Ansel Adams and Louise Arner Boyd: A camera tells a story

Abstract

Ansel Adams travelled to southern Utah in August 1953 to photograph three small towns not far from Zion National Park. With him was Dorothea Lange, recording aspects of the Mormon community from her very different perspective.1 At some point in their trip, Lange turned her Rolleiflex toward Adams, capturing an image of him halfway under his darkcloth as he looked into the focusing plane of his big, 8 x 10-inch, flatbed, aluminum body, Kodak camera.2 This portrait of Adams later became known around the world when clothing manufacturer GAP used it in the mid-1990s as part of a campaign to increase sales of men's and women's khaki slacks. They used black and white photographs of celebrities like Sarah Vaughan and Jack Kerouac wearing casual slacks overprinted with the caption ‘Ansel Adams [e.g.] wore khakis’. Adams's portrait was the only one in the series in which the face was not visible. In fact, in Lange's portrait none of Adams's features are visible — not his goofy ears, nor his distinctively crooked nose, nor his expressive eyebrows. He did not even strike a recognizable Ansel-like pose. Only bits of his non-descript fedora's crown and brim are visible, poking out from the back of the dark cloth. Yet we know without a doubt that this figure in the wrinkled khakis has to be Adams. Even the crass advertising executives of GAP knew that the viewer does not need to see Adams's face, because the monster camera is transformed into a believable icon for the best-known photographer of all time.