

Ted Organ:

Adams :

The New York Graphic Society is a subsidiary of Time, Incorporated,
is it?

Yes.

Did you feel well-publicized?

Oh, my gosh, yes. Nothing since sex books have been given such
publicity. [Laughter] I had to go all over the country for signing,
etc.

You see,
were taking a
go to $75 — it
in the hole,
if they didn'
canceled out,
seven years,
losers, which

they were under some difficulty too, because they
chance. If the book is priced at $65 and then they
was very costly, and if they didn't sell they'd be
The New York Graphic Society had been advised that
t make a good showing for 1974 they were going to be
dissolved, because they hadn't made any money for
Time-Life felt what's the use of perpetuating money
was quite right. (There's lots of them around.)

So you bailed them out?

So this book apparently saved them.

How many copies have they sold?

They've sold nearly the entire twenty-eight thousand and are
getting ready to print the next ten thousand, I think, which will
bring it to thirty-eight thousand copies. I think they have a few
thousand copies left. And then of course there are some returns.
There were more returns than expected because of bad binding.

So we say the book was very successful. I haven't seen any
negative reviews yet — I suppose there are some. We do have quite
a few returns, but some of those returns are made up soon. So I
suppose it would be safe to say that twenty-five thousand copies
have been sold at this time.

The next book in process is The Southwest, which will come
out in conjunction with the exhibit down at the University of
Arizona and the Amon Carter Museum. We don't have all the details,
but we're getting figures on the book. It won't be nearly as big
as Images; it will be a squarish book — maybe 9 1/2 by 12. As it's
bound on the narrow side in that size, it can be bound by automatic
binding equipment, which will make it better. They made some
mistakes in this book with collating. After it's thoroughly sewn,
they apply what they call "perfect binding fluid" just to pack it
up a little more, and some of that got out on some of the pages and
stuck them together. These things always happen, but still —

735

Adams: The thing they did do which was bad, and they certainly got their
wrists slapped for it, was they didn't reinforce the end papers.
When you open and close a book a certain number of times, unless
those end papers are reinforced, the binding will break. The bound
book is held to the case by the end papers, and that's reinforced
with a piece of linen on both sides.

White House Visit

Teiser: Your recent visit to the White House [January 27, 1975] that was so
widely publicized —

Adams: I made a trip to Washington to see the secretary and the President
and go on to the opening of the Edward Weston show at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York.

Teiser: How did you happen to go see the President and the secretary — the
secretary of the interior, wasn't it?

Adams: Well, [Rogers C.B.] Morton I've known for a long time, and I saw

him because I was in Washington. But what happened was, the White
House photographer is a very nice young man, and he'd got very
excited about the book, bought a copy, and then took it over and
showed it to the Fords, and Mrs. Ford immediately borrowed it and
kept it. So Turnage suggested we make a presentation copy to the
President, which was I think the right thing to do. Then she
expressed great interest in having one of the prints, "Clearing
Winter Storm, Yosemite." So I just happened to have one, a big-
sized one, at hand, and so we packed that off to her.

The idea was that I'd go there and have a semiofficial
presentation. So after seeing the secretary of the interior, we
got to the White House at twelve o'clock, and we met in the Oval
Room and then had to go outside to get pictures taken, and came
back and spent maybe twenty-five minutes talking with the President,
primarily on national parks.

Teiser: What did you tell him?

Adams: Well, you see, the national parks have not had good presidential
support for many years. We were perfectly frank about it. We
said that the parks should have strong presidential support and
this was his chance with the forthcoming campaign — this could be
a very important element of his platform, because people have been
very upset about the way the parks haven't been protected.

736

Adams: So we sat there and had a very pleasant discussion. He's a very
impressive person. He's very quiet; he's very gentle; he looks
you right in the eye, and you have a feeling of complete integrity.

Then after that was over Mrs. Ford took us for a complete
tour of the White House — everything — marvelous.

Teiser: Who's us?

Adams: Bill Turnage and the New York Times photographer and the White

House photographer [David Kennerly] . The White House photographer
very seldom has his pictures appear in print. He doesn't break in
on the news people unless they request it.

So then we had a very amusing thing happen. We went into the
third floor, the family quarters. There's little corner rooms.
And the corner room on the southeast is her room, a kind of a den
where she can read. Well, she has staff offices too, you know — an
awful lot of social things go on. But she has this little
hideaway. Then she took us to the other side and said, with a big
smile, "Our predecessor loved this room. He would come in here and
read. He had all his hi-fi equipment in this cabinet. This is
where he used to come and play his tapes — I mean his records."
[Laughter] And everybody guffawed.

Then we had a very nice informal luncheon in what they call
the solarium, which is really her girl's room, but she appropriates
it for these occasions. The whole thing was really very engaging.

After that we were driven to the hotel to pick the baggage up
and taken to the International Airport.

Park Problems and Solutions

Teiser: What did you tell Secretary Morton — ?

