Foreword

The memories that are most vivid, as I look
back across the years, far, far back of early maturity are of
mountain peaks and blue sea, trees and clouds, flowers and fruits
and birds ... as near and as complimentary as ones right hand is
to the left.

Mango trees, tall and ample in their glossy fol-
lage, hung in season with huge jewel-like clusters of yellow,
pendulous fruit, red-cheeked at the stem-end ... the golden
globes of the guava and the heavy abundance of the banana and pa-
paya ... and in their season of blossoming, magenta bouganvillia,
scarlet ponciana regia and the orange trumpets of the bignonia,
flamed against a tropic sky caravelled with lazy trade-wind clouds
against whose white glory, frigate-birds and the exotic crests of
the up-sweeping coconut trees swayed to wind-meles as old as
Time.

From the misty peaks above Nuanu Valley, clothed
in their gray-green forests of koa and kukui, to the smooth, white,
crescent beach that was Waikiki in those innocent days, was, even
in the era of horse-back and the carriage but a few miles ... so
that odors and sounds were closely related to my young senses ...
with a difference ... the difference of the smell of warm, forest
loam and the haunting perfume of fern jungles and maile and wild
ginger floating on the air ... to the sweet, strange, salty redo-
lence of irridescent sea-weeds when the tide is out ... and leaves
the coral reefs where it grows ... above water.

Between these two glories, life was full of ad-
venture for a small wild group of us, who were into every thing
for miles around ... vivid young savages, primed to the brim with
with the zest of living.

All this is a simple weaving of a tapestry of
impressions in which I lived and moved as a child of the tropics.

In the spring of 1906, San Francisco was shaken
to ruins by the great earth-quake.

By summer, many of us felt the need of a change
of scene after the long strain.

With a small group, I went to the northern Sierra
to make rough camp, packing into our mountain fastness by mule.

The grizzled guide eyed us contemptuously and
"lowed" that we had "picked a-hell-uv-a-place".

But he staked the tent and unpacked the dunnage...
meanwhile casting a wary eye at the thunder-heads that were rising
above the peaks ... gave his trowsers a hitch, spat fulsomely
and was gone down the steep trail in a cloud of red dust.

We "ate and slept with the earth" in the fullest
sense in this glorious grimness.

Under these circumstances, through the following
years ... 1906 to 1927 ...I slowly found my power with the camera
among the junipers and the tamrack pines of the high, storm-swept

altitudes.

Compact, squat giants are these trees, shaped
by the winds of the centuries like wings and flames and torso-
like forms ... unbelievably beautiful in their rhythms.

Here, stored consciousness began its work ...
not only with the splendor of the strange trees, but a sense of
visualization developed in amazing ways in which the human figure
suggested itself as part of their motive ... even before the
camera was brought to bear upon the revelation... The Dying Cedar
(plate XX) being an early experience.

In one of the early camping years I found fellow-
ship with a young sculptress. She was brimming with interpretive
ideas of earth and sky and winds. We roamed from peak to river
talking line and form ... and then, one day I "glimpsed" something,
... the print of The Dryad (plate XIV) ... being one of the earli-
est flashes of visualization that has played a strong part in my
life.

During these early years with the camera, I came
into the friendship of Rudolph Schaeffer and Norman Edwards of
San Francisco who were teaching the use of fundmental design and
pure color.

In brief experiences of class study that covered
many years, I began to understand why I was able to think my prob-
lems through at high speed ... the reason being a natural sense of
dynamic symetry.

All trees are beautiful or strange but not all are
pictorial. I learned how to look for trees by the prevailing wind
and the contour of the storm-swept glacial wastes ... and then I
found glorious ones with out any of these apparent indications ...
each find, an ecstatic experience of breathless wonder ... some-
times from a distance, sometimes in a turn in a rocky ledge .....
and my heart missed a beat.

Into the tree and rock forms the sensitive yet
hardy feminine figure took its place with sculptural fitness.

The few figures I have used through the years of
the mountain series were slim, hearty, unaffected women of early
maturity, living a hardy out-of-door life in high boots and jeans,
toughened to wind and sun ... cooking for weeks over a camp-fire
with wood from the forest around us ... and carrying water from
the icy lake at our feet ... bearing and forbearing to the utmost.

Over-night fishing trips were a part of the sum-
mer's experiences. One blanket apiece, our rations rolled in
them, we went, the beloved Red Dog at our heels, higher and high-
er with the full knowlege that the night at best, after the sing-
ing and the laughter around the fire, would be a wretched affair
at-beat, of roasting on one side and freezing on the other.

The orthodox Judgment Day will have no more wan
and weary looking faces rise from their graves to face the pale
beauty of early dawn, than I, exhausted and numb and grimy with
granite sand, have seen, as my companions in misery lifted on un-
steady elbows, to stare with heavy, half seeing eyes, into the
wonder of distances far below and away to the rim of the world ...
gray ... cold ... silent ... with a great star pulsing a melody
above the coming day.

We laughed hilariously ... afterward ... when

the perfume of coffee and bacon and sizzling trout from the little
lake, floated on the frosty, hemlock-scented air ... ate with a
zest ... told of how you woke to find someone's boot in your face
(for we slept in them) ... or of someone who crawled in; between
you and the fire, adding to the misery we had called sleep.

Then, camp cleared of all traces of clumsy humanness, we
were on our way for the last and the hardest of the trip ... the
peak with its dreaming distances where mountain range after range
became like the far waves of the sea. Veils of warm air pour up-
ward through the pinnacles below, bringing the scent of dry earth
and the pollen of rock lichen ... voices are strange and brittle
in that high stillness ... where eagles sail in miraculous spirals
against the blue dome ... then veer and sweep like wind-driven
flecks of dark cloud over the valleys.

Then... the decent..!

Across gleaming acres of snow, over slippery shale,
through dazzling growths of vermilion and orange paint-brush and
purple monks-hood, around boulders, over logs, for now we could
short-cut the trail in places ... back to the manzanita scrub and
hemlock and pine and juniper, down, down, down for base camp be-
fore sunset.

Who can experience such days and not grow into new
dimensions of body and thought, selfless and unafraid. They were
wonderful days of hard going, of happy freedom, of comradeship, of
endurance through rain and hail and bone-chilling after-maths ...
and then into sunny weather of summer glories with templed domes of
great clouds and bird songs and wild flowers and the stunted
magnificence of the twisted trees.

And now, the swing of the pendulum to the beaches of
Southern California.

The mountain camps, high and far to the north, shine
in the bright mists of memory.

Here, I am giving my heart to the sea with its long,
pale planes of sandy wastes ... to the high skies with their wind-
swept clouds ... to the melody of the surf in fair and wild weather,
... to winter mists and dust storms from the Mojave desert that lies
inland to the east ... These storms produce a low, luminous haze
over the land and ocean that makes for atmospheric effects that
come at no other time of year.

The print of El Dolor (plate XXXIV) is from a straight
negative made on a day like this with a winter sun at solstice.

* * * * *
I am glad of the years of photographic experience that
many of us came into under the leadership of "that strange genius,
Alfred Stieglitz".

We learned to be human light meters. We used a fair
amount of sense ... profited by our mistakes ... and in our un-
hurried way ... left some telling land-marks of pictorial beauty.

I am not deaf to the controversies concerning manipula-
tion or non-manipulation of negative or print ... each angle has
its virtues and its faults. I would rather print from a per-
fect negative ... and there are such miracles ... but I am at the
controlling of my medium and if I want to do a tail-spin ... it is
my privilege.

I have dealt with the chaos of mountain tangles and the
glare of granite ... and if I had not ventured to sublimate