"I LOVE SHADOWS, and I love haze!" Washburn announced the next day as I walked through the front door of his apartment. The hallway was dimly lit, and he had lunged out of nowhere, jabbing a finger in my chest. No "Good morning" or "How do you do?" "The early-morning haze is what makes it a good picture," he explained, directing my eyes to a framed print of corniced ridges he'd titled Sunrise, Aiguille du Midi. "I was 19 when I did that picture, and I think it may be my best!"

Moving into the living room, we were joined by Barbara, who'd just turned 90 and had carefully styled hair and bold red lips. An avid adventurer in her own right—she was the first

Whatever the task, Washburn has been in control, the man in charge. Nothing about him or the way his life has unfolded seems accidental. Call it certitude. Call it fate—a life of constantly pushing forward.

woman to summit Mount McKinley, in 1947—Barbara accompanied Washburn on many of his mapping projects. Anybody who has met her knows immediately this is a 50-50 deal. While Washburn may have lost a step or two over the years, Barbara's mind is as agile as ever.

I assured him I wasn't going to ask about what it was like to lead expeditions or make maps. All I wanted to discuss was his relationship to photography—starting with his 40-year friendship with Ansel Adams, whom he met through the Sierra Club in the thirties. But suddenly he leaped up, distracted, and rushed into his office to grab an eight-by-ten resin-coated proof print. "This is a picture somebody took from a U-2 spy plane," he said, thrusting the photograph at me. "This is Mount McKinley taken from 68,000 feet. To me, it's a really thrilling picture!"

"Now, Brad, just answer his questions," Barbara said. She looked at me. "It's not easy keeping him on track."

"Barbara and I were invited to Ansel's 80th birthday party in Carmel," said Washburn, obliging. "We were two of eight people seated at the head table with Ansel. We'd never done anything like that before—travel all that way for a birthday party. I loved Ansel because of the real perfection in what he did."

"Did you learn from him?" I asked.

"He taught me to expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights."

I asked him if he'd read any of Adams's how-to books on exposure, development, and printing.

"No."

"Did you ever subscribe to photography magazines?"

"No."

"Did you collect books of photographs by other photographers?"

"No."

"Do you know the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson?"

"I don't know anything about him."

Here, then, was the disconnect. Washburn was a friend of Ansel Adams; he'd known the inventor of the Polaroid process, Edwin Land, and Harold "Doc" Edgerton, who pioneered stop-action strobe photography. He'd been blessed with enormous natural talent, had access to a community of photographers who were practicing the craft at its highest level, and had been included in a 1963 exhibition of American landscape photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art. ("I thought his work achieved a very high standard of artistic power," says John Szarkowski, MoMA's former director of photography.) Yet all these years later, so few people in the world of photography know him or his work. Why?

For starters, he's been busy. In addition to his many mapping expeditions, he spent nearly three years working for the Army during World War II, testing equipment in extreme conditions in Alaska. He and Barbara raised three children. And over the course of 40 years, he turned Boston's stodgy New England Museum of Natural History into the dynamic, hands-on Museum of Science.

There has also been unfinished work to do. Soon after meeting Decanaes in 1990, Washburn showed him his portfolio. Though Washburn had exposed a stockpile of more than 15,000 negatives, he had but a handful of prints, few of which were exhibition-quality. "Is this all you have?" Decanaes asked. "You think I'm going to pay for prints only to put them in boxes?" Washburn responded. In the marketplace, the provenance of the print is like a purebred stallion's bloodline, its traceable history. If a print was made close to when the photographer snapped the picture, it's considered more valuable than a print made years later. If the photographer made the print—rather than a lab—better still; likewise if it was signed and dated, numbered or limited.

Together Washburn and Decanaes identified about 1,400 negatives for possible printing. Somewhere around 300 different images have been printed on traditional silver gelatin paper thus far, in sizes ranging from eight-by-ten to 20-by-24. There are about 3,000 signed, exhibition-quality Washburn prints of these 300-odd pictures in the Panopticon inventory, the sum of which represents the future of Washburn's collectibility. And then there are his big digital images, created by scanning large-format negatives and printing them with archival inks on acid-free paper using ink-jet printers. The jury's still out on how well these new inks will age, but there is no doubt that this technology is made to order for Washburn mountain photography. The clarity—you can see the fissures in the rocks, the texture of the snow—is captivating. And because ink-jet printing can remove scratches from field-worn negatives, the images appear as pristine as they must have looked to Washburn's naked eye at the time of exposure.

"Although Brad pooh-poohs himself as an artist, if you look at his prints you realize they're all full-frame and uncropped," says Decanaes. "He has an uncanny instinct for composition. These are difficult prints to walk by."