MIKE MANDEL, ZONE ELEVEN
At the 1975 annual meeting of the Society for Photographic Education, as part of his remarks to the assembled crowd, Ansel Adams made an announcement that he had given his entire archive to the Center for Creative Photography. The newly formed organization, housed at the University of Arizona at Tuscon, opened later that year with five anchor tenants: the archives of Adams, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer, all of whom were still alive at the time. And while photographers (and their families) had been donating their archives to museums and libraries since the advent of the medium, this felt like something different. From the ground up, the CCP was designed to offer the potential for more in-depth study and engagement with its key (and growing) photographic holdings. The fact that Adams, the crowd-pleasing patriarch of environmentally-conscious straight photography, had contributed his vast holdings to this new effort was the ultimate sign of validation.