06/06/2025
“Reading (his) letters, I am swept back irresistibly into Ansel Adams’ hyperactive life. He lived and worked amid swarms of people—his family and assistants, neighbors, friends, conservationists, politicians, other photographers, casual admirers. You never rang his doorbell that his living room and studio did not contain at least four or five people talking to Virginia and waiting for Ansel to come out of the darkroom. When he did come, still in his lab apron and with his glasses on top of his head, there would be a boom and rush of greeting and laughter, a new joke or limerick, a few minutes of impetuous talk, the answering of a question or settling of a problem or determining of a piece of conservation strategy, a regretful admission that he was chained to the darkroom for a while, an admonition to stay—stay to dinner, please—and an apologetic departure through the studio and office on his way back to his trays of hypo.
“On the way he would probably pause long enough at the studio table to inspect the work of the assistant spotting prints there; and as he passed through the office you might hear the machine-gun tattoo of the typewriter. That would be Ansel, pausing in transit to add a line or two to the letter rolled into it…punctuated with multiple exclamation points and asterisks and picturesque misspellings.
“Then he would be gone for a while, closeted alone, locked in his wrestle with absolute truth.”
— Wallace Stegner in his foreword to “Ansel Adams: Letters 1916-1984” published by Little, Brown and Company
📷: ‘Ansel Adams, Carmel, California,’ 1976. Photograph by Arnold Newman ©️Arnold Newman
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