Ansel Adams’s Lone Pine Photograph

Ansel Adams made the photograph, Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine in 1944. It should be obvious to anyone who knows Adams’s work that the picture here is not one of his; it’s a photograph I made near where he made Winter Sunrise. I offer it here, because I’ve been involved in discussions about the ethics of removing elements from photographs and Winter Sunrise has always been one that springs to mind during such discussions.  

    Adams awoke early on four successive mornings and tried to make the picture he had envisioned, but conditions weren’t what he wanted. On the fifth morning he struck pay dirt. It was still dark and very cold when Adams drove to the spot he had chosen, located just outside of Lone Pine, a small town 58 miles south of Bishop, California on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. He set up his camera on the new platform that had been bolted to the top of his car. When he finished, he climbed down and he and his wife, Virginia, sat in the car waiting and sipping coffee. Just before the first light of dawn, he climbed back onto the platform and at that time he has been quoted as saying, “I finally encountered the bright, glistening sunrise with light clouds streaming from the southeast and casting swift moving shadows on the meadow and dark rolling hills.” Just as Adams exposed the film the horse that had been standing in the meadow turn sideways and the sun sent beams of light that highlighted the horse and the trees in the foreground. That moment was not only the beginning of one of his most recognized photographs, but later it would give rise to one of his famous quotes, "Sometimes I think I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.”

    The one thing about the photograph that disturbed Adams was the white washed L-P that high school students had painted on the rocky slopes of the Alabama Hills. “It was a hideous and insulting scar on one of the great vistas of our land,” so stated Adams. He removed all of the L-P that he could from the negative and spotted out any remaining trace on the final print. He was criticized for doing that, because many people think it unethical to remove elements from photographs. In his defense he said, “I am not enough of a purist to perpetuate the scar and thereby destroy for me, at least, the extraordinary beauty and perfection of the scene.” 

    On one of my trips down U.S. Route 395, I stopped off in Lone Pine and made the photograph you see here from nearly the same spot as Winter Sunrise and there sits the L-P. For this to be a true comparison, I would have had to be at that spot at o-dark hundred, which is against my basic principles. That’s why I have no sunrise photographs in my portfolio. Copyright laws prohibit me from using Ansel’s print here, but if you Google it, you’ll see the difference that a master of technique can make in a photograph. And I have no quarrel with anyone who removes elements from photographs as long as they fess up to it and clearly state the fact, which is precisely what Ansel Adams did.

Note: You can find a discussion of Ansel Adams’s Winter Sunrise in his own words in his book, Examples, The Making of 40 Photographs.

Cherry Creek

If you wander the unpaved streets of Cherry Creek, a living ghost town, with a population of around 70 people, you'll find plenty of abandoned houses that are slowly withering away. They were built in the late 1800s by hard rock miners who came to Nevada in search of fortune. Today relics sit side by side with newer homes, occupied by people who still work a few of the mining claims. Some of them brought in mobile homes, while others beefed up old buildings and added new rooms. There are even a few mud houses remaining that were half-buried in the ground. They had wooden floors and doors and wooden beam roofs, on which sod was piled. All of this variety makes for a cacophony of architectural styles.

The house you see here was one of the first brick structures built in Cherry Creek and now it's the sole surviving brick building. That wood you see in front of the door might seem like a porch, but it isn't exactly. It was the porch's roof. A tremor, or maybe age weakened the supports and down it came.

Cherry Creek got its start in 1872 when two old sourdoughs located silver ore and named the strike, the Tea Cup Mine. One year later, there were nine other claims along with a town of around 400 people. Legend holds that the town’s name came from a small creek that got its name from either wild cherries or chokecherry bushes that grew near it. The area went from boom to bust, then fire, then more boom, more fire and more bust. All told there were three cycles of riches to rags over an eleven-year period.

At the top of the boom times, about 1880, Cherry Creek had a transient population of about 6,000 with about 1800 permanent residents. The bustling town at one point had all the services miners needed: a livery stable, blacksmith shop, hotel, boarding houses, restaurants, two stamp mills, a post office and most important to thirsty miners, an amazing twenty-eight saloons. It's reported that altogether a total of some where around $20 million in gold and silver came out of the mining district. Small leaseholders continue to be active, probably because gold is selling at a price that makes it worth the effort to go after the small pockets that are left. Residents own most of the claims.

All the activity that once was and the growth that was the result is certainly not apparent today. You have to use a great deal of imagination to see what it must have been like to be there during the boom years. I think of this brick house as a symbol of the rags to riches to rags history of Cherry Creek. If only that house could talk.


Cherry Creek is located about an hours drive north of Ely.