The history of California in the first half of the 20th century can be told through the intersecting lives of two artist friends: Ansel Adams and Chiura Obata. Adams was the exuberant San Francisco–born lensman who brought a crisp rigor to landscape photography. Obata, hailing from Japan and almost 17 years Adams’s senior, was the influential teacher known for his steadfast temperament and an approach to painting that made landscapes feel liquid and alive.
In many ways, Adams and Obata traveled parallel paths. Both were deeply committed to their work. Both ran in influential circles of Bay Area artists that included figures like photographer Dorothea Lange. And both came to regard Yosemite as their muse: Adams remains renowned for magisterial photographs of natural phenomena such as the park’s Half Dome; Obata, for blockprints like Evening Glow of Yosemite Fall (1930), an intimate view of the cascade that regularly appears on posters and greeting cards.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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But, as the United States entered World War II, their paths split. Both artists poignantly rendered Japanese American incarceration camps—but from opposing standpoints. Adams photographed the detention center at Manzanar, in California’s Owens Valley, as a documentarian, producing elegant portraits of its inhabitants. Obata, conversely, chronicled life as an incarcerated person. Over the two years he spent in detention (1942–43), he produced a staggering array of sketches and paintings that captured the indignities of daily life: detainees at San Bruno’s Tanforan Assembly Center chatting with visitors through a chain-link fence, or a family in Utah’s austere high desert huddling under a blanket in a rickety barrack at the Central Utah Relocation Center (Topaz).
Obata and Adams produced significant records of the time as well as enduring images of the Golden State. And the artists, who orbited each other in life, continue to do so in death—their works materializing together in exhibitions about the legacy of Japanese incarceration as well as the more bucolic subject of Yosemite. Curator Timothy Anglin Burgard, who organized the 2000 exhibition Great Nature: The Transcendent Landscapes of Chiura Obata for the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, sees two men who ignored the artistic trends of the day to produce “astonishingly poetic” work. Both artists, says Burgard, “have shaped the way we see Yosemite.”
Almost a century after they met, their concepts remain timely: Their abiding respect for nature feels profound in our era of climate change, and their records of incarceration offer a poignant parallel to a moment in which the federal government is rounding up immigrants. Little is known about the exact contours of the artists’ friendship, but a dialogue does survive in the conversation between their works.
GRANITE PEAKS
Obata, born Zoroku Obata in Okayama, Japan, in 1885, was a prodigy artist and self-proclaimed “roughneck” who began training in sumi ink painting at the age of seven. He was apprenticed to a master painter by the time he was a teenager, then sailed to San Francisco in 1903. Adams, born in 1902, was the child of a relatively comfortable merchant family with New England roots. As a youth, he had aspired to be a concert pianist, but a family vacation to Yosemite—where his parents presented him with a Kodak Brownie—shifted Adams’s priorities. By the late 1920s, he had set his sights on photography, which was not yet embraced as a fine art.
After landing in San Francisco, Obata—who endured intense anti-Asian discrimination in his new home—got right to work, producing illustrations for Japanese-language publications, painting murals for department stores, and designing a set for a production of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. In 1921, he teamed with fellow artists to establish the East West Art Society, a group that sought to bridge the cultural gap between Asia and the United States. “In the world of art,” said Obata, “there shouldn’t be any walls.”
And in his world, at least for a time, he seemed to transcend them: Obata traveled around California, creating paintings of nature that fused the sumi techniques he’d perfected in Japan with a depth of perspective drawn from Western painting. In 1927, he made the most consequential journey of his career: a six-week trip to Yosemite that put him on course to intersect with Adams (though it’s unclear whether the pair met in Yosemite or the Bay Area). The experience, he later said, “was the greatest harvest for my whole life.”
That same year, Adams published his first portfolio, which included his pivotal photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome (1927), showing the granite peak in deeply saturated shades of charcoal gray, embraced by bright, snowy peaks. It’s an image so vivid, it seems as if the mountain might spring to life.
Adams and his wife, Virginia Best, ran a gallery called Best’s Studio in Yosemite Valley (now the Ansel Adams Gallery), and Obata’s work started appearing there regularly in the 1930s. The painter, at this point, had achieved some prominence, exhibiting at the Legion of Honor and the de Young. In 1932, he began an influential teaching career at UC Berkeley. “In the late ’30s, the Obata family would come to Yosemite and camp for a couple of weeks every summer,” says Adams’s son, Michael. “They stored their camping equipment in our garage.” Michael has a portrait that his father took of Obata posing with a fishing pole, as well as a charming sketch that Obata made of Adams clutching a martini glass.
Both artists brought a modern eye to depictions of nature, breaking with prior artistic traditions in which landscapes were represented in gauzy, romantic ways. In the wilderness, they cultivated new ideas: “I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite,” wrote Adams in Ansel Adams: An Autobiography, published in 1985. Obata, in a dispatch sent to his wife, Haruko, during his first trip to the park, described a certain transcendence: “The air in the high mountains is so clean, and the trees, grass, birds, and flowers are fascinating beyond description. There are birds much like the canary. Beautiful flowers bloom in a stream of icy water. I only feel full of gratitude.”
