
Commissioned for the observance of the one hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the University of California in 1968, Fiat Lux by Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall celebrated the event with a perceptive, artistic statement about the University itself, and about its reach into the lives and surroundings of the people it serves. This book was especially designed by Adams, Newhall and bookmaker Adrian Wilson to be experienced at a particular scale and size. Because this original 1967 edition is now out of print, On the Same Page, in collaboration with UC Press, has created a 2012 facsimile edition for all incoming students and current faculty, a reprint that approximates the original in terms of size and overall layout. We believe that even in the digital age, there is still a place for the material object of the book, especially a book that was so carefully and thoughtfully designed.
For wider circulation and access to the text among students, faculty, staff and the larger public as well as for the visually impaired, we have provided a machine-readable PDF of Fiat Lux. Available Here. CalNet authentication required
This republication in both material and digital form is an invitation to reconsider our inheritance and to re-imagine our institution's future.
Visual Literacy
"Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records be kept in images and sounds." -Nancy Newhall, Aperture, 19521
The Fiat Lux book exemplified a genre of photography book that Nancy Newhall is credited with inventing: the "spread book" in which photographs and words are carefully calibrated and matched, with picture size and placement shifting in relationship to words and overall design. The effect of such a book, as Ansel Adams described in a letter to a UC administrator, was that each spread within the book must "read well, look well and 'feel' well. The best ideas in the world must be tailored to the total design. This is quite different from a book with continuous text, and pictures introduced on an occasional basis."1 Newhall and Adams, who had worked together on several previous books, aimed with Fiat Lux to produce not a documentary photographic book about the university but rather an expressive, poetic, and personal interpretation. "This is a portrait by an artist rather than an essay by a photojournalist," said one observer.3
The overall thrust of Fiat Lux emphasized the relationship of the University to the people of California, as is evident in the book's opening line: "To look at the University of California is to look at California itself--its land, its people, and their problems--into the civilization rushing towards us from the future. There are few aspects of California . . . with which the University is not concerned." They favored resonant images, rather than spectacular ones; evocative images over those tied to comprehensiveness or making documentary statements. Words and photos were chosen and presented in a way meant to produce a "profound emotional experience," in the words of Newhall.4
Today, the Fiat Lux images and book often produce emotional reactions, and not all of these are positive. Some contemporary observers react to the images quite negatively, finding them disturbing, dystopian, monumental, and uncritical of their modernist and masculinist sensibilities. Others are puzzled by the relative absence of students in the photographs, an absence that was also noted at the time of the book's publication in 1967 when J.R.K. Kantor of The Bancroft Library said, "Fiat Lux is much better than I expected. In fact, it is really impressive in its telling the story of the University's accomplishments as a research institution -- this is good public relations, for it shows the public what it has gotten for what it has paid. I'm afraid, though, that Adams and Mrs. Newhall have managed to overlook the entire student-faculty reality, but perhaps this is not to their taste."5
The question of why there are so few students is an interesting one, and perhaps one answer might be found by reading Clark Kerr's Godkin lectures delivered at Harvard in 1963, the very year he commissioned the Fiat Lux project.6 These lectures also presented what many found to be an unsettling portrait of the undergraduate college experience, especially within the new model of the research university that Kerr termed the "multiversity." Berkeley's Free Speech Movement reinterpreted Kerr's "knowledge industry" as a "knowledge factory," and Mario Savio called upon students to throw their bodies upon the gears of the machine. Interestingly, machines loom large in Adams' rendering of Kerr's University of California from half a century ago. Machines often upstage, entrap and even replace researchers altogether.
While Fiat Lux was, for Adams, a work for hire, can we still see in these images a critical sensibility expressed by the artist? What attitude do these photographs and the text and layout in the book have towards the university? What assumptions about knowledge or learning are represented here? The UC was known in this period for its involvement in mass public education, big agriculture and defense. How are these aspects represented in Fiat Lux? How might your own portrait of the future of the University of California differ from what Adams and Newhall have presented? We are only half way into the century they were asked to imagine. Should we, at this moment, imagine our future differently? Are there features of the expansive vision for a public university system represented in this archive--one in which the UC appears, according to Clark Kerr, as the "Yosemite of higher education"--that we believe ought to be preserved and conserved?7 What is your picture of the future? Adams and Newhall dedicated their project to those who will make the future. That's us!
