Stanford unearth a 'forgotten' Ansel Adams assignment

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The 20th-century photo pioneer is widely celebrated for his majestic images of the American West. Less known are his commercial projects, including a 1961 assignment to capture the “spirit and purpose of Stanford University.”

The proof sheets from Adams’ Stanford project include photos taken by Adams as well as the three photographers he hired to help with the assignment. | Stanford Historical Photograph Collection. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries

In the spring of 1961, Stanford’s planning office commissioned a series of campus photographs for a three-year development campaign that President Wallace Sterling called “our boldest venture since the university was founded.”

The photographer’s name: Ansel Adams.

Adams hired three other photographers to help with the project, whose shot list included iconic architecture, prominent faculty, and scenes of campus life. Select images were used in a promotional booklet called The Case for Stanford. Others were printed and displayed in a third-floor conference room in Encina Hall, along with a 25-foot motorized model of future Stanford, with Tresidder Memorial Union among proposed new additions.

Stanford Historical Photograph Collection. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries

Adams’ contact sheets were preserved in the Stanford University Archives and later scanned along with more than 16,000 other historical photographs in one of Stanford University Libraries’ first large-scale digital imaging projects in the early 1990s. That’s where journalist and photographer Charles Russo found them in 2017, essentially hiding in plain sight.

“The Stanford photo archives are a field day for finding cool stories; there are so many interesting things in there,” he said. “I stumbled across those photos and I just knew there was a good story behind them.”

Stanford Historical Photograph Collection. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries

The Stanford project wasn’t recorded in Adams’ photo log, so over the next eight years, Russo spoke to historians, archivists, and biographers to track down the details of the long-forgotten assignment. The resulting story, published Sept. 3 in SFGate, spurred a “mountain” of reader feedback, including from academics, professional photographers, and even Adams’ own family trust. Like Russo, they were fascinated by the window the found collection offers into Adams’ lesser-known commercial work.

“It gives a richer view of him as a photographer, and it gets back to that very human angle of him needing these jobs to make a living,” Russo said.

“I kind of saw it as like, you could listen to a band’s greatest hits over and over again, but if you really love the band, it’s worth listening to their B sides, right?”

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The article Unearthing Ansel Adams’ forgotten Stanford assignment written by Charity Ferreira was published on Stanford’s Report. Many thanks Charity!!!

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