Then came the war.
WORLDS APART
Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 turned California upside down. The following year, about 110,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast—the majority of them U.S. citizens—were sent to detention centers as a “military necessity” under a presidential executive order. Chiura, Haruko, and their daughter were uprooted from their Berkeley home—an event the artist conveyed in a mournful sumi ink drawing, Farewell Picture of the Bay Bridge (1942), showing the span looking glum in a downpour. “The rain almost seems to dissolve the cables of the bridge,” says Burgard. “There is this subtle suggestion of breaking of ties to home and community.”
The Obatas were sent south to live in a former racetrack. “We waded in rain, through slush and mud up to our knees, only to stumble into empty horse stalls,” Obata wrote at the time. “Many an involuntary sob escaped our lips as we began our life at Tanforan.” Five months later, they were relocated to Topaz, situated on a dry lake bed where temperatures fluctuated between freezing and searing and dust storms were a regular feature—phenomena Obata captured in dozens of sketches.
Even in confinement, however, he created majestic canvases. A 1942 painting titled Moonlight over Topaz, Utah—given to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who sympathized with the plight of Japanese Americans—shows a dramatic moonrise over a mountain range. The camp’s structures are rendered in dark silhouettes at a diminutive scale—man’s travesties are tiny against the vastness of what Obata described as “Dai Shizen” (great nature). “I think even from the beginning, my grandfather could see through to the other side,” says Obata’s granddaughter Kimi Kodani Hill, who has helped produce key texts on the artist’s work, such as the 2000 book Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata’s Art of the Internment. “How do you keep yourself grounded? And how do you know who you are through all of this? For him, it was the experience with nature.”
Echoes of the stark conditions at the camps appear in some of the photographs Adams took during his visits to Manzanar beginning in 1943. One image, snapped from a guard tower, shows rows of grim barracks extending endlessly into the horizon. But overall, Adams’s work is—understandably—different in tone. Some of that had to do with the conditions of access: The terms stipulated that Adams not photograph armed guards, barbed wire, or guard towers, so he focused on photographing people and activities—like detainees playing baseball.
To be certain, Adams was confounded by incarceration. In Born Free and Equal, his 1944 book on Manzanar, he wrote about how imprisonment had ripped away a sense of security from second-generation Japanese Americans. “Many of the Nisei,” he wrote, “have suffered spiritual and psychological wounds that may never entirely heal.” His portraits were an attempt to counter racist media portrayals of the Japanese—a position for which he was attacked. Parents of U.S. soldiers criticized Adams for portraying the “enemy” sympathetically; others took him to task for presenting an idealized picture of camp life.
A PORTRAIT EMERGES
It’s unclear whether Obata stayed in touch with Adams while at Topaz. But the pair did reconnect shortly after he was released. Chiura and Haruko’s son, Gyo, was studying architecture at Washington University in St. Louis (a part of the country where Japanese Americans were allowed to live), and in 1943, the couple and their daughter received permission to join him. Soon after, Adams and Best sent a holiday letter to the Obatas. It’s a generic note on Adams’s professional stationery, but on the back is a handwritten missive from Best, describing the possibility of selling flower arrangements made with native plants at their Yosemite gallery and wanting to consult with Haruko, who had taught ikebana, Japanese flower arranging—perhaps a way of helping the Obatas return to the life they’d had before the war.
The Obatas moved back to the Bay Area in 1945; Chiura resumed his career at Berkeley, and Haruko went back to offering instruction on ikebana. After their return, Adams hosted Obata at his studio for a lecture and painting demonstration. Michael also recalls the Obatas visiting Yosemite on numerous occasions. Hill says her grandfather loved fishing in Happy Isles on the Merced River, not far from Best’s Studio. And late in life, Haruko told stories about these excursions. As Hill describes, “My grandmother would say, ‘Ansel would invite us, and Virginia would invite us, and I would go and cook sukiyaki for everybody, and Ansel gave me a hug and I didn’t like it because he had a beard.’ ” Hill owns a copy of Adams’s 1949 book, My Camera in Yosemite Valley, that bears an inscription from Adams to her grandfather: “For great artist and fisherman! Chiura Obata.”
As Obata got older, the trips to Yosemite receded. In 1954, he retired from Berkeley and led tours to Japan to promote cultural understanding. Soon after, Adams gave up his home in San Francisco and began dividing his time between Yosemite and Carmel. At this point, any record of contact between the two artists dries up. Obata died in 1975; Adams, nine years later.
In the work they left behind, you find analogous stories—of ambitious men who were brought together and then pulled apart by the forces of history, of artists who bucked convention and found success on their own terms. At Manzanar, Adams took time to shoot natural phenomena, like a dust storm, capturing the shifting light against a mountain backdrop. Obata likewise recorded the environment around Topaz—finding, as he stated, “a beauty that exists in that enormous bleakness.”
Californians today, survivors of ravaging fires and a crumbling democracy, understand the savage beauty of a landscape that seems to take as much as it gives. In Obata’s and Adams’s images, you find both: the terrible and the sublime—a portrait of California.•
