Images Sought

(Photo: Ansel Adams along the cliffs of Big Sur, originally published on March 28, 1980 by the Los Angeles Times. This cropped, smaller image is considered a fair use. Original photo © Los Angeles Times.)

Ansel Adams, possibly the best known photographer in the world, died in Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in 1984 at the age of 82. But his unique photos still sell well as prints, posters, books, calendars and cards. One of the more than 30,000 prints Adams made himself sold for $609,000 during a 2006 auction in New York. And just three months ago, a new visitors’ center at a national park in New Mexico opened with a roomful of photos Adams took there in the 1940s. Born and raised in San Francisco in 1902, Adams was a concert pianist until he was 28, when he decided to devote himself to his photography. He went into it with zeal and lived for years in Yosemite, then moved to Carmel in 1962. Adams had to support his art and his family with commercial photography, portraits, teaching and editing for 40 years until the 1970s, when he was able to make a living solely from his famous images.

(Video: Ansel Adams: Celebration of Genius)

Refinery for Moss Landing

(Photo: Moro Cojo Slough, with the Moss Landing power plant towers in the distance, used with permission. Original source. © 2008 by Miles Daniels.)

The gentle Moro Cojo Slough in Moss Landing is owned by the Elkhorn Slough Foundation now, but four decades ago it was marked as the site of a giant oil refinery by Humble Oil Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil, ancestor of ExxonMobil. The company bought 455 acres of property at the slough in 1965 to build a $70 million refinery to process 50,000 gallons of crude oil a day. Another 5 acres of beach property was to be the terminus of a pipeline moving crude onshore from big tankers anchored in Monterey Bay. The plan outraged some Monterey Peninsula residents, who argued that oil spills and smog would destroy the bay, ruin the tourist industry, and bring an end to agriculture in the Salinas Valley. Humble countered that there would be "no significant air pollution," and that the industry would help the county tax base and help fund public schools. The opponents, in just six days, got 12,000 signatures asking the county to reject the refinery application.

A number of retired industrialists, conservationists, and politicians led the fight against Humble Oil Company's plan to build a refinery at Moss Landing. Carmel photographer Ansel Adams and even former Governor Goodwin Knight joined the fray, with Knight warning: "Humble Oil will kill you. Don't let them." A fourth of Monterey County residents signed petitions against it, the Salinas Valley agriculture community was split, and county planners opposed it. But the county's Board of Supervisors, after a 17-hour hearing in December 1965, voted 3-2 in favor of the refinery, deciding the county could regulate air pollution. Courts upheld the approval, but directors and shareholders of parent Standard Oil got an earful at the annual shareholders meeting. In August 1966, Humble dropped the plan and announced that instead it would build a larger refinery in a more welcoming Benicia. Humble said opposition on the Monterey Peninsula was a factor, but engineering and soil tests at Moss Landing were more decisive.