Ansel Adams

mounted, signed 'Ansel E. Adams' in pencil on the mount, 1933

The photographer to Pirkle Jones

This early print, on paper with a surface sheen and mounted on slick white/light gray board, is in generally very good to excellent condition. In raking light, a tiny crease near the fire hydrant is visible; this does not break the emulsion. There are 8 small, rust-colored deposits, possibly foxing, scattered on the mount board. These do not affect the print. On the reverse of the mount, there is age-darkening, and an annotation 'AA-230' in pencil in the lower right corner.
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The dated description in Ansel Adams's negative log at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, carries this title and confirms that this image was made by Adams during his first visit to New York.  In 1933, Adams traveled to New York City, where he met with Alfred Stieglitz and showed him his photographs.  While Stieglitz did not offer to exhibit Adams's work in his An American Place gallery, his encouragement meant a great deal to Adams.  Thus emboldened, he approached Alma Reed at Delphic Studios on 57th Street, one of the only art galleries in the city at that time to exhibit photographs.  Reed agreed to exhibit 50 of Adams's pictures.

Response to the Adams exhibition, which opened on 13 November 1933, was overwhelmingly positive, and the show garnered at least two favorable, if brief, notices in the press.  In the New York Times, Howard Devree wrote: 'Photography by Ansel Adams, a Californian, strikingly captures a world of poetic form.  His lens has caught snow-laden branches in their delicate tracery; shells embedded in sandstone; great trees and cumulus clouds.  It is masterly stuff' (29 November 1933).

Photographer Pirkle Jones's (1914 - 2009) long friendship with Ansel Adams began in 1946, when Jones enrolled in the inaugural photography course at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.  Founded by Ansel Adams, this innovative 3-year program, one of the first of its kind in the country, included among its guest instructors such photographers as Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Homer Page, and Minor White, who succeeded Adams as the program's director.  Jones got to know them all.

Pirkle Jones served as Ansel Adams's assistant from 1947 until 1953.  In the years after his graduation, Jones and Adams remained good friends.  In 1949, when Jones married another CSFA photography student, Ruth-Marion Baruch, Adams hosted the wedding at his home in Yosemite.  He enlisted Jones to teach at the Ansel Adams Yosemite workshops, and in 1956, when asked by Dorothea Lange to collaborate on a photographic essay of the Berryessa Valley, Adams declined, but suggested Jones.  Beginning in 1958, Adams and Jones worked together on a series of photographs of the Paul Masson Vineyards, resulting in both a book and exhibition, The Story of a Winery (1963).

From 1952 to 1958, and again from 1970 to 1997, Pirkle Jones taught photography at his alma mater, the CSFA, re-named the San Francisco Art Institute in 1961, and continued to enjoy a very successful and prolific career as a photographer.  With his wife, he produced the photo-essay and exhibition Walnut Grove:  Portrait of a Town (1961), and the controversial A Photo Essay on the Black Panthers, which was shown at the De Young Museum in 1968.  This photo-essay was published as a book that same year, and again in a new edition in 1970.  A retrospective exhibition of Jones's work was held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art from December 2001 to April 2002.

In 2006, Jones summed up his friendship with Adams this way:

'My introduction to Ansel Adams's photography, reproduced in an early issue of U. S. Camera magazine, impressed me by its content and the brilliance of technique.  On the GI Bill in 1946, I was fortunate to attend the California School of Fines Arts (San Francisco Art Institute), studying with Ansel Adams in my major, photography, and had the privilege of being his friend and professional assistant.  What I learned from Ansel in the classroom, as well as helping him in the darkroom, has been invaluable.

'I thank Ansel Adams for his generosity, and consider him one of the giants in the history of photography.'