2 Letter from Ansel Adams to Verne Stadtman, January 31, 1967, The Bancroft Library, CU 5.9, box 17, file 1.
3 Memo from Verne Stadtman to UC Vice President Sorensen, February 10, 1967, The Bancroft Library, CU 5.9, box 17, file 3.
4 Letter from Nancy Newhall to Verne Stadtman, March 29, 1967, The Bancroft Library, CU 5.9, box 17, file 3.
5 Memo from J.R.K. Kanto, University Archives, The Bancroft Library, to Verne Stadtman, December 15, 1967, The Bancroft Library, CU 5.9, box 17, file 4.
6 These lectures were later published as The Uses of the University, Fifth Edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001 (originally published 1963).
7 Quoted in Melinda Wortz, Ansel Adams: Fiat Lux, The Premier Exhibition of Photographs of the University of California, Irvine: University of California, 1990, p. 11.
Original Jacket Copy
The creators of this distinguished volume are well known to those who love and admire photography. Californians and conservationists are particularly familiar with them because of their successful collaboration on such books as Death Valley, 1954, The Pageant of History in Northern California, 1954, Yosemite Valley, 1959, and This is the American Earth, 1960.
Biographies of the Artists
ANSEL ADAMS, master photographer, is one half of this remarkable partnership. Created by other men, pictures may speak 1,000 words: by Ansel Adams they sing songs. That may be no accident, for, in his youth, Adams studied the piano and aspired to a concert career. But his interest in photography, begun at the age of 14, trained under the tutelage of a San Francisco photo-finisher, and inspired by a warm acquaintance with famous California artists, poets, and photographers, eventually won out as the dominant pursuit in his career. Another life-long interest, mountaineering and conservation, gave his photography much of its characteristic subject matter and point of view. A portfolio on Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, launched his career as a photographer in 1927 and has been followed by an imposing list of exhibitions, books, and portfolios that have appeared with regularity to the present time. His "straight" or pure photography techniques are shared with other photographers in his own books on the art and in classes and lectures throughout the country. He founded the first department of photography in the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, affiliated with the University of California.
NANCY NEWHALL, trained as a painter, became interested in photography and photographers after her marriage to Beaumont Newhall in 1936. After two years of research for a biography of Alfred Stieglitz in 1941-42, and three more as acting curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she became aware of the new dimension that could be achieved when words and images are, in her words, "conceived together in synesthetic sequence" for books and exhibits. She concluded that selection, arrangement, and textual amplification of photographs, while influenced by the artist whose work is presented, constitute creative expression of a form that is undoubtedly an art in itself. With this insight she has collaborated with Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Edward Weston and other photographers, to produce memorable volumes.
ADRIAN WILSON, designer and typographer, entered the graphic arts through the stage door, printing extraordinary posters and programs for San Francisco's post-war theaters. Limited editions of fine books soon followed, as well as commissions for book designs from the University of California Press. In 1958 he wrote, printed and published widely acclaimed Printing for Theater. After a year's sojourn to Europe studying the work and methods of leading designers and printers, he established his Tuscany Alley book design studio on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. From it have emerged award-winning pictorial and art books, scholarly texts, cookbooks, corporate reports, bibliophile editions, etc. He has also taught at the University of California School of Librarianship and at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Did thy know the world would change as much as it did? Was their vision overly optimistic? Are the things they thought important back then (to future success) still relevant?
Berkeley Institute of Design seminar
1) 1964 looks too much like 2012; 2) Today's UC is people--lot's of people; 3) Not a classroom to be seen?
All UC Faculty Conference
Our panel of faculty judges has selected two winners for November's Fiat Lux Remix contest: Pauline Autet and Daniel Hogan.
Pauline's piece is a booklet, "A Call to Care," that combines... read more

First prize goes to Everto Gutierrez, for his photo "Field Day," which evokes Ansel Adams' Professor Stebbins Field Trip images in a complicated way. Everto has won a $150 gift card to the Cal... read more

In this video (http://youtu.be/bjvCZvq6mnI) Ansel Adams discusses the culmination of the FIAT LUX photographic book which went into production in January... read more