From my favorite place in Yosemite Valley.

Ansel and I had been taking pictures together in Yosemite for several years, but eventually I tired of the genre. I was at a point in life where never seeing another image of Yosemite would leave me a happy man. Ansel would keep dragging me to El Capitan or Bridalveil Fall in the most godawful weather, and just stand there goggling, lumberjack shirt, pot belly and suspenders. Every now and then he would mutter “Far out, man” in between hits on that little hash pipe he carried everywhere. The strange thing was that, even though he was carrying a load of gear, he never actually took any pictures. On the rare occasions he straightened up, he would repair to that smelly darkroom in the log cabin and make more prints from snaps he had made in the same locations decades earlier. As long as I knew him, he photographed nowhere else, ever since he got that suspended sentence for driving with a kilo in the trunk. Only his fame had kept him out of Alcatraz.

“What gives, Ansel?” I asked, as he staggered out of a darkroom by now blue with marijuana fumes. “Far out, man, but you know ….” and here he paused to take another deep hit from that bong he had hand carved in the shape of Half Dome “…. all they want is prints of the old ones even though my gear was crap back then, ’cause I mostly tried to make a living as a barroom pianist and that barely kept me in bread, water and pot, certainly not in the best photo gear. But look, I get $2,500 for these, $3,500 if I yellow them up a bit and make sure to mark them ‘Limited edition 1/5’. I suspect I’ve unloaded about two thousand or so of that limited edition over the years. Hey, man, it’s a living. Gee, this is good stuff. Wanna hit?”.

Ansel dropped by the other day, zonked out of his gourd as usual, clutching a bunch of prints he had just made of those damned white Yosemite birches. When will photographers stop milking this theme? I mean, come on, how many more times in your life do you want to see a snap of a bunch of spindly, butt ugly, emaciated white trees with peeling bark, over printed and over enlarged which some jerk weed has just used $50,000 of gear to replicate for the umpteenth time?

He offered me a toke but I politely declined, seeing as it’s not my thing.

“But I’ll tell you what, Ansel. How about I give you one of my personally autographed white birches? In full color, as that’s not really something you know how to do now, is it? Feel free to stick it any place you like”.

“Far out, man. Like, yeah dude. Birches rock. I’m getting $5,000 for mine now!”

So that’s how Ansel happened to end up with one of my Yosemite snaps on the wall of his rustic cabin. I told the old fart it was hand printed from my 8″ x 10″ Deardorff, made using old growth oaks from Yosemite, and he bought it. And I think he missed the door handle, being higher than a kite at the time. He told me, in the strictest confidence, that he had to augument his energy with a couple of uppers, while in the darkroom, as he was so sick and tired of printing the same images for well over four decades now.

“That’s awesome dude. All my gear is handcrafted by that dude I get messed up with down the valley. Trouble is, he always promises to finish in a month, then when I go to pick the gear up, find he’s forgotten to start, because he was too out of his mind to do anything. My last tripod took him five years to make – said he finally got on with it as he was out and needed the money for a new stash. I was gonna offer him some of mine but reckoned that would add another year to the wait”.

White birches. Off New Montgomery Street, Yosemite. D700, 35-70 AF D.