Master of the Yosemite

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Adams' photographs are too thoughtful and rigorous to be called nostalgic. But some of their poignancy comes from the paradox of their making. The replicated image and its mechanical multiplication of fact slowly wore down 19th century romanticism and moved irony to the center of modernist culture. The camera, as Critic Susan Sontag pointed out, makes us tourists, not just in Yosemite, but within all reality. With Adams, however, the camera became the romantic's last defense. There was no irony. What you felt—scrupulously and with great technical skill—is what you got.

Perhaps Adams' most striking record of nature in full terribilità is his nose. It was broken in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, when he was four. An aftershock tumbled him, face first, into a brick wall. "The family doctor said, 'Fix it when he matures,' " Adams chuckles. "But of course I never did mature. So I still have the nose."

The Adams family was well off then, but not as rich as it had been. Much of late 19th century San Francisco was built with lumber from the Washington Mill Co., which Ansel Adams' grandfather owned. But around the turn of the century the family lost six mills by fire and 27 lumber ships at sea, all of them woefully underinsured. After 1912, faced by the ruin of his timber interests, Adams' father, a mild, benevolent man with a deep amateur interest in astronomy, made a career at life insurance. He continued to raise his only child in Edwardian respectability, in a chalet-like house overlooking the Golden Gate.

Here, between the ocean, the fog banks and a coast still innocent of condominiums, the child's interest in wild nature began. "I was a hyperactive brat," Adams recalls. He was educated at home by tutors, and he ascribes his lifelong habit of keeping meticulous records of every motif, exposure and chemical mix to an early taste for algebra. But the main obsession of his youth was music.

Adams' house, like most middle-class homes before the dawn of stereo, had an upright piano, and Adams practiced on it assiduously. By 14, endowed with a nearly perfect memory, he could take a score to bed with him, study it, and play it in the morning. His teacher was a very Prussian octogenarian named Frederick Zech, formerly professor of music at the conservatory in Potsdam. "He was a great disciplinarian," recalls the pupil. "He turned me from a Sloppy Joe into a good technician. If it hadn't been for that, I don't know what would have taken its place." But the effect of music on his later photography went deeper than inculcating a habit of technical excellence through discipline. "I can look at a fine photograph and sometimes I can hear music, not in a sentimental sense, but structurally," he says. "I don't try to do it, it just sometimes comes. It's a synesthetic reaction." His preferences in music are in line with his predilections as a photographer: a preference for large structures, commanding themes and plenty of orchestral color. "I've always liked heroic music. I can't stand Debussy and Ravel. I like Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Scriabin—anything architectural and big has much more appeal to me."