Vault of 40,000 Pictures Researched : Ansel Adams’ Photo Mastery Resurfaces

Ansel Adams’ treasure trove of 40,000 black and white photographs, packed inside a concrete and steel vault, is yielding masterpieces that the meticulous artist never found time to print.

“Two or three times a day, we come across something that just blows us away,” says Rod Dresser, who is proofing Adams’ nearly seven decades of work before sending it to the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography.

Though known for landscape and nature photography, Adams also made about 2,500 portraits and 3,000 color photos, most of which have never been printed.

“We keep uncovering stashes in shoe boxes and in the back of closets that he liked and wanted to do something with,” Dresser said.

Published in Autobiography

Some of the photos were published for the first time in Adams’ recently released autobiography, edited by his chief assistant, Mary Alinder. Others will be published in future books, including a collection of his letters.

The masterpieces in the book include “Succulents and Cypress Root,” “Cathedral Rocks, Meadow Mist” and “Glacier Bay.”

In the months after Adams died on April 22, 1984, at the age of 82, Alinder said she “talked” to him.

“I don’t mean that in a spooky way,” she said. “I was so angry. In a loving way, I would say, ‘Ansel Adams, why didn’t you make a print of that?’ And I could hear him saying, ‘Oh, well, I’ll get to it next week.’ He always went from project to project, and that was old business.”

None of the newly discovered photos will be printed for exhibition.

Not for Museums

“They could never be shown in a museum. We wouldn’t put them up, even in this house. They are for reproduction only,” Alinder said in an interview at the Adams house.

When Adams made a photograph, he believed in doing everything himself--from visualizing, exposing and developing to producing the final print. He sometimes labored for days to achieve a print that satisfied him.

His autobiography is visually elegant, sprinkled with wisdom and poetry from a long life filled with art, music, nature, humor and remarkable friends.

One of the few bitter passages concerns President Reagan, whom Adams strongly criticized for his environmental policies.

Adams served on the Sierra Club board of trustees for 37 years until he quit in 1971 in a dispute over nuclear energy. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Adams, a two-finger typist with arthritic hands, spent his last years punching out his memoirs on a computer, printing his most famous photos for exhibitions and speaking about environmental issues. Only rarely did he find time to go out with his camera.

“Ansel would try to concentrate in the darkroom or on his autobiography and there’d be senators and other people calling about a river being threatened or something else,” Alinder said. “He’d be at his wit’s end sometimes, feeling his energies were going in so many directions other than photography.”

Adams quit school after the eighth grade in San Francisco and educated himself by reading voraciously.

“I like to read history and Ansel would sometimes say, ‘Why do you look at the past? The future’s what’s important,’ ” his widow, Virginia, said in an interview at their sprawling home overlooking the Pacific.

He found early discipline in music and trained through young adulthood to be a concert pianist. Later, he said he often heard music in his head while he photographed. He worked in the darkroom with a metronome rather than a clock.

Adams produced about 40 books. He was a workaholic during the day and an insomniac who kept the light and radio on all night. Still, there wasn’t enough time to print all his work.

Alinder, who worked closely with him from 1979, estimates that the negatives Adams kept represent only about a fifth of those he actually made.

About one-third of his early work was lost in a 1937 darkroom fire at his Yosemite studio. He purposely mutilated the negatives to his Portfolio VI in an effort to boost sales by limiting the edition, an act he regretted and never repeated.