When confidence,
intuition, humor, artistry, passionate ingenuity, and shyness
function together in any one person we have an event of
considerable importance. When we add to this galaxy of
attributes the qualities of kindness and belief in the ultimate
creative association of man and nature, we have a truly
extraordinary situation. Such was Cedric Wright. He was no
stylist in the usual sense of the term; he photographed and
wrote tirelessly about what he felt deeply and truly believed.
He was not concerned with the sophisticated adjustments of idea
and impulse typical of the self-conscious artists of our time.
Nature spoke simply and directly to him and he replied in
similar vein. He was, in truth, an evangelist of special
persuasion and compassion.
Above the complex
emotional patterns of his life --- which centered about the
kaleidoscopically active days in Berkeley and the High Sierra
--- towers an edifice of beauty and imagination, a product of an
uncompromising faith in nature and in people, things and
experiences of great diversity. His work reveals a strange and
compelling beauty; it is not obscure, oblique, mechanical, or
intellectual, but is the evidence of a great insight and
intuitive power. It moves the spirit; then, because it is so
simple and direct, it moves the mind and conscience.
Twelve years my senior,
Cedric Wright gave me confidence and support in many aspects of
life, love, and the pursuit of individualism. He never
"influenced" people in the ordinary sense of the term; he
affirmed and clarified all valid experience. He firmly believed
that "to know all is to forgive all." He had an uncanny
awareness and distrust of the futilities, degenerations, and
opportunisms encountered so frequently in contemporary music,
graphic arts, literature, and photography. Over the years,
Wright held fast to his own dream, selecting here and there,
from all art expressions available to him, the statements
necessary to the structure of his own creative life. He never
expressed doubt of suffered introspections about the
significance of his work, nor did he strive to associate it with
the modes and manners of the world about him. His esthetic and
communicative codes are to be found in Whitman, Edward
Carpenter, H. G. Wells, Bach and Beethoven --- men who thought,
wrote, composed, and lived in the fresh air of imagination,
compassion, and understanding. Superficially, his philosophy may
seem at times a confusion of ethics, mysticism, and blind faith,
but in the end a pattern emerges which explains and justifies
his intense creative compulsions. Elbert Hubbard gave him in his
youth a gentle but often satirical attitude toward humanity and
its manifestations of ego. Trained as a violinist, and
gravitating to photography in his middle years, he always found
it difficult to adapt himself to the configurations of formal
and academic procedures. Nevertheless, he was an excellent
teacher, imparting a sense of structure and intense emotional
content, rather than expositions of conventional concepts and
style. Fritz Kreisler, as a performing artist, was his idol, and
profoundly influenced his approach to music and photography. He
had small taste for the mere virtuoso, and little regard for
mechanics and style unless directly associated with emotional
expression. His approach to photography was almost entirely
empirical, yet the scope of his work was enormous --- landscapes
and natural details, people and portraits, architecture and, as
few realize, a massive body of technical work accomplished as
photographer for the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley during
World War II. Granted his techniques were sometimes
inconsistent, his photography always carries the stamp of his
very particular personal vision.
One aspect of Wright's
personality --- memorable to his friends but extremely difficult
to present out of the context of direct experience --- was his
egregious sense of humor. Frequently we discover this humor in
his photography; it exhibits a sensitive and buoyant
appreciation of the ridiculous, a rounding out of a gently
applied comment on the human characteristics of people, things,
and situations. It was this quality that provided the essential
alleviations, balancing the severe and evangelical compulsions
of his philosophy and effort. He was an unconscious master of
dialect, and professed a unique concept of spelling and
expressive rhetoric. Many of his letters contain the lilt of
humor and the sheer excitement of life interest. Others are
profoundly moving declarations of spirit and purpose. throughout
all his statements runs the firm thread of personality, binding
his ideals, experiences, and friends into a pattern of
comforting validity.
I write this little sketch
not as a resumé of a deep, thirty-five year friendship, or as a
definitive critique of his creative functions and
accomplishment, but in the spirit of an earnest invitation to
all who read this book to give more than a pleasurable survey of
this tangible evidence of devotion and spirit. It is true that
Cedric employed symbols to explain symbols --- but what more can
art in any form accomplish? The mood and actuality of a crisp
Sierra dawn over a glittering meadow should be experienced by
all people --- living here in the shadow of the Sierra as well
as in the labyrinths of Chicago and New York. Towering granite
peaks and rolling thunderclouds over a high-mountain lake are
part of our basic heritage; many of the trapped urban millions
may find it difficult to gain direct experience of wild places,
but the creative intensity of art can bring them some of the
magic and mystery and encourage them to think, to dream, and
perhaps to explore. The realities and bounties of nature are as
actual as the urban and rural realities of our society, and may
be recognized as such and accepted when experienced directly, or
through some intense creative-emotional interpretations. Cedric
believed that any man's spiritual horizon would be expanded
through contact with nature, and his life was dedicated to
the idea.
Many "realistic" and
concrete-cultured critics scorn at simple exposition of natural
beauty and wonder. To them, man is here to dominate the earth,
not to live with it. Photographers of the hard-boiled
journalistic school (usually in the juices of discontent,
disillusionment, and metropolitan survival techniques) avoid
images of intrinsic mystical quality, and might not know a
songful image if they was it. Cedric Wright was in a constant
cold war with such concrete and hard-boiled notions, and with
the academic, business, and political conservatives. He had
little use for the self-protective conventional wisdom. He paid
a price to live with his convictions, but it kept his genius
intact and lost him none of the affection of his friends.
What is offered here is
not merely a collection of nostalgic and beautiful pictures and
poetic text, but a profound revelation of a most uncommon man,
who, despite avalanches of problems and distractions, held fast
to the essential dream. I regret there must be a date on this
work because, in essence, it is timeless. Only the fact that it
is concerned with photography places it in the relatively narrow
confines of our age. With amazing clarity of appreciation
and insight, Nancy Newhall has extracted from a tremendous sheaf
of Cedric's writings the essence of his poetic vision, and has
blended it with his photographs as equivalents of mood and
meaning. And the Sierra Club affirms its aims and achievements
in presenting this book as a memorial to one of its most
illustrious spirits.
Ansel Adams
San Francisco
August 20, 1960
__________
Adams, Ansel.
"Cedric Wright: Words of the Earth." Forward. The Sierra
Club,
1960, pp. 9-11.