The CCP and I

My active relationship with the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona goes back to 1987, during the tenure of the CCP’s second director, James Enyeart. (I knew the CCP’s founding director, Harold Jones, from his days at the George Eastman House and, subsequently, at Light Gallery in New York. But I had no involvement with the Center’s formation, nor any interaction during its early years.)

As an intern of mine from Bennington College in the winter/spring of 1981, Steven Albahari (now the publisher of 21st Editions) worked with me to develop a rudimentary bibliography of my writings through early 1981 ― some 800 items. Initially I intended this strictly for my own use, as a simple way of keeping track of my steadily expanding output. With the assistance of a string of interns, the bibliography continued to grow thereafter, intermittently and incrementally. And I found that it began to serve not just myself but others, since I used it with increasing frequency to provide bibliographic citations and synopses of my essays to colleagues who wrote to request those from me.

That led me to consider its publication in book form, which in turn brought me to considering the CCP for that purpose. The Center had already published several annotated bibliographies I considered exemplary, the first on W. Eugene Smith, prepared by William Johnson (1980-82), the second on Robert Frank, prepared by Stuart Alexander (1986). Such research resources remain scarce in our field, so there weren’t any other likely candidates for collaboration on this project.

Based on that typewritten bibliography, and the steady growth of my files of correspondence and research and manuscripts, in early 1987 I contacted Jim Enyeart at the CCP to pursue two matters: the publication of a comprehensive bibliography of my writings on photography and related matters, and the archiving of my papers at the CCP. That dialogue continued through the end of Jim’s tenure as the CCP’s director in 1989 and into the administration of his successor, Terence Pitts.

Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ

There’s a long story there, but as most of it’s not germane to the issues at hand let me simply summarize by saying that over the course of more than a decade I had ongoing dialogue with the CCP about the Center’s relationship to and regulations regarding archival materials that entered its holdings, as well as about the Center’s relationship to the University of Arizona-Tucson’s Library system, in whose infrastructure the CCP was embedded. I held those discussions with two successive directors of the Center, Enyeart and then Pitts, plus assorted staffers in both administrations.

Eventually that led to my depositing materials from my own archives there on long-term loan, and to an agreement that they would indeed publish an expanded bibliography of my writings. In 1996 the Center honored me with the invitation to become the Ansel and Virginia Adams Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence for that period, which brought me to Tucson for a three-month residency. The designated purposes of my time there were (a) to help them organize the materials of mine then in their holdings, (b) to refine the bibliography of my writings and move it toward publication, (c) to work with the CCP’s William Mortensen Archive toward production of an essay on his life and work, and (d) to use their resources for other projects of my own.

So I spent three months in Tucson from late ’96 into early 1997 (a welcome respite from the New York winter), pursuing all of the above. The bibliography project eventually resolved into a finished volume, edited by Nancy Solomon, that the CCP published in 2000. We issued it in both print form (hardcover and softcover) and as a searchable PDF; you can download it here, free of charge. For a more detailed account of its making, download this PDF of the book’s front matter.

The project in which I participated there that’s proved most relevant to the current lamentable situation at the Center was my scrutiny of and writing about the Wiiliam Mortensen Archive. As some of this blog’s readers know, I’ve written extensively about Mortensen over the decades ― starting with an inconspicuous footnote in my 1976 essay, “The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition.” That note, which accused Beaumont Newhall of purging Mortensen’s name from the history of the medium, prompted the young scholar Deborah Irmas to track down Mortensen’s work. One thing led to another: Irmas wrote her dissertation on Mortensen, then created a traveling exhibition of Mortensen’s prints (1978-81) that had the CCP as a venue on its itinerary.

Adams, alive and well at the time, tried his best to prevent that from happening. According to Enyeart, in 1983 Adams wrote to him in high dudgeon, objecting strenuously to the Center’s scheduling of the Irmas exhibition. As I put it in a subsequent essay, “Enyeart told him that this is what museums do and invited him to let viewers ‘see for themselves in depth a pictorialist rationale.'”

