1/25/2017 (received at KAM & Deed countersigned)
Sue and Paul Stohr (St. Louis, MO)

Inscription FOREWORD / Ansel Adams is having the strange experience of looking back through / more than fifty years of his work. Many of us have had that curious / flash of surprise and recognition when suddenl coming across some / early and totally forgotten print or article, “My god, I didn’t think I / was that good then!” A moment later, “Why it actually has the whole / mood and meaning of that time!” Or, of course, the opposite reaction, / “What trash!” and into the wastebasket or the fire. That latter decision / may be later regretted, but most artists seldom really regret; if they have / been really good, they have been remarkably fecund. A lot of things may / have “boiled the pot”—and yet some aspect of social history may cling / to them; others are purely historical—people, places, houses, views, situ- / ations, and events that vanished long ago, and hence have value to library- / ies and societies, as indubitable documentation. // Of the creative work, what goes to the fire is usually “a sketch” for / something achieved at a greater moment at a later time—the latent image / finally realized. And there are the great moments some mechanical fail- / ure or pure accident prevented from being fine negatives. These are the / hardest to throw out, because of their potentials, if you could find the / way to solve the problems involved. Most artists have had “burnings”— / cleansings, resurrections—but Adams has not, unless the negatives were / really hopeless. Of course he did suffer a real fire, in 1938, in his Yosem- / ite darkroom—somebody left the old drymounting press on—he lost / many negatives, and so had to spend some time thereafter trying to re- / place the irreplaceable, because nothing ever happens exactly the same as / [ new page] / before. Still, a number of early negatives did survive, thanks mostly to / Edward and Charis Weston, on duty, that night of fire, beside the bath- / tub, full of grime and sooty negatives, helping wash, rinse, and hang up / to dry the results of fifteen years’ effort with the camera. So here, some / rarely seen, some unknown, and some familiar, are ten prints ranging / through nearly thirty years of Adams’ work. The gamut of mood and / emotion is still greater: the fairy-tale, Beauty-and-the-Beast-in-the- / dark-wood quality of Graduation Dress [ital.]; the exquisite luminosity threaded / with jet branches in Fresh Snow [ital.]; the nostalgic clutch at remembered / architectural splendor, flimsy as a stage set, so common in ghost towns / like Columbia, in White Post and Spandrel [ital.], seen in the pale clear light of / early morning after rain; the stiff little mining town of Silverton [ital.], not yet / touristed, between the enormous peaks, and the sudden meditation on/ man’s littleness and briefness compared to this earth he inhabits in / Antelope House [ital.]. Yet Edward Weston [ital.], little as he is, is bigger than the enor- / mous eucalyptus on whose roots he sits. And Gottardo Piazzoni [ital.], climbing / up to his scaffolding to begin work, was not posed, but was photographed / as he was with an 8 x 10 camera in natural studio light. // Adams thinks he has been typed as “nature boy” too long and too un- / fairly; certainly his work with and for the Sierra Club, for Yosemite it- / self and his major fights for conservation have been spectacular, but they / have pigeonholed him. He thinks it is time the public had a chance to / see more of the immense scope of his work, and we think he is right. // As with previous portfolios, some of the photographs may be contro- / versial, —not the expected Adams. Some may regret this fall from con- / ventional grace; others will welcome it as a newly-revealed perspective / on Adams and his reactions to man, his works, and nature. And, though / all his prints, since he was in his teens, have been beautiful, the prints he / can make now surpass anything he has done in the past. Perhaps they are the most beautiful prints yet made in the medium of photography. // Beaumont and Nancy Newhall