Ansel Adams by Mary Street Alinder

shocked by the president’s approach (never, ever would Ansel have classified Reagan as an environmentalist) and increasingly uneasy that his fifteen minutes had run out without his ever having been allowed to enter the fray.
    When Ansel finally did speak, he felt that Reagan listened but did not hear. As a leader of the Wilderness Society’s “Stop Watt” campaign, Ansel talked about the damage he believed James Watt was inflicting across the country, and touched on topics ranging from acid rain to the conduct of the Environmental Protection Agency to the plummeting morale in the National Park Service to his pet project, magnetic fusion technology. He later regretted not having had time to bring up the protection of the Big Sur coast. 14
    Pictures were made of everyone assembled, and then there was time for small talk as we got ready to leave. Deaver proudly shared that he had purchased Ansel’s photograph Clearing Winter Storm a few years earlier for $250 and was very pleased to have later sold it for $6,000. I thought it in poor taste to tell an artist that one had 1) sold his work and 2) profited by it, but I bit my tongue. I knew that Deaver wasn’t so smart: Clearing Winter Storm now brought $10,000. (In 2014, the price for a sixteen-by-twenty-inch 1970s print of Clearing Winter Storm is about $45,000. A large mural of Clearing Winter Storm sold at an auction at Sotheby’s New York in June 2010 for $722,500, to date the most paid for an Adams photograph.)
    To the White House’s dismay, the Adams-Reagan meeting was front-page news in the Washington Post for Sunday, July 3. Ansel related to reporter Dale Russakoff that the president had caught him a bit unawares. Instead of the tall, commanding actor from the movies, he had found a small, slight man, comfortably dressed in slacks and a starched white shirt embellished with monogrammed double Rs. Ansel was shocked by Reagan’s surprisingly warm and human-size personality, as well as by his undivided attention, giving every indication that he listened to what Ansel said, although Ansel brushed that off as good acting. Each time Ansel would attempt to charge Watt with another serious transgression—“I told him Mr. Watt is the most dangerous element in the country today”—the president would rise to his defense. Ansel summarized his own performance, “I expressed myself as forcefully as I could . . . I was braver than I expected to be.” 15 With great satisfaction, Ansel read the newspaper headlines proclaiming Watt’s resignation later that year.
    During the spring of 1983, a lesion on Ansel’s leg—legacy of the burn he had received while photographing a factory in 1945—flared up and refused to settle down again. Concerned, his dermatologist sent us on to a plastic surgeon. In March, a biopsy came back negative, but another, in September, showed a squamous-cell tumor. The doctors cut out the malignancy and put Ansel on complete bed rest for four weeks to allow his leg to heal.
    This was a tough month for me, too, since Jim had back surgery at about the same time that Ansel was hospitalized. They were each on bed rest at their respective homes. Whenever I was with one of them, I felt great guilt about not being with the other; though it was a no-win situation for me, they both recuperated fairly well.
    Ansel began to sense that his time was limited. Even though I was with him constantly, he wrote me long letters about the things he found too difficult to say out loud. He wanted assurance that there would be sufficient income for Virginia when he died. Knowing that his leg was threatened, he resolved that even if he lost it, he would still direct the printing of his negatives. And finally, if he should die he wanted me and his photographic assistant, Chris Rainier, to supervise the making of prints from “important” negatives that had never been printed, placing his confidence in our perception of his life’s work. 16
    A lump developed high on