Ansel Adams worked in black and white, but he and his photos dripped with color

It was not my intention to come away drunk from my interview with renowned photographer Ansel Adams, but good manners and proper etiquette left me no choice.

This was in 1983.

I was covering the arts for The Arizona Republic and Adams was in town to support a building fund drive for the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, of which he was a co-founder.

Since those early days the center has become an internationally celebrated artistic treasure, with 270 archival collections, including the work of Adams, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, Lola Álvarez Bravo, W. Eugene Smith, Edward Weston, Garry Winogrand and so many others.

An exhibition of Adams’ work, borrowed from the center’s collection, opened at the Phoenix Art Museum this month and will run through June.

It’s worth the trip.

It’s worth two trips.

Adams defined the American West

Adams was 82 when I spoke to him. He would pass away from a heart attack about six months later.

I was invited to stop by the downtown hotel where he and his wife, Virginia, were staying. They made time for a quick interview before they had to leave for the airport.

When I got there Adams was puzzling over a new, high-tech camera he’d purchased recently. I asked if he was trying to decipher the many advanced automatic features of the device.

No, he told me. He was trying figure out how he might disconnect each one.

"The automatics have made photography accessible to millions of people,” he said, “and that is good, but it has not produced much serious work.”

Adams had been making photographs for 50 years by then. He’d exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was known and collected the world over.

His work, in many ways, defined the American West. And still does.

He made art, but not for a cause

But it’s more than that, something I didn’t quite understand in 1983, but do now.

My job is to reduce the many colors that exist in every single story, every single person, into something that is black and white. Words on a page. Words on a screen.

Adams worked in black and white as well, but with just the opposite effect. His magical black and white photographs somehow manage to enhance all the color that surrounds us.

For nearly 40 years he was a member of the board of directors of the Sierra Club. His photos have been used by generations of environmentalists eager to protect wilderness areas.

"I never made a picture directly for the environmental movement, but a lot of my pictures have been useful to that cause," Adams told me. "An artist has to be free to act as an individual. It is wonderful if he is interested in a particular cause or theme, but once his work is directed toward the interpretation of that theme, I think it will fail."

His work never did. And doesn’t now on the walls of the Phoenix Art Museum.

About that whiskey bottle ...

As we were speaking all those years ago Virginia came in from one of the hotel suite’s other rooms holding a pint bottle of an expensive whiskey.

“Did you open this?” she asked her husband with an accusatory tone.

“Last night,” Adams said.

“You know what that means?” said Virginia. “We can no longer take it on the plane.”

“Oh, sorry,” Adams said.

Then Virginia said, with authority, “Well, we’ll just have to finish it here. Right, young man?”

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.