In a big redwood house above the shifting kelp beds and nocturnal sea of Carmel, an old man is playing the piano, not too well. The room is large, worn and comfortable, decked with the heterogeneous souvenirs of a long life—rows of Indian pottery, elegantly woven tribal baskets and a huge Chinese ceremonial drum. The piano player's head, a bald mass, gleams in the light. His hands, swollen from arthritis, hardened by decades of immersion in darkroom chemicals, skitter over the keys, assaulting the same phrase again and again. "Damn," he says, "I've lost it." But not altogether. Once you have practiced to concert discipline, even 50 years ago, the traces still show. "There used to be a relationship between my piano and my photography," says Ansel Adams. "I guess it's one-sided now."
Today, at 77, Ansel Adams is the most popular "fine" photographer in America. His images of landscape, and particularly of Yosemite National Park in California, have become almost indistinguishable from their subjects: to many people, Yosemite is the apparition on Adams' viewfinder. "Won't it be wonderful when a million people can see what we are seeing today!" exclaimed John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, as he gazed on Yosemite seven decades ago. Last year 2.7 million tourists went to Yosemite. One may fairly assume that most of their innumerable frames of 35-mm and Polaroid film were exposed in the hope of trapping their own Ansel Adams image, rather as tourists in 18th century Italy sometimes carried a smoked lens called a Claude Glass, through which the landscapes of the Roman Campagna could be seen in the mellow brown tone of Claude Lorrain's canvases. To that public, Adams is as American as John Wayne: the last portraitist of Western sublimity.
Somewhat like his photos, Adams is larger than life. More than a million copies of his books have gone into print. The latest, Yosemite and the Range of Light (New York Graphic Society; $75), will be published next week. The publication is timed to coincide with "Ansel Adams and the West," a two-month retrospective of 153 of his landscape photographs, organized by the Museum of Modern Art's director of the department of photography, John Szarkowski, and opening at MOMA next week. In workshop sessions over the years, Adams has personally taught at least 4,500 students. Original prints of his photos may number as high as 30,000. The most sought-after of these images, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941), exists in an edition of about 900, and the going price for each one is $8,000.
Adams' work—and his 60-year association with the Sierra Club, including 37 years as a member of its board of directors—has exerted a steady pressure on U.S. conservation and parks policy. Adams' limited-edition book Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (1938) helped persuade Franklin D. Roosevelt to shepherd a bill through Congress that turned the Kings Canyon area of east-central California into a national park.