Fiat Lux

A few weeks ago, Sally Stein, a professor emeritus at UC Irvine whose long career has focused on the politics of photography, sent me the catalog of an exhibition at the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside. The text is by Doug McCulloh, the museum’s curator, who died suddenly in January.  The exhibit was his last project. It was in his catalog that I found Adams’s quote about the UC Berkeley protesters.

The exhibition’s title, “Lost in the Wilderness: Ansel Adams in the 1960s,” describes a project to extol in photographs the nine campuses of the University of California in the mid-1960s. The project’s name, “Fiat Lux,” is the university’s motto, translated from Latin as “Let there be light” — an arrogant statement of the university’s view of itself, shedding light on those beneath it. Ansel Adams’s adoption of the motto was an equally audacious announcement for a set of photographs created by that light.

Adams’s work is famous for its luminous depiction of nature without human presence. On the high walls of the old Downtown Berkeley branch of Wells Fargo Bank, where I deposit my unimpressive freelancer’s income, there are enormous mural-size prints that have been there for decades. One shows the Golden Gate before the bridge was built. Another photograph is from the Fiat Lux series, taken from a high vantage point in the hills above the Berkeley campus. It is a very peaceful image of stately buildings. No police car idles in Sproul Plaza. No students are visible at all, even going to class, let alone marching with signs and banners or being dragged away by their ankles.

Lost in the Wilderness reveals one reason why the project is hardly known compared to his other work. In many cases, Adams simply photographed buildings or objects rather than magnificent landscapes. Some images in the exhibition do show people, but they are uninspired depictions of teachers and researchers at work, or students diving into a swimming pool or lying and talking on the grass.

There are two exceptions. One image shows a piece of plywood announcing a protest. In another, a crowd of students greets US ambassador to the United Nations Arthur Goldberg with signs condemning his support for the Vietnam War. But even these emphasize an absence where photographs might have been, of the tumultuous events exploding in the institution he was hired to photograph during the mid-1960s. “It’s hard to escape the conclusion,” McCulloh says in the catalog, “that Adams cannot face what is happening at the university and in society, let alone stare it down on the unforgiving ground glass of his camera. He prefers blindness.”

McCulloh traces the origin of the Fiat Lux project in the relationship between Adams and UC president Clark Kerr, a Cold War liberal. Kerr eventually lost his job because he was insufficiently conservative for Gov. Ronald Reagan, but before he left, he gave Adams the best-paying assignment of his career. At $75,000, the Fiat Lux budget would today be worth ten times that. In addition, the university guaranteed the publication and sale of a book of the images. Fiat Lux’s 7,161 negatives are a large part of Adams’s career total of 40,000 photographs.

McCulloh’s “lost in the wilderness” is a double entendre, playing on both the primary subject of Adams’s work and his inattention to the society changing around him. He finds that the university project shares its blindness with Adams’s earlier landscape work. “It is simply Adams’ sturdy, unchanging worldview carried forward into Fiat Lux,” he charges.

McCulloh presents other contemporary photographs to support his perspective. One is an image by Rondal Partridge, Adams’s assistant for two years, showing Half Dome, the object of many Adams landscapes. But in Partridge’s photograph, the granite monolith is in the background, and the foreground is a parking lot jammed with cars. It was taken in 1965, forty years after Adams’s first professional photograph at Half Dome and four years after his last. It is clearly intended to critique Adams’s deliberate omission of his most famous scene’s transformation into a tourist mecca.

To McCulloh, Adams can “park himself in the vast Curry Village parking lot at Yosemite, tilt his tripod and camera upward, and, above the rows of cars, frame a pristine view of the sheer face of Half Dome.” Adams’s “distilled, essentialist images carry an inverse: he determinedly excludes almost everything. He is both a high art practitioner, and blind.”

Cars in parking lots weren’t Adams’s only omissions. Yosemite Valley was home to the Ahwahneechee people for four thousand years before European colonization. In 1953, the National Park Service prohibited native people from living in the park’s boundaries and evicted those who were still there. By then, Adams had been excluding them from his photographs for decades.

Friends in Left Places

Fiat Lux was the culmination of a long and illustrious career, throughout which Adams had consciously maintained distance from photography that critiqued or threatened the social order. He was rewarded for it: over four working decades, Adams became an icon of the establishment, and the Fiat Lux contract was proof of his acceptance.

