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110 C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • H O L I D A Y 2 0 1 7 Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Alaska, 1947 with the music business, he decided to concen- trate on photography. "I had to choose: the camera or the piano," he told an interviewer late in life. "And the cam- era won. Family and friends said, 'Oh, Ansel, don't give up the piano. The camera cannot express the human soul.' The only answer to that was 'No, I don't think the camera can, but maybe the photographer could.'" Nevertheless, music remained a lifelong pas- sion of Adams' and would partially inform his work. Musical metaphors abound in his com- ments on his profession: he famously described a photographic negative as a composer's score and the print as the performance. An artist who worked almost exclusively in black and white, he said, "most color prints remind me of a piano that's slightly out of tune." The photographer made his first visit to Carmel in June 1926 with friend and early patron Albert Bender. Bender didn't drive, but owned a Buick Coach and asked Adams if he could get away and drive him to meet the poet Robinson Jeffers. "Naturally I could get away!" the young Ansel said. The two spent the night at the Peter Pan Lodge in the Carmel Highlands (burned down in 1959) with no inkling that the area would become Adams' home years later. "Jeffers was somewhat of an eccentric," Michael Adams says. "Bender wanted Ansel to show the poet some of his photographs but he wasn't impressed. But then he asked Ansel to play the Jeffers' piano Photo: Adams Family Collection and the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust