CEDRIC WRIGHT
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Cedric Wright: Words of the Earth

FORWARD
By Ansel Adams
August 20, 1960

 

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

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Adams, Ansel. "Cedric Wright: Words of the Earth." Forward. The Sierra Club,
     1960, pp. 9-11.
 

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