If you survey current, ultramodern monochrome photos you will find an abundance like mine above, where near-coal blackness juxtaposes with higher-valued tones without much progression in between. This captures a West African musician at the climax of his performance; however usually the subject is landscape, cityscape or architecture, made with equipment designed to produce very long exposure times — shot in daylight — producing liquid effects among any clouds present. I once trained a week in Santa Fe, New Mexico with a man teaching a different, more classical approach. According to this doctrine, the final B&W product should have minimal solid black and a bright white point (a tiny one) combined with a constellation of well-articulated intermediate tones.

With this teaching in mind, I wandered into a gallery in an old house downtown Santa Fe one evening after class, and found hanging on its walls dozens of Ansel Adams prints, some quite large; all of these came from the master’s own hand. In many of these images I beheld extensive areas in solid black with near-zero detail; a few had no gradations at all. Pure white I could not find. I brought this up the next day with our seminar leader. He knew Mr. Adams personally — had touched the hem of his robe, so to speak — had worked and studied with him. He always referred to his old mentor by first name: Ansel. My instructor — a man somewhat older than me — sniffed through both nostrils, then twisted his forehead to make a frown. He made a well-known gesture, a lifting of one hand with a repeated twisting of that wrist, to indicate Ansel was probably drinking alcohol heavily when he made those irregular prints.

Even today I am not sure what principle I should take away from this little conversation. If Mr. Adams did not follow the standard rules (his own rules by the way) he must have been imbibing spirits before entering the darkroom, or during his printing session. But Ansel’s original prints were hung in an art gallery for everyone to see and purchase. Why did he not destroy them and start over when he sobered up?