The Focus of a Lifetime

Longevity doesn’t guarantee recognition for artists, but it seems to be paying off for Bay Area photographer Pirkle Jones, who celebrated his 87th birthday last January. Known mainly to photography specialists and often dismissed as a talented acolyte of Ansel Adams, Jones is finally being discovered by a larger audience, even as his work is being reconsidered by curators, historians and collectors who only thought they knew it.

The impetus for this belated attention is two-fold: “Pirkle Jones: Sixty Years in Photography,” a major retrospective exhibition opening Saturday at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and “Pirkle Jones: California Photographs,” an illustrated book recently published by Aperture.

Other books and shows are under discussion as well. Late as they may be, the projects are gratifying to an artist who has played a vital role in California photography, although usually outside the limelight. Too busy to promote himself and too independent to have his career managed by a dealer, he tends to be known in bits and pieces.

“Pirkle is like the elephant that all the blind men are describing,” said Tim B. Wride, associate curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who co-curated the exhibition with the Santa Barbara museum’s photography curator, Karen Sinsheimer, and wrote an essay for the book. “Everybody knows their own little part of him, but nobody really has had a chance to look at all the work,” he said.

When they do, they discover a photographer who not only absorbed the lessons of his mentors and better known colleagues--including Adams, Edward Weston, Minor White, Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham--but also found his own voice. Beyond magnificent landscapes that put one in mind of Adams and sensuous images of vegetables inspired by Weston, there are distinctive pictures of flea markets, Black Panther rallies, and San Francisco’s buildings and laborers.

One of his most compelling portfolios, produced with Lange for a Life commission that was never published in the magazine, is “Death of Valley.” Completed in 1956, it’s a study of the Berryessa Valley, near the town of Monticello. It was flooded in 1957 to create a reservoir. For his part of the project, Jones photographed the valley’s last gasp of life in images of orchards, grape pickers and an elderly couple walking from a cemetery on its last Memorial Day.

Philosophically, Jones is akin to White, who conceived of photography as a spiritual discipline and valued meaning as much as composition, Wride said. “But once you factor in the idea that Pirkle is a very politically active humanist, his work really takes on a different edge.” Jones’ pictures of the Gate Five houseboat community near Sausalito in 1969 and 1970 were taken “as an insider” who communicates directly with his subjects, he said. Fascinated with the hippies and their fantastic dwellings in the then-makeshift community, Jones created a close-up portrait that reflects his interest in their experimental lifestyle.

The key to appreciating Jones’ achievement is to track his work to his Pictorialist roots in the 1930s and follow its evolution, Wride said. The fact that it can’t be easily classified or stuffed into a single niche is “all the more reason to understand and celebrate it,” he said.

The creator of this multifaceted body of work is a charming octogenarian who tends orchids and receives visitors at his classic Modernist wood and glass house, nestled in a wooded canyon just outside central Mill Valley. He has lived there for more than 30 years and still loves the way it allows him to live amid nature.

Settling at a long dining table, Jones reflected on his career. “This whole thing of art--what is shown in museums and what stands up in history--is so complex,” he said, in a classic understatement. “In the end, time will tell.”

True, but this is his moment, and he didn’t seem to mind telling his life story one more time. Asked to begin at the very beginning, he said he was born in 1914 in Shreveport, La., and moved to an 80-acre farm in southern Indiana about three years later.

“That led to an extremely happy childhood, living on the farm close to nature and the earth. I often go back and reflect on that, and I think it has probably affected my whole life,” he said. “I was always interested in nature; [horticulturist] Luther Burbank was my boyhood idol. I was not as keen on sports. My interest was more in using my eyes and appreciating what I saw.”

Named for the Dr. Pirkle who delivered him, he was “the different one” in a family of seven children, Jones said. “None of my brothers or sisters were interested in the visual arts.” His father was a cabinetmaker who inherited enough money to be a gentleman farmer, and his mother was too busy with her brood to aid her son’s artistic development. “She didn’t have time to do anything but give me a lot of support, but that’s the most important thing,” he said.

