Book features extraordinary collection of Adams’ work

ANSEL ADAMS: Our National Parks, edited by Andrea G. Stillman and William A. Turnage, Little, Brown and Co., 127 pages, 80 duotone illustrations, $16.95.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that only one picture in 10,000 was worthy of the applause of mankind. He was wrong. Less than a century later America’s legendary photographer, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), let loose a torrent of pictures so magnificent, so enduring they have become an icon of excellence. A man with a mission, Adams focused his photographic skills on the then emerging chain of national parks and monuments that was gradually lengthening in this country. An ardent environmentalist, he chose to promote the worthy cause of the park system for six decades, employing every means at his command: photography, letters, speeches and public appeals. From his oeuvre of park pictures this extraordinary collection has been assembled.

A genius who used his camera to search out the soul of the scenes he immortalized, Adams’ black-and-white pictures haunt the memory and awe the eye. In the flat eye-level view of water sweeping over a table of rocks at Schoodic Point in Acadia National Park, he invokes the ill-concealed passion of the Atlantic Ocean; the grotesquerie of carnival-shaped rock formations of the Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona, frozen in time; the Brobdingnagian intimidation of “Grounded Iceberg” in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska; the Euclidean sweep of a narrow band of water bisecting the dark plains of the sand bar on the Rio Grande, Big Bend National Park, Texas; and the surrealistic flow of lines in “Sand Dunes Sunrise,” Death Valley National Monument, California.

About “Sand Dunes” he wrote: “I was camped in my car near Stovepipe Wells, usually sleeping on top of my car on the camera platform, which measures about 5×9 feet. Arising long before dawn I gathered my equipment and started on the rather arduous walk through the dunes to capture the dune surnise. … The dunes are constantly changing, and there is no selected place to return to after weeks or months have passed. A searing sun rose over the Funeral Range. …. The red-golden light struck the dunes, and their crests became slightly diffuse with sand gently blowing in the early wind. … I worked first with 4×5 Kodachrome. … Then, without moving the camera, I made several exposures with black-and-white film. … Within 15 minutes the light flattened out … and I moved back to my car through 90 F and more of Death Valley heat …”

One of Adams’ most difficult and singular photographic assignments took him 750 feet underground in the Carlsbad Caverns (“so strange and deep in the earth that I can never feel about them as I do with things in the sun”). From this locale came the eerie, brooding picture, “Detail, Papoose Room,” Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico. Confessing that the photographic problems were “terrific,” he explains that he started out with an exposure of about 10 minutes, then boosted the image with photoflash, his aim being to capture the beauty of the formations rather than the textures and substances. Although “Detail” is a technical triumph, its ambiance is chilling and brings to mind the realm of the dead.

There is what Robert Herrick the English poet termed a wild civility about the pictures of Ansel Adams. He stuns the senses. In the instance of “Zabriskie Point,” Death Valley National Monument, California, the viewer is caught up in the spell of the scene of row on row of undulating rills of rock. In “The Grand Canyon from Point Sublime,” Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, one stares into the inky depths of the rock-rimmed abyss; minutes later the eyes feast on the fairyland beauty of “El Capitan, Winter, Sunrise,” Yosemite National Park, California, and soon after that the bright pebble sheen of water in “Afternoon Sun,” Crater Lake National Park, Oregon. “We have been given the earth to live upon and enjoy,” Adams writes in one of the essays. “We have come up from the caves; predatory and primitive ages drift behind us. The earth promises to be more than a battlefield or hunting-ground.”

Sensitive, perceptive, unswervingly resolute in the pursuit of excellence, one of his favorite work-perches was the large platform atop his old Cadillac. There, eye to the camera, Adams worked hour after hour to coalesce the elements of scenes he captures. In Alaska he traveled by boat, seaplane or bush plane, and was up before dawn to duel with nature for victory over shooting conditions. By the 1950s and 1960s he had achieved celebrity and was on his way to becoming a national treausre. Never once did he slacken his efforts on behalf of the development of the national park system.

“I am, frankly, an evangelist,” Adams wrote to a close Sierra Club colleague in the ’50s. “I hate compromise … and I am quite unhappy in the face of lack-of-courage.” William A. Turnage, former president of the Wilderness Society, who worked closely with Adams for many years, writes in the book’s preface that his friend was the only environmental advocate who had easy access to the president of the United States.

This book is a sublimely beautiful sampler of the genius of Ansel Adams, master photographer and dedicated environmentalist, who sought out “God’s great picture” (Robert Greenleaf Whittier) in the world’s first national parks at Yosemite and Yellowstone, and all the others that came into being in his lifetime. We owe Adams a debt of gratitude for the art of his lens and the passion of his pen which helped in large part to transform a dream into a reality that has enriched all our lives.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a regular feature in the monthly Books in Review section. Goodrich also writes a review column and is the author of the award-winning nature story series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”