Medium: gelatin silver print, mounted on board
Dimensions: 15 x 18 3/4
Frame dimensions: 29 x 32 1/2 x 3/4
Notes:
"No matter how sophisticated you may be, a granite mountain cannot be denied - it speaks in silence to the very core of your being." - Ansel Adams, Sierra Club Bulletin, 1932
This Grand Tetons view is the most sought after of Ansel Adams’s iconic images. This print was collected by Sir Elton John, who is noted not only as a great photography collector but a collector who brought a connoisseur’s eye to each print he purchased. Eye candy for the well-schooled collector, it delights the viewer with its incandescent light and tone. To paraphrase Ansel Adams, “the negative is the score and the print is the performance,” and here we have a transcendent performance.
The Mural Project
In 1941, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes hired Adams to photograph the lands and Native Americans under his department's jurisdiction. Adams’s goal was to produce thirty-six photographic murals to hang on the walls of the Department of the Interior in an emotionally progressive sequence intended to positively influence congressmen, lobbyists, and government officials. His job description read "Photographic Muralist, Grade FCS-19" and he received a daily compensation of $22.22 (the highest rate then paid to a consultant), plus $0.04 a mile and $5 per diem for room and board. The contract, specifying that he was to work no more than 180 days, was in effect from October 14, 1941, to July 2,1942.
On June 11, 1942, Ansel Adams wrote to Nancy Newhall that he was heading to Billings, Montana, "then to Yellowstone, then to Glacier, then on west to Rainier and Crater Lake, then home." That summer, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the National Park Service were in a furious battle with Jackson Hole ranchers over young John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s secret purchase of local land using the Snake River Land Company as a front. Rockefeller intended to give his huge parcel of Teton Valley to the National Park Service. Local cattlemen and politicians, Wyoming congressmen and senators, and the U.S. Forest Service all objected. Film actor and valley resident, Wallace Beery, led an armed posse and a herd of cattle across park land. Fortunately, the National Park Service ignored the opera bouffé gesture and no shootouts occurred.
With this heated conflict brewing, it appears that Ansel Adams detoured from Yellowstone into Jackson Hole and made his photograph The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, which included much of land Rockefeller intended to grant for park expansion. Taken during a rainstorm, it was a majestic photograph that clearly touted the vast emptiness of unspoiled nature. Was it also meant as one of Interior Secretary Ickes's public appeal weapons in the war with the ranchers and the Forest Service over which he had no control?
Making the Negative and Print
On a stormy afternoon in mid-June, Adams set up his 8 x 10-inch Ansco Commercial View camera and attached a 12-inch, slightly long-focus, Goerz Dagor lens to gently compact space, with a Wratten K2 yellow filter to minimize haze. Since his goal was to make murals, he used Kodak's very fine grained Panatomic-X sheet film developed in Ansco 12. The fine grain would allow for enlargement to mural proportions.
Later, Adams remembered that when he made The Tetons and the Snake River, the scene before him was physically gray, but his emotions were anything but, soaring as high as the fantastic mountains before him. He knew when he returned home and made a print, it would resonate with thunderous power.
The Tetons negative holds a range of extreme contrasts, from Zone II (almost pure black) along its left edge to a blinding Zone VIII (almost detail-less white) in the patches of glinting sunlight on the river's surface. Creating his visualization of the Tetons that would communicate the desired impact meant a virtuoso darkroom performance of burning (giving more exposure) and dodging (less exposure) to localized areas in each and every print. So much tonal manipulation proved essential that he realized that great care had to be taken so that the tonal values he captured on each paper's surface remained believable.
Ansel Adams’s Grand Style
Rebecca Senf, the leading Ansel Adams scholar, notes how this view exemplified Adams’s grandest style:
"Around 1941, Adam’s photographic style shifted dramatically. The drama grandeur and awe conveyed in his 1927 Monolith, the Face of Halfdome, … became typical…. This shift, to what is considered his mature style, coincided with his work for the UD Department of the Interior… The job resonated so strongly with him because … he knew who his audience was. … The American people… He understood what he wanted to communicate: that the National Parks were an American Treasure, a gift from the nation to its people, from the past and present to the future, and a place of incomparably profound experience. He knew how to say it: by depicting the awesome views of protected lands through a powerful, direct, and operatic style.
This signature, or mature, style includes a number of facets, … which function together to heroize the landscape and emotionally engage the viewers to share Adam’s vision of nature as transformative. These facets encompass technical choices: a panoramic perspective with emphasis on a distant landscape, an omnipresent viewpoint, the inclusion of dramatic light and weather effects, and a balanced inclusion of a wide range of gray tones” seen in his iconic views such as The Teton Range and Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
titled and dated '1942' on photographer's Carmel credit [BMFA Stamp 11] in ink (mount, verso)
Christie's New York, Photographs from the Collection of Sir Elton John, October 14, 2004
Private Collection, Wyoming