Socially conscious photography developed during the early period of Adams’s work, and in the 1930s, the politics of the Popular Front made it possible for such photography to gain access to the mainstream. The New Deal–era Farm Security Administration (FSA) funded photographers whose images, albeit intended to justify New Deal social reforms, couldn’t help but dramatize deep poverty and racism. Other photographers too radical for the FSA could also make a living, like Hansel Mieth and Otto Hegel. Both chronicled the strikes of farmworkers and longshoremen and worked for Life magazine in its early days but then were blacklisted when the Cold War started.

Yet Adams was a friend of left-wing photographers in that era. He helped start Group f/64, which included Consuelo Kanaga, a red photographer deeply respected by her peers. Many photographers then belonged to the radical Photo League, the center of a photographic tradition more radical than the FSA, linking their work to unions and anti-racist social movements. Adams’s work was much less threatening politically, giving him access to museum directors, corporate sponsors, and government officials.

His most political moment came in 1943, when he was invited by the commandant of the Manzanar concentration camp for Japanese Americans, Ralph Merritt, to take photographs of the camp’s residents. Adams opposed the internment and produced a book called, with intentional irony, Born Free and Equal, praising the internees’ “democratic internal society and a praiseworthy personal adjustment to conditions beyond their control.” The book included text by John Hersey, later the first journalist to witness the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Interior secretary Harold Ickes even wrote an introduction and sent two copies to President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a note expressing his opposition to internment. The book was publicly burned in the war hysteria.

After the war, the Photo League was put on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations and subsequently destroyed. In the heat of McCarthyism, Adams had the courage to sign a protest petition — a risk, given the blacklisting suffered by many radical photographers of the era. He emerged unscathed and became the country’s best-known photographer. Fiat Lux came a decade later, by which time he had soured on the Left.

As the World Turns

McCulloh contrasts the formalism of Adams’s timeless landscapes and his modernist aesthetic of the clear, sharp image with a new style of photography that became popular in 1950s and ’60s. While Adams received enormous mainstream recognition, he became an outlier in a photographic world that welcomed movement, blur, and human subjects.

For McCulloh, the challenge came from the “new 1960s photographers [who] trigger an absolute explosion in approach and subject matter.” He lists their obsessions as “alienation, deformity, sterility, insanity, sexuality, bestial and mechanical violence, and obscenity. . . . Their collective subject matter was the unseemly, the outcast, the dangerous, the forbidden, the exotic, and the bizarre.” Larry Clark’s image of two men shooting heroin was taken in 1963, a year before Fiat Lux and the Free Speech Movement. McCulloh highlights other photographers of that era, from Robert Frank to Diane Arbus, who had little interest in Adams’s Zone System for perfect exposure or the slow process required by the view camera.

McCulloh presents this cohort as an alternative to Adams. Yet despite their effort to offend 1950s conformity, this generation of photographers was quickly absorbed by the mainstream, with gallery exhibitions and books that purported to look under the covers. They turned out not to be so dangerous after all. They did not celebrate establishment values, as did Fiat Lux, but, unlike the work of 1930s radicals, their photography was nonetheless disconnected from any movement for social change. It did not challenge twentieth-century capitalism, as had the radicals of the ’30s.

A better alternative is represented by a new generation of photographers, none of whom appear in Lost In the Wilderness, who documented protests against the war and for civil rights, from the South to Cadillac Row. One was Bob Fitch, who spent years in the US South carrying a camera with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, organizing for social and racial justice. “I did organizing for the balance of my life,” he remembered, “and photographed those activities as I went through. And I perceived myself as an organizer who uses a camera to tell the story of my work.”

George Ballis, like Fitch, began photographing Southern civil rights struggles. Then he, Harvey Richards, and Ernie Lowe started documenting the abysmal conditions of California farmworkers, much as Hegel, Mieth, and Dorothea Lange had done two decades before. By the time the Delano grape strike began in 1965, inaugurating the modern farmworker movement, they’d been in the fields taking pictures for several years.

Their work, and that of the photographers connected to the movements of the 1930s and ’40s, provides a much more critical counterpoint to Fiat Lux. While Adams was “lost in the wilderness,” they used photography to inspire and support a vision of social justice and believed that photographers had to be participants in order to advance it. Fiat Lux was a dead end for Adams and for a kind of modernism palatable to powerful institutions. But the socially committed alternative had a future — and lives on.