Ansel Adams is “the” icon of landscape photography in the United States. Trained as a concert pianist, his love of photography and Yosemite led him to a career change.
In several ways, 1936 was a turning point in his life. That summer, Adams worked past the point of exhaustion preparing for a one-person photography exhibit at the request of Alfred Stieglitz, curator of “An American Place” gallery in New York. Stieglitz was the most highly respected photographer of his day and Adams was still largely unknown. Partly due to the importance of the show, and partly because Patsy English, his darkroom assistant, pushed him to higher levels of excellence in his prints than he had ever achieved before, Adams produced what many consider to be the best set of prints of his life. Immersed in the project, they would sometimes work for days without sleep. Complicating the summer, Adams fell in love with his assistant. Physically worn out at the conclusion of the project, and torn between his conflicted feelings for his wife Virginia and for Patsy, Adams had a nervous breakdown.
Loyalty to his wife and children and a desire to “do what is right” took priority over his feelings for his assistant. Time spent in his beloved Yosemite brought emotional and physical healing. As he emerged from the breakdown months later, he wrote the letter below to Cedric Wright. It is now considered a classic and the final paragraph is quoted in a host of photo books and on dozens of web sites. The exhibit at the Stieglitz gallery was a huge success and Adams went on to become one of the most famous landscape photographers of the 20th Century.
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Letter from Ansel Adams to Cedric Wright, June 10, 1937:
“Dear Cedric,
A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.
For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.
Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.
Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.
Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these.
Ansel”
Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927, by Ansel Adams. This photo was a major turning point in Adams conception of his own photography, and a validation of his decision to switch from concert pianist to professional photographer.
Ric Burns PBS Documentary, Adams autobiography, and “Examples” of 40 of Adams works:
PBS: Ansel Adams. A synopsis of Adams’ life with an edited version of the letter to Cedric Wright.
Transcript of Ric Burns’ Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film (Narrated By David Ogden Stiers)
Text of the letter to Cedric Wright
Ansel Adams Gallery. Buy posters and reproductions of Adams’ work ($20-30), vintage and rare originals that were printed by Adams (these cost thousands of dollars), and “Yosemite Special Edition Photographs” that are individually hand printed by Alan Ross from Adams’ original negatives (currently $175). The gallery also sells works by other photographers.