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Photographer Ansel Adams and his wife, Virginia, have endowed a permanent staff position in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, to be known as the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellowship. The announcement of the $250,000 endowment was made March 6 at the Adams home in Carmel, Calif., to a small gathering of friends and associates. It was repeated the same evening at a dinner in honor of Adams’s 75th birthday, given by William and Andrea Turnage and attended by some 80 patrons, curators, artists, and others from the photographic community. The event coincided with the tenth anniversary meeting of the board of trustees of the Friends of Photography, the Carmel organization founded by Adams and others in June 1967.

The fellowship provides for a three year appointment in the MOMA department of photography, with extensions possible to a total of not more than five years, according to Adams’s business manager, William Turnage. He said that the position was intended for “a young person entering his or her first full-time job in museum work.” The Newhall Fellow will be selected by John Szarkowski, director of the photography department at MOMA, Turnage said, and will enter the department at the Curatorial Assistant level.

Confirming Turnage’s outline of the fellowship, Szarkowski told Afterimage: “We conceive of it as a job for brand-new professionals.” The director was enthusiastic about the gift. “I think this is an absolutely glorious, imaginative, generous, original kind of way for a working artist to express faith in the future of his own medium,” he said in a telephone interview. “It will be a tremendous opportunity for a whole series of young professionals, over the years, to work with a great collection.”

Szarkowski said that he plans to announce the availability of the position within the next few weeks, and expects to make the appointment in the fall. Asked what sort of credentials he would be looking for, he said that while the first appointee would most likely be someone with an academic background in art history, this would not necessarily be the case. “I want to keep as much flexibility as I can,” he said.

Details on the “charitable remainder trust” set up by Ansel and Virginia Adams to finance the fellowship were provided by William Turnage, who explained that $250,000 in securities would be placed in an irrevocable trust with MOMA as beneficiary and Adams’s Los Angeles attorney as executor. During his life, Adams will get a yearly dividend of $12,500, which he has pledged to donate to the museum to pay the salary of the Newhall Fellow. Upon Adams’s death, the principal goes to the museum to support the program.

Asked why Adams had chosen the Modern to receive his gift, Turnage said that it was “largely for sentimental reasons.” “The fact that Ansel, David McAlpin, and Beaumont Newhall were the founding committee for the department had a lot to do with it,” he said.

Turnage also pointed to “the impact that department has had on the world,” the museum’s New York location which makes it more accessible than some other museums and makes it a point of focus for people interested in photography, the fact that Beaumont Newhall has “a strong affinity for and some pride in” the department he once headed, and “Ansel’s tremendous respect for John Szarkowski.”

By endowing a research position, Turnage said, Adams hopes to stimulate other people to think along similar lines. He pointed out that while it may be difficult to get people to help build a collection, it is even harder to get them to help preserve one. “People want to give works of art, if they give something to a museum,” he said. “They can get a tax deduction at the current market value of a work, and if it’s appreciated since they bought it, there’s an advantage. But also, there’s a certain amount of ego satisfaction to having your name attached to a work—for it to say ‘gift of so-and-so.'”

As John Szarkowski said of the endowment: “It is the most valuable kind of gift any museum could receive.”