William Mortensen, untitled self-portrait, ca. 1942

Adams died in 1984. Irmas, who’d located Mortensen’s widow Myrdith during the course of her researches, inherited from her this once-prominent photographer and author’s skimpy archive, and eventually donated that to the CCP. Thus, due to a seed I’d planted, the remaining prints, notes, and papers of the photographer Adams once described privately as “the Anti-Christ” came to share the same purified and temperature- and humidity-controlled air as Adams’s own archive ― poetic justice, you might say.

The eventual acquisition of the Mortensen material from Irmas in 1993 would surely not have made Adams happy, nor would the CCP’s later augmentation thereof with material from the collection of Mortensen’s collaborator and sometime model George Dunham. Both those acquisitions took place during the administration of Terence Pitts, as did the 1996 invitation to me to come to Tucson, subsidized by a fellowship named after Adams. That too would have displeased Adams, who didn’t count me among his admirers and had vociferously not appreciated some of my criticisms of his work and his public and private actions.

He’d have felt especially aggrieved that I’d gone there in order to collaborate with other scholars and the CCP’s staff on the production of the first study ever published of Mortensen’s life and work. None of that mattered to Terry Pitts and the CCP staff, so far as I could tell; they understood, as had Jim Enyeart before them (and, I’m sure, Harold Jones when the CCP came out of the starting gate), that this is what museums and archives do.

William Mortensen: A Revival (1998)

That book, William Mortensen: A Revival (1998), subsequently came under unexpected and savage attack from John Szarkowski, of all people, in the magazine Art On Paper. Szarkowski had brought major money from Adams to the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art during his tenure there, by consenting to curate and mount there a major retrospective of Adams’s work, Yosemite and the Range of Light (1979). Subsequent to his retirement Szarkowski took a whopping fee from the Adams Trust as independent curator of yet another Adams retrospective, Ansel Adams at 100 (2001), in production at the time he wrote that 1999 review. Since my essay in the Mortensen monograph cast Adams in an extremely bad light vis-a-vis this “Anti-Christ,” Szarkowski apparently felt compelled to serve the interests of his clients and justify his fee by giving all those involved in this project ― especially Pitts and myself ― a thrashing in print.

Whether we deserved that or not the reader will have to determine by engaging with the Mortensen book itself, and Szarkowski’s response thereto. I bring this convoluted backstory up for the following reasons:

Terence Pitts

• Two previous directors of the Center for Creative Photography, James L. Enyeart (1977-89) and Terence Pitts (1989-2000), felt no obligation to tolerate demands from Ansel Adams himself relating to the content of CCP projects or its acquisition policies, nor any need to consider the Adams Trust’s preferences in those regards. Clearly, during their administrations, a firewall was understood to exist between the activities of the administration and staff of the CCP on the one hand and Adams and the Adams Trust on the other. Each of these directors, in his own way, made it clear that those holding their office functioned independently of the photographer himself and, after Adams’s death, his heirs and assigns ― with the obvious exception of what they did with Adams material on loan to them, which is in fact controlled by the Trust. Certainly neither of those administrators felt that they were serving at the pleasure of the Adams Trust, regardless of the ties between the Trust and the CCP.

William Turnage, still from the Ric Burns film Ansel Adams (2002)

• In my 42 years as a critic, historian, and cultural journalist concentrating on photography, I’ve felt it necessary only twice to call publicly for the resignation of major functionaries in this field: John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art (1978) and William Turnage of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Not the least of the intriguing connections here is the substantial amount of money that flowed from the latter to the former.

• As a result of all this, I have a more than passing acquaintance with the Center for Creative Photography, at least under several of its previous directors: extensive first-hand observation of its day-to-day activities in the late ’90s, and lengthy dialogue with those directors and their staff. The pertinence of this will become clear in my next post.

•

For an index of links to all posts related to this story, click here.