[End Tape 31, Side 1]
[Begin Tape 31, Side 2]

Adams: Well, I had known Morton — not too well. He was very cordial. I

gave him a copy of the book, and then we talked about the national
parks in greater detail, about the very miserable master plan that
had been motivated pretty much by the concessioners, and distorted,
and that we felt that it needed great strength and support from him
directly, as secretary of the interior —

737

Teiser: That was particularly in relation to Yosemite?

Adams: Well, yes; of course Yosemite is a key park. What they accomplish
in Yosemite is really the symbol of what will be done elsewhere;
but it has to be done. It's sort of proven to be our function in
Yosemite — many innovations, like the buses, are very satisfactory.
But a lot of the master plan was very bad and was very much
oriented toward further development.

I pointed out at least two things: that the establishment of
the national park system by Stephen Mather was predicated on the
fact that business would be invited in to invest in public services-
hotels and food and so on — and that they would be strictly
controlled. They'd be allowed to make a fair profit, but they
would remain under the strict control of the government.

As every building was government property, you couldn't use it
for collateral for business loans, which meant that they [the
concessioners] had to finance everything themselves, which of course
resulted in investments whose only source would be increased charges
to the public even when amortized over a period of years.

We had that in Yosemite when we applied for renewal of
concession — we had to put up over $100,000 for refurbishing the
building, because it was about ready to collapse anyway, and do a
lot of things of that nature, and we couldn't borrow anything from
the bank for the building; we had to put our own resources up for
collateral. It actually paid off, but that's the only way it could
be done. But if the government had moved in on their own and
purchased the equity on all these buildings, then leased the
operations, the government could then, by a very slight increase in
fees to visitors, easily amortize the government investment, and the
rates to the public would then significantly drop.

Of course we had to pay a 5 percent on gross income as a
concession fee, plus putting aside another 5 percent for
construction amortization for the next time it came around. Turnage
was able to reduce the concession fee to one percent in our case.
The Yosemite Park and Curry Company only paid 1 3/8 percent — it's
a big company! So we always considered it to be very unfair that
the company netting $20 million a year only paid 13/8 percent,
whereas a company grossing $150,000 or $200,000 would have to pay
5 percent.

Well, we've progressed considerably since then, but for a
$100,000 gross, that 5 percent is $5000 as against $1000 for one
percent. Five thousand dollars puts a nice bite into the pocket-
book.

738

Teiser: You mentioned last evening that you also were discussing the
semantics of parks —

Adams: Yes, that was another thing that I think is terribly important,
that I stress in all my lectures — the fact that for years the
public and the government, everyone, has labored under the
tyranny of words. They've implied meanings. The word "park" in
"Yosemite National Park," "Golden Gate Park," or "Central Park,"
or a town park with a bandstand, implies a place for fun,
recreation, etc. There's no implication at all of preservation.

The "Point Lobos State Reserve" is a marvelous name because
the "reserve" really defines what it is. It should be "Sequoia
National Reserve" and "Yosemite National Reserve;" that would be
the dominant controlling descriptive term, and I think everybody
would then begin to understand. They don't understand a "wilderness
area" because "wilderness" is just as vague a term as "conservation."
The middle of the Mojave Desert is wilderness — and a lot of Los
Angeles is wilderness [laughing]. There you're speaking of areas —
and to attribute a park quality to wilderness areas, you're
producing a very vague definitive term. It should be a "reserve"
or "preserve," or you can have certain areas, like the Hastings
preserve up the Carmel Valley, operated by the University of
California — I forget the name but it's part of the University — not
extension, but a station. It's not open to the public; it's a
natural science preserve where they study animals and ecology.
Well, that's fine. That's a small area for specific scientific use.
The "wilderness reserve" is just simply things left alone as they
are, but the place should always be accessible under very simple
terms, like trails only, no roads, to walkers and riders. But
under a controlled basis, on the theory that you have an opera
house and you have an opera and you sell out all the seats and a
little standing room and all you have left is lap room — and you
shouldn't be selling figurative lap room in the Sierra. [Laughter]

And they have to have controls, like limiting the number of
people at a remote lake. Well, in the first place, I don't know
how they're going to limit them without great supervision. But
they've got to do it, in some way they've got to have a
reservation system. I've been told by computer experts that it
would be less difficult to install a reservation system for
national parks, state parks, and national forests than it would be
to put in an airline reservation system. You could go to the post
office and get an application on which you listed where you wanted
to go and the dates — first, second, and third choice— and put a
dollar in as the fee for that and send it off to the reservation
center. You would get back a reply. If there isn't any chance at
all, you are so advised; if your dates are acceptable and there's
room, all right, that's reserved for your purpose. But now if you

739

Adams: can't make it, then the next person is put on stand-by. But there
should be a penalty involved so that if you couldn't make it, you'd
have to advise them.

