ADAMS, Ansel (1902-1984)
Untitled [Brush and branches]
 
Gelatin silver print, November 3, 1961, 10-1/8 x 12-3/4 inches (25.6 x 32.4 cm), from a Polaroid Type 55 negative probably circa 1959-1961, mounted on Harvey illustration board 14-1/2 x 20 in. (37 x 50.7cm), with Adams's hand stamp and his printing notations in ink, the “Polaroid Land Photograph by Ansel Adams” hand stamp and the “Polaroid Collection” hand stamp with archive notations in ink, on mount verso.  Two superficial scratches on image surface (1 cm and 5 cm) lower center left, neither visible frontally and not breaking the surface, else in fine condition.  Archivally installed in heavy rag board mat, 16 x 20 in., within a Bolivian rosewood frame, 19-1/2 x 23-1/2 x 2 in. overall.
 
We have not been able to locate another copy of this image, or any reference to a surviving Type 55 positive print from the negative of which this print is an enlargement.  The feel of this image is close to that of “Tree, Point Arena, California,” a Type 52 positive print dated March 20, 1960 included in the 1986 gift of Virginia Best Adams and Polaroid Corporation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1986.1042.1).  The evolution of these compositions in white and black traces through “Grass and pool” from 1935, included in the Sierra Club 1960 Portfolio 3.  Perhaps not coincidentally, the Metropolitan print bears a number “13” lower center recto, and the present print bears a pencil inscription (apparently not by Adams) “18 uu” on the mount lower center recto.  The letters “uu” could mean “unused,” possibly for one  of Adams’s publications or exhibitions of 1962-3.  (The 1978 revised edition of Adams’s 1963 Polaroid Land photography manual offers, as examples of Adams’s own work in his selection of Polaroid Land photographs by different photographers, four gelatin silver enlargements from Type 55 negatives.)
 
Adams’s printing notation is: “Cold Light on // #4 Velour Black Dektol 1:3.”  “Cold light” refers to the cold-light custom head that Adams used on his 4x5 Beseler enlarger (he also used a self-designed square bank of 36 bulbs for diffuse light with his 8x10 custom-fabricated track-mounted enlarger).  “#4 Velour Black” was then DuPont’s Defender brand of variable-contrast enlarger paper, renowned for deep blacks and contrast, in contrast grade No. 4.  Dektol was Adams’s standard Kodak developer.  In its dispersal sale of the Polaroid Collection, Sotheby’s transformed the printing notation into a title, “Cold Light on Branches, 1961, no.4,” so listed on the consignment agreement (an exhibit in the Polaroid bankruptcy case) and inscribed by Sotheby’s in pencil on the interior mat margin.  Nevertheless, there is no indication whatsoever that Adams himself had intended this title.  His usual titling terminology would be an objective description, e.g., brush and branches, followed by place.  If the print were unique and unused, there would have been no reason for a title or Adams’s signature (lacking also on the cited Metropolitan Museum print); nevertheless, this piece, which Adams annotated “#11-61-1,” became no. 32 (of some 1,200 pieces offered by Sotheby’s) in the Polaroid “Library Collection,” which included the most important assemblage, overseen by Adams himself, of his work in private hands.
 
The collaboration of the two giants in American photography, Adams and Edwin Land, was explored in the 2004-7 circulating exhibition “Ansel Adams and Edwin Land: Art, Science and Invention - Photographs from the Polaroid Collection.”  From 1948 Adams wrote over 5,000 pages of correspondence to Land and other Polaroid colleagues, full of extensive and intensive findings and recommendations (Palmer Museum of Art introduction).  The culmination as to black-and-white printing was Polaroid Positive/ Negative 4x5 Land Film Type 55, of which the negatives have a fine grain, vast tonal range and exceptional resolution that provided for very sharp enlargement by Adams’s variable-contrast cold-light techniques (Adams, op. cit., pp. 28, 47, 57).  In his posthumous Autobiography (1985), Adams wrote (p. 302), citing specifically “El Capitan - Winter, Yosemite Natl. Park, California” (Type 55 positive print, 1968), "Many of my most successful photographs from the 1950's onward have been made on Polaroid film….  One look at the tonal quality of the print I have achieved should convince the uninitiated of the truly superior quality of Polaroid film."

Provenance: Polaroid Collection (dispersed Sotheby’s New York, sale 8649, June 21-2, 2010)
 
General reference:
Adams, Ansel, with Robert Baker, Polaroid Land Photography, Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1978 (1st rev. ed.).

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