Adams and Stieglitz: a friendship: when Ansel Adams met Alfred Steiglitz in 1933, the two photographers embarked on an enduring personal relationship that was the most important of Adams's artistic life

Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Sandra S. Phillips

The exhibition honoring Ansel Adams's centenary (the last stop of its extensive tour was the Museum of Modern Art, New York) offered a major reevaluation of this photographer. Until now we have known Adams's work much differently: there were many early pictures in this show, works from the 1920s and '30s not often seen. Perhaps a third of all the photographs included were unique prints. And the prints themselves were a revelation--smaller and more tonally rich than the later prints, from the '50s on, to which we have grown accustomed.

Adams lived a long and extremely productive life, and when he died in 1984 at the age of 82 he was one of the last photographers who had known the great figures of modernist photography personally. The centenary show's curator, John Szarkowski, himself a landscape photographer of no small accomplishment, essentially discovered a new Adams, one who, it now becomes clear, was an important modernist, endowed with a singular, quiet and passionate voice. As it toured, the show prompted me, one of its organizers, to think further about Adams's relationship to modernism, and particularly his relationship to Alfred Stieglitz, the man who gave him the show he most valued in his lifetime.

What has become clear to me is the unique and constant importance of Stieglitz in Adams's artistic life. Their contact lasted from their first meeting in 1933, when Adams was 32 and Stieglitz 69, until Stieglitz's death just after World War II, in 1946. Their friendship flourished particularly because Adams willed it; he was determined to maintain contact with the man who had the highest ambition for photography and whose own photography he most admired, a mentor who had also admitted him into his circle. Perhaps distance also helped, for Adams, though he made many trips to New York, lived in San Francisco. Thus he was essentially free of the animosities that so often came from closer contact with Stieglitz and made friendship with him so difficult. Adams was not, however, oblivious to the complexities of his personality; he was entirely aware of Stieglitz's need for control and adulation.

In his later years, Adams always claimed that Stieglitz was the most important figure in his life. When informed of his death, Adams wrote back to his correspondent, "I do not believe in ghosts, but he spoke to me a few days ago, while I was driving through the mountains--wonderful sun and clarity. He said that the only thing that mattered was the sun and the earth and the growing things and what these things were in relation to humanity. The agony of humanity was in direct relation to humanity's separation from the truth and from nature." (1)

One of the remarkable contributions of the centenary exhibition is that it revealed the profound importance of Stieglitz's work to Adams, and the great creative use Adams made of it. In 1948 he claimed his "intense experiences in photography" were seeing Stieglitz's "Equivalents" (probably for the first time in 1933, when they met), Paul Strand's negatives in 1930, and Edward Weston's portraits and shells, which he must have known by the late 1920s. (2) By the 1940s, Adams was making pictures that refer, at least in their origin, to the ecstatic sequenced pictures of clouds Stieglitz made at his summer home in Lake George. Adams's Surf Sequence (1940), for instance, recalls the older artist by its abstracting downward glance to the sea (rather than, as with the "Equivalents," upward to the clouds), and the same might be said of the multiple pictures of grasses, Grass (Sequence) Yosemite Valley (1944), or the photographs he made (though he neglected to title them as sequential) of the limpid Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park (1942), which so resemble Stieglitz's many views down his hill to the lake.

The trees that Stieglitz saw and the distant mountaintop he photographed at twilight, wreathed in cloud, were profoundly interesting to the younger man; many of the pictures Adams made express a similar delight in place. Like Stieglitz, Adams photographed favorite trees over a span of years--among them an oak on the Yosemite Valley floor covered in snow or radiant in the autumn light, and another by the river seen in the evening and in the morning sun.

Adams's pictures of trees do not, however, bear the same tragic personal identification as Stieglitz's dying chestnut trees or his poplars, broken and gaunt. Poplars, so-called because they are hardy and common (their scientific name is Populus, and Stieglitz would surely have loved that), have the approximate life span of a man. Stieglitz thus photographed the survivors of his lather's original plantings, trees of his own life span. This is the essential difference between the two photographers. Even when the subjects are similar, Adams's pictures are more emotionally distant. They have a sense of observation that is not personally implicated, as Stieglitz's work is. This is particularly evident in Adams's photographs of mountains and sky. His early, small prints of the 1920s, reminiscent of Stieglitz's "Songs of the Sky" (as early variants of the "Equivalents" were titled) and certainly made after Adams had seen them, are momentary glimpses of the divine, as though we were standing with the photographer looking to the opposite peak, straining at a glorious revelation, brief and wonderful but bearing no relation to us at all.