Ansel Adams fires off a memo

Click on the memo to enlarge it. The comments, Ugh! –PW are from Peter Wensberg, VP of advertising and sales at the time; Ugh! Ugh! –WF from Bill Field, director of design. The scan is from a Xerox copy Bill sent to me. The year is 1974 and at that time many of the package designs received Awards of Excellence from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) in its two consecutive Excellence in Packaging Shows for 1972 and 1974. (We repeated again in the next show, 1976.)

Some time in 1958 or 1959 Stan Calderwood had bounded into my so-called office and said, "Ansel Adams is in town and I want you to meet him for lunch," whereupon we repaired to The Original restaurant on Windsor Street where Polaroid people went for the most basic of sustenance. The saving grace was that The O, as it was called, had a license to sell booze. This helped get the food down and considerably raised the noise level. Ansel spoke in a very soft voice. I could swear he said he was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, though every bio I've ever read says he was born in San Francisco.

Since I wasn't much of a participant in the lunch conversation, it gave me the opportunity to observe Ansel pitching his work to Calderwood. It seemed unnecessary because he had been under contract as a consultant since the inception of Polaroid photography in 1949 and had just won his third Guggenheim fellowship. There is little I can remember of the conversation beyond this and the matter of zones that Ansel spoke of with great intensity. Later, my photogapher friend and former studio-mate Mel Goldman clued me about the significance of zones in photographic images.

PBS recently did a special on Ansel and his work. He is truly a unique American icon and his photographs are spectacular. Equally impressive is his lugging those heavy 8 x 10 cameras up and down the mountains of Sierras. The PBS link is http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/ansel/