The master develops

Ansel Adams rarely acknowledged Sundays or holidays. Until just a few months before he died -- at 82 on Easter Sunday, 1984 -- the photographer was in his darkroom nearly every day. The only difference was that on Sundays, his assistant didn’t come by, and he’d complain that he couldn’t get as much done.

Photographer John Sexton, a onetime Adams assistant, recalls a particularly frustrating morning for Adams in 1980. Struggling for hours to make a print, experimenting again and again with papers and developers, Adams emerged from his darkroom triumphant. “He said he’d finally got the print he wanted when he made the negative in the ‘30s,” says Sexton. “Fifty years later, he still experienced the rush and magic of the process.”

Adams’ process is at the core of “Ansel Adams at 100,” opening today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through April 27). More than 100 of his black-and-white images of mountains and sky, lakes and waterfalls in Yosemite, Canada, Alaska and other points west are included in the first major show to reevaluate his work since Adams’ death.

Curated by John Szarkowski, director emeritus of the department of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the traveling exhibition includes prints of the same negatives made at different times in Adams’ life. “You could show two or perhaps even six versions of every picture in the show,” says Szarkowski, who spent more than a year seeking the best prints he could find in public and private collections. “A photographic negative is a very plastic thing.”

This was particularly true for Adams. According to William Turnage, managing trustee of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Adams made more than 40,000 negatives and probably printed 4,000 to 4,500 of those as fine prints -- many of them again and again.

Adams made every print himself. Trained as a pianist, Adams once told me he considered the negative the composer’s score. “The print,” he said, “becomes the performance.”

Adams and photographic technology evolved over time, and so did the prints. Although not all of Adams’ photos changed dramatically when printed at different times in his life, most of the prints he made after the ‘50s were larger, bolder and more likely to highlight the contrasts between light and dark.

Adams’ prints of “Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Alaska” are an extreme example of that change, says Szarkowski. There are two such prints in the LACMA exhibition, both made from a 1948 negative -- one in 1949, the other in 1978. “It’s a radical change,” says Szarkowski, “and it really turns the picture into something with quite a different meaning.”

In the later one, “the mountain looks as though it’s already been victimized by some heavy industry pollution, like all of Ansel’s conservation efforts failed. It’s darker and heavier. Wonder Lake has a big dark spot Ansel burned in for some reason. I don’t know why he did that.”

The two versions of “Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Alaska” are next to each other in the LACMA show. “You can’t walk away without realizing how many options are available to the photographer,” says the museum’s curator of photography, Robert Sobieszek. “There are an infinite number of choices that constitute the art of photography. The public will see that in a very clear way.”

EVOLVING VIEWS

San Francisco-born Adams first put his West on film at 14, taking his Kodak Brownie box camera on a family trip to Yosemite. His early photographs represented just a “visual diary” of his outdoor experiences, he said once, but in time “the images began to mean something as images as well.”

Adams spent much of his life working in a makeshift darkroom in the basement of his San Francisco home. But when he relocated south of Carmel in the early ‘60s, he designed a long, narrow darkroom that resembled a wide hallway packed full of big sinks, enlargers and other equipment. He used the metronome from his pianist days to time things by sound rather than be distracted by looking up at a clock.

After the ‘50s -- both his and the century’s -- Adams was more likely to be in the darkroom than in the Sierras taking new pictures. “By the mid-’60s, he was making very few new photographs,” observes Turnage. “The fire had gone out, which happens to artists, and I think he had said what he had to say visually.”

As Adams grew older -- and looked more like Santa Claus in a Stetson hat -- he also fueled, accommodated and eventually profited from an accelerating interest in photography as art and investment. So instead of making just three or four prints of an image, he printed more to meet the increased demand of dealers, private collectors and museums.

The long hours standing, his hands in cold liquid, would have been arduous even for a man younger and without arthritis. “Darkroom work can be considerable drudgery,” says Turnage. “This was a very laborious process. All of the prints, although they look unmanipulated, were manipulated, some significantly so. His absolute criteria was that this manipulation should not be obvious or visible.

“A lot of artists don’t print their own work, but the printing was a more important part of his work and what he was trying to say. His darkroom skills, tenacity and ability were unparalleled. He began as a pianist, and on the piano, if you miss a note, everybody hears it. He transferred that discipline, that 10 hours a day of practicing, to photography. He pursued photography with the same sort of rigor. I can’t tell you how many prints that were beautiful to me he would rip in half and throw away because he wasn’t satisfied.”

As Adams reinterpreted his negatives of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, and his prints became darker and more contrasting, Turnage thinks they also became easier for people to understand. “I think Ansel, wanting his work to be liked, even loved, saw in the ‘60s that his later prints were more easily appreciated and created more enthusiasm from the broader public, and he continued in that direction.”

Adams’ son Michael, a physician who as a child accompanied Adams when he shot many of those early photographs, says he likes the later works more because of their sharper contrasts. But as Szarkowski also makes clear in his catalog accompanying the show, the curator prefers the early ones.

