Douglas Brinkley Shakes Things Up

Instead of talking about the boring, tedious, same old stuff going on in politics, Imus and the historian Douglas Brinkley spent most of today’s interview talking about the late photographer Ansel Adams.
 
Brinkley, who recently turned 50, was in Carmel, California this morning, where he’ll celebrate the holidays with his family, exploring Big Sur and San Francisco. Unable to resist the urge to do something historical, Brinkley met with Adams’s son in his house on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean
 
“He was a real old school photographer,” Brinkley said of Adams, known for his great images of United States National Parks, and other landscape shots.
 
Imus fancies himself an amateur landscape photographer, and once auctioned off for charity some Hasselblad lenses Adams had used and then returned to the New Jersey-based camera equipment company.
 
“I started the bidding at $100,000,” he told Brinkley. So, who won? “They’re in my office.”
 
The price on Adams’s prints is on the rise, and one recently sold for $700,000. But the photographer was not always so coveted. “He used to be broke a lot, and would actually take pictures of bread for a bakery, or you could hire him to take a picture of a wrench if you were a hardware store,” said Brinkley, always equipped with an interesting story.
 
Identifying Adams’s signature look is not difficult to do, Brinkley noted. “He was the master of the darkroom.” He also preferred black and white shots to color, since the they were less likely to fade.  
 
Of the thousands of photographs Adams took in his life, his son told Brinkley, “He only considered about 400 worthy of high art, and then about ten of them he thought were perfect, and four he thought were masterpieces.”
 
Done with Ansel Adams, Imus made the natural transition into—who else?—musician Hayes Carll, with whom Brinkley was unfamiliar despite living in Texas and being a music junkie.
 
“You will love this guy to death,” Imus promised, adding, “But that’s a long day, man.”
 
Because there were about 90 seconds left to chat, Imus asked Brinkley his thoughts on President Clinton fielding questions at a White House press briefing last Friday after a meeting with President Obama.
 
“There was sort of this feeling Clinton was coming in as the maestro of politics,” Brinkley said. “He’s very respected in the Democratic Party, particularly by Democrats in the center, so it worked.”
 
Though it was an unusual move, and Clinton looks a lot meeker than he used to, Brinkley noted, “He’s got a new sort of gravitas.”
 
Well put, as ever.
 
-Julie Kanfer