But you could control the whole national park system that way.
Somebody could say, "I want to be in Yosemite from the first to the
tenth of June and then go to Olympic from the twelfth to the
fifteenth" and have that all down, and that would be like selling
seats on a plane. There's no reason why it couldn't work. The
American Express card idea that the Park Service tried failed
because they couldn't make any money on it; that was a very stupid
thing for the then director to do.

Well, I guess that's all — that was the second trip. Then I
went to the opening of the great Edward Weston show in New York.

Teiser: How was it received in New York?

Adams: Oh, tremendously. It was a magnificent show.

Teiser: You felt it was hung well?

Adams: I felt it was displayed beautifully. My only criticism is that it
was very icy; it wasn't at all like Edward's personality. The
smaller show at the Witkin Gallery had much more of the personal
feeling you had when Edward showed you his prints — a small room and
the prints intimately presented. The big show had great rooms and
great white spaces and sharp lighting, but it was very cold.

Museums and certain galleries are getting more and more sterile
in that way. They do not think of the environment.

Teiser: Some contrast to the Louvre, though.

Adams: The Louvre was the most awful display I've ever seen in my life;
things are all crowded together; the lighting is terrible. The
paintings are neither clean nor well-protected. And my image of
the Venus de Milo in her room — her face is turned away from the
light, and throngs of people under her with flashbulbs going off.
[Laughter] Everybody's photographing the Venus from all angles —
with flash at the camera, which of course is the worst possible
lighting you can have. I was interested that the face was not
toward the window, and the marble looked rather yellowish and dusty,
and not at all like the photographs I've seen. .Then" the Courbets
and the Botticellis and the endless number of things you've seen in
great reproductions in art books all your life are just terribly
disappointing in their showing. And they say they show only a
fraction of what they've got. You know how big the Louvre is — just
like the whole Civic Center in itself.

740

Death of Nancy Newhall
Teiser: I was going to ask if you want to say anything about Nancy Newhall.

Adams: Beaumont Newhall is one of my very oldest friends — did we discuss
her tragic death?

Teiser: No.

Adams: Well, they had moved of course to Albuquerque where Beaumont was a
professor of history of photography at the University of New Mexico.
They were to give a workshop in Colorado Springs. But prior to that
they took a short vacation in the Tetons, which she loved very much.
They loved to go down the river in one of these big yellow
inflatable rubber boats, just floating down the Snake. I don't know
how many miles the trip is, but they dock eventually and are taken
back to the hotel by car.

So they were leaving on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon for
Colorado Springs, and they said, "Let's just take one more trip
down the river." They did, and they were floating along when a
great big spruce tree whose roots had been undermined by high water
(they'd had very high water that spring) suddenly decided to let go
and fell right on the raft, striking Nancy. It hit Beaumont a
little — he had a sprained back — and it knocked the other people
into the water. But Nancy was pinned by this big tree and
suffered shattered ankles and cracked ribs and broken collar bone
and multiple concussions. So they finally got her to the hospital
and she was gradually coming to, and they thought they'd be able to
take her to Albuquerque and take her home after a short time. But
she had moments of incoherence, and it was possible that she never
would have been herself again on account of brain damage. She just
suddenly died. Apparently the diagnosis was that when you have
shattered bones sometimes, the marrow can get in the blood stream
and cause a blockage in the brain. They said the bones splintered
so bad they couldn't repair the very shattered areas there. It
perhaps was a rather merciful thing that she did go that way rather
than linger on in a mentally impaired condition.

It was a great shock to Beaumont, but he's come out of it very
wonderfully and seems to be thriving with all kinds of new
objectives and work to do —

Teiser: She had done a great deal, and a great deal of what she had done is
preserved in your books, isn't it?

Adams: Yes, she and I worked together at great length, and we had great

sympathy in many ways and approaches to the world. Towards the end
I would say she was getting a little eccentric on solar power, on a

741

Adams: very emotional basis — and I was a little more careful, having had

so much experience with the fanatics, and I would say, "Be sure you
get scientific advice on what you write and say, because it still
is a very open and difficult question." Solar power has got great
potential, but it works in certain areas and doesn't work in others,
but not being a scientist — I felt we have to be very careful. We
should get more scientific support. Of course, many of the
scientists disagree, which is an interesting fact.

Tom Jukes, for instance, thinks that in stopping the use of
DDT, the Sierra Club is favoring genocide. There are certain areas
of the world where DDT has eliminated the mosquito and millions of
lives have been saved, so that is a possibility we have to take.

The Sierra Club counters by saying it's bad for man and beast
and it's extinguishing species, and so on. But I think we should
be feeling that man is the most important thing; I still must favor
a human being over a pelican.

It's like nuclear power — everybody's scared to death about the
wastes. Well, we must have enough technology to minimize the
dangers from the waste. But when you say we haven't got it, that
to me is very disturbing because we've surrendered, I think, to
many things of great importance just because of a fear and a
distrust of a fundamental technological capability, which I think
we have.

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Full text of "Conversations with Ansel Adams : oral history transcript / 1972-1975"

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