[Leica] Ansel Adams Anecdote

[Bill Clough <bill_clough@yahoo.com>]

TEXAS
CORPUS CHRISTI
07 May 2002

        The recent thread concerning Ansel Adams reminds me
an afternoon in Houston in the mid-1970s. For some
inexplicable reason, I was invited to attend a couple of
hours with large-format photographers as we talked--well,
listened--to Ansel Adams.

	I don't remember why Adams was in Houston. George
Honeycutt, the chief photographer of the Houston Chronicle,
said he had arranged for me to attend and so I went.

	There I sat, in a conference room in the hotel next to the
Galleria, feeling terribly out of place with my black Leica
M4 around my neck, surrounded by ardent 4x5 photographers
hanging on to every word as Adams expounded at length, from
memory and from experience, about his zone system.

	In the group was a young man who photographic fame only
could be described as meteoric. His advertising color work
was predominately displayed in books and magazines.

	While the rest of us seemed to hold Adams in high esteem,
this slightly portly photographer seemed to be barely
restraining himself. Finally, he simply couldn't keep his
peace any longer. When Adams came to the end of a sentence,
this prima donna burst in.

	“Well, Mr. Adams,” he said in a slightly sanctimonious
voice, “at major magazines, such as ‘Better Homes and
Gardens,’ all this zone system has been replaced by
computers. You take one transparency for the highlights,
one for the mid-tones and one for the shadow details. You
then just let the computer combine the three.”

	Adams remained silent during this un-invited lecture and,
when the photographer was finished, Adams picked up exactly
where he had left off, by quietly suggesting:

“Perhaps that’s why so much of the color we see these days
is so ghastly.”

	When Adams died, I recounted the incident in an article
for the local National Professional Photographers
Association magazine, pointing out that Ezra Pound could
have been talking about Adams when he wrote:

        “They will come no more, the old men with grand
manners.”




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