Consider “Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake,” for instance. “There’s a wonderful shimmer on the original picture, like quicksilver,” Szarkowski says. “The whole thing kind of vibrates with life. In his best work, from his best years, his pictures have the quality of a curtain in the light -- that kind of shimmer, like Gothic illumination. It’s almost flat but it’s almost shaking in the light. And that’s what the Mt. McKinley picture has as he printed it when he first made it. Later it becomes ponderous.”

Another draw for Szarkowski is the scale of those early prints. In the ‘30s, he says, Adams had exhibitions in small galleries, his prints were also small -- rarely as big as 8 by 10 inches -- and there might be three or four people on a crowded day. “One speaks in a quieter voice,” says Szarkowski. “In my view, the most beautiful prints are done when Ansel is thinking of the audience for his work in more intimate terms.”

It wasn’t just the audience that changed, but Adams’ attitude toward the world in general, says Szarkowski. “Maybe he was tired of talking in soft-spoken, lyrical tones. Adams as a person becomes, in his late 40s and early 50s, a more public person. He is more publicly involved in disputes in the museum world, photography and conservation, and as this happens, the character of his speech changes to more declamatory. Work conceived in lyric terms is recast in dramatic terms.”

Szarkowski challenges those who say that Adams’ reinterpretations were dictated by either changes in photographic materials or indeed by changes in Adams’ eyesight. “For one thing, if your eyes are fading, you’d print lighter and Ansel kept printing darker,” says the curator. “Also, I would prefer to think that unless you really have persuasive evidence to the contrary, you should give artists credit for doing what they do because they want to. I don’t think we should think it was an accident that the printing changed.”

Adams cut back on his printing around 1975 when Turnage convinced him he could afford financially to spend less time in the darkroom making the same prints over and over and devote more time to working on books and other projects. “He wanted to reach a larger audience,” says Turnage. “He could only reach a limited number of people with prints -- even at a couple hundred dollars each, they were expensive -- but he has reached millions through his books.”

The photographer announced he would stop taking orders for prints. Yet even after he stopped taking orders, there was a sizable backlog from dealers and others that kept him fulfilling requests for several more years. Adams said that he “breathed a sigh of relief” when he knew he didn’t have any more orders to fill, but he still returned to the darkroom daily, reprinting negatives for his own archives and for museums.

ADAMS’ EDICT

After his death, Adams’ negatives went to the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, an archive, museum and research institution the photographer co-founded in 1975. Adams directed that no one be allowed to print his negatives for sale or exhibition after his death, says Turnage. John Sexton or another former darkroom assistant will occasionally make prints for the trust for reproduction purposes if prints get worn out, Turnage says, but that’s the only exception.

Still, there are a lot of prints extant. “You would think how prolific he was would dilute the interest, but there have never been enough images to satisfy the public,” says New York photography dealer Robert Mann. “Because of demand, the same pictures will change hands on more than one occasion, and the prints keep ratcheting up in value.”

Although Turnage estimates that Adams made more than 1,000 fine prints of his quintessential image, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,” even that image has continued to climb in value. Early prints of the 1941 negative are rare and the most valuable, but the later ones most people have seen are not widely different from one another. “Moonrise” prints shot up in value from $800 in 1975, when Adams stopped taking new orders, to $50,000 or more today for prints generated in the ‘70s and ‘80s. An oversize copy of “Moonrise” made before 1957 fetched a record $136,000 last April at Sotheby’s in New York.

Prints made in the ‘70s and ‘80s of “Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Alaska” in good physical condition, at 16 by 20 inches, would fetch $35,000 to $45,000, says Mann. But far rarer ones made around the time of the 1948 negative, in the same size, could be $60,000 to $80,000 or more. “Ansel wasn’t making many 16-by-20 prints then,” says Mann.

Now comes “Ansel Adams at 100.” The exhibition at LACMA drew record attendance in San Francisco, where it was first organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in August 2001, and sizable crowds in Chicago, London and Berlin.

The attention, dealers say, is heating up the market for his works and adding luster to a career already credited with driving and riding the wave of photography’s popularity. (Looking around the crowded Santa Monica Civic Auditorium during last month’s “Photo L.A.” event, veteran San Francisco photography dealer Scott Nichols commented, “If it weren’t for Ansel Adams, we wouldn’t be here.”)

LACMA will host a companion show of contemporary landscape photography from its permanent collection.

“Every landscape photographer working in the late 20th century has been influenced in one way or another by Ansel’s example,” says LACMA’s Sobieszek. “Not only his grand operatic objectifying view of nature, but his printing techniques, his respect for the medium and his passion for his art make him a towering influence. There are fresh tripod marks in the Sierra Nevada every day.”

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‘Ansel Adams at 100’

When: Opens today. Runs Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, noon-8 p.m.; Fridays, noon-9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays,

11 a.m.-8 p.m. Closed Wednesdays.

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

Ends: May 11

Price: Adults, $10-$15; children under 17, free. Tickets include entrance to some other exhibitions as well.

Contact: (323) 857-6000