Denee Barr Art News and More

Ansel Adams
American
1902 - 1984

Mr. Adams, can you remember the first photograph that you ever took?

"Well, that would be hard because the family had an old 3 1/2 by 3 1/2 Kodak Bullseye and we'd just take pictures. I think the first photograph I was conscious of really trying to make was a picture taken whilst I was sitting on a rotten stump near Camp Curry. The stump gave way and I descended, I clicked the shutter and in some miraculous way I got the picture. When the film was developed at the local photofinishers, he said: "You must have held the camera upside down when you did this one." I was wracking my brains to figure out how I did do it. He showed me the whole roll and I thought that it must have happened when I fell off the stump. That was in the Yosemite Mountains during 1916 and as I became more interested in the mountains, my natural impulse was to have a visual diary. The excitement of Yosemite became strong and filtered through me into some aesthetic experiences which probably were supported by similar experiences I was having in music study......"

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Was there any art background in your family at all?

"No, not in the family."

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Why did you study music instead of photography?

"I studied music when I was about eight or nine. I forget the exact date, but I was very young. So I'd worked with music years before I even thought of using the camera."

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So in fact, you ended up being a self-taught photographer?

"That's all you could be then as there was no school. I learned some sort of bread-and-butter things. In the summer of 1917 I learned a lot about developing, picture washing, the 'nuts and bolts' as we call it."

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You got involved at a fairly young age with the conservation movement?

"Oh, yes, there was a club founded in 1896, but I didn't really have any direct interest in that until I got to Yosemite. In 1917 I joined the Sierra Club and in 1918 and 1919 I was custodian of the club memorial. Conservation was growing all the time because then we used the word conservation with a specific meaning. I don't use it at all now because it has lost its original meaning. You can conserve everything from beans to oil you know. I use the term environment. That really is more to the point."

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Excerpts from Dialogue with Photography
by Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper 1979
Cornerhouse Publications
Manchester, England