The family moved to Indianapolis in 1922 and then to Lima, Ohio, about four years later. As a high school student in Lima, Jones loved biology and botany, but Latin stumped him, so he drifted into a commercial course.

“The high point of graduating from high school in 1931 was that some of the seniors were able to take a trip to Washington, D.C.,” he said. He visited the Phillips Collection and was enthralled by Renoir’s painting “The Luncheon of the Boating Party.” “I’ve seen it three times, up to 50 years later, and my interest in it and thrill with it has never diminished. There’s something about it that’s so compelling to me. I think it’s the social content, the beauty of the color and the very positive feeling.”

He also took photographs on that trip using a Brownie camera. But his first encounter with photography as an artistic medium occurred a few years later, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. “I was introduced to Alfred Stieglitz’s work in a little gallery on the lower floor,” he said. “I couldn’t help but admire his work, but I didn’t understand it at all. Still, I never forgot the images.”

From 1933 to 1941, Jones supported himself by operating a shoe-trimming press at the Lima Sole & Heel Factory. “If I worked hard all day, I could earn about $5.25,” he said. At the same time, he cultivated his interest in art by visiting Midwestern art museums and taking drawing classes taught by artists employed by the WPA. He also began taking photographs and submitting them to publications and salons organized by photography associations. One of his early images, “Narcissus at the Pool” (1936), was widely exhibited and published in the U.S. Camera Annual, edited by Edward Steichen.

Jones’ life changed abruptly in 1941, when he was inducted into the U.S. Army. He served in the Signal Corps and was stationed in the South Pacific. After his discharge in 1945, Jones decided to use his GI Bill benefits to study photography. He was accepted at Art Center School in Los Angeles (now Art Center College of Design in Pasadena). But he heard that Adams was starting a photography department at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and enrolled there in 1946.

Jones became Adams’ assistant in 1949 and joined the school’s faculty in 1952. Throughout his student days and early professional years, he was part of a creative community that included White, Lange and other instructors at the school; Weston, who lived in nearby Carmel; and many illustrious visiting artists. The milieu led to many creative collaborations, including “Death of a Valley” with Lange, and photographic essays on the Black Panthers and the city of Walnut Grove with his late wife, writer-photographer Ruth-Marion Baruch.

“It’s amazing to imagine all those people at that school at the same time,” Jones said. “When I look back, I think this was really something, something you couldn’t plan. It was very organic.”

Photography wasn’t always considered art, but Jones said “that was never a question” for him. “I never let that bother me because I was so interested in what I was doing. I did not wonder what people would think of my work. The joy of producing work was satisfying enough for me. That’s why, during my whole career, I have never been able to have a dealer. There is a certain inevitable relationship you have to establish. The bottom line with a dealer is: It’s a business.”

Turning his attention to the new Aperture book, Jones said he is particularly pleased with “the way it was put together in thematic sections, so it will be easy for people to go through. A lot of visual books are of a catalog nature. This is good for the layman, but it’s also a good source for people who need a reference book.”

Still, the 120 pictures in the book are “sort of the tip of the iceberg,” he said. Asked if they are his favorites, he said, “Let’s just say there’s not a photograph in here that I don’t like.”

Leafing through the pages, he recalled coming across sculptural madrone trees on Mt. Tamalpais, finding collage-like compositions at a flea market and stopping his car to photograph a boy riding his bicycle followed by a dog on a lonely country road in Berryessa Valley. He also remembered going back to certain sites repeatedly to capture just the right light and shadows.

Jones occasionally runs out of ideas, “but I never let it bother me,” he said. “Even if I don’t have a camera in my hand, my eyes are the camera, and I am always sizing up the visual experience of what I am seeing. I don’t need to photograph it all. I can isolate and do the compositions in my head for my own pleasure. Artists transfer their experiences so that other people might enjoy a small percentage of them. The artist really gets the full jolt.”

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“Pirkle Jones: Sixty Years in Photography,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara. Saturday through March 31. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Fridays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sundays, noon-5 p.m. Adults, $6; seniors, $4; students and youths 6-17, $3; children younger than 6, free. (805) 963-4364.