Newsletter: Fall 2007

Late one afternoon at the cusp of November sixty-six years ago, Adams was driving south to Santa Fe, New Mexico, after a middling day's work for a photomural project with the Department of the Interior. Suddenly an "inevitable photograph," as he would later call it, appeared to his left.Adams swerved onto the shoulder and hit the brakes. Before the dust settled, he had hauled his eight­ by-ten-inch view camera, film holder, and tripod onto the car's custom-built roof platform and was spurring his two passengers into a futile search for his light meter. Before him, the day's last sunlight glowed on an adobe church and the crosses in its cemetery. In the sky, above the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains and a smooth bank of clouds, the moon floated, nearly full. Having committed its luminance to memory, Adams used the moon for a meter and hazarded an exposure. He prepared to make a second plate with the aperture one stop further open, but he was too late: the sun had set behind him, casting the churchyard into shadow. As it turned out, the flawed exposure resulted in what the artist came to call his "most difficult negative"; he ventured only three or four prints from it prior to 1948, when he intensified the negative in the foreground area.