A LEGACY OF LIGHT

Abstract

Ansel Adams with Mary Street Alinder. Ansel Adams: An Autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1985. 385 pp. Ulus. Mark Klett, essay by Denis Johnson. Travels in the Desert Southwest. Boston: David R. Godine, 1986. 42 pp. Illus. Beyond the exhibitions, a foundation, many books and articles and other generous teachings, the legacy of America's great modern nature photographer, Ansel Adams, is of course a collection of forty-thousand negatives, templates for the most serene and expansive photographic images of the American landscape. Adams' pictures will speak for themselves, and thereby, for him. What can an autobiography, eked out in the last days of his active eighty-two years, add to such riches? About a third of the chapters of Ansel Adams: An Autobiography are titled by others' names, and toward the end Adams, considering fame, muses: "The individual is but a cell in the larger body... .Superior minds and spirits emerge, yet who can deny that countless others... might have been revealed had circumstances favored them...?" Adams thought himself favored by friends and this book is in large part testament to that. The first of these might be Adams' father, for the venerable, familiar, crumple-nosed mountain gnome of an Ansel Adams we see on the book's cover emerged from a frenetic elf or—as Adams writes—"an adenoidal brat." We can only guess what would have happened had not Adams' father plucked his hyperactive son first from school (encouraging him still in piano lessons which brought into Adams' life a sense of discipline, an abiding under- standing of art, and a sense of rhythm and anticipation), then out of San Francisco for trips to Yosemite. It was in that then unpopulated Park that Adams' wild exuberances could have scope—provided they did not kill him, as they almost did on several occasions he relates. And it was there that his commitments to the natural environment and to photography were sealed.