Bill Turnage — ran Wilderness Society, boosted Ansel Adams
Bill Turnage, a former president of the Wilderness Society who also became a force in photography through his control of Ansel Adams’ publishing rights, died Sunday at his home in Mill Valley.
The cause of death was stomach and esophageal cancer, said his brother, Robert Turnage. He was 74.
Mr. Turnage was a graduate student running a fellowship program at Yale College in 1970 when he invited the famed California nature photographer to the campus to give a week of lectures. The two got along so well that Adams later invited Mr. Turnage to move to Carmel and manage his business affairs.
This was the start of a relationship that was to veer from management into environmental advocacy and help catapult Mr. Turnage into an eight-year term as president of the Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C.
In 1976, though, Adams formed the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust and named Mr. Turnage as managing trustee.
At the time, Adams was still a working photographer who would do anything, including commercial photography. Mr. Turnage put an end to all of that. He was convinced that Adams’ nature photography was as important as any painting and promoted him as an artist.
“In some ways you can say the whole rise of photography as an art form in the contemporary market since the 1970s has to do with Ansel Adams’ rise as a master artist photographer, and that was framed by Bill Turnage,” said Sandra S. Phillips, curator emerita of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “Bill adored Adams as a person and considered him a supreme and essential American artist.
“The integrity of Ansel’s work as we know it now is due to Bill’s tenacious oversight.”
Mr. Turnage was not without controversy. Some said he was too firm in his control over the likeness and images of Adams. He could be litigious in his pursuit of anyone who tried to capitalize off of Adams, who died in 1984.
In one well-publicized case, he sued a California man named Rick Norsigian, who claimed to hold a set of long-lost Adams negatives.
“William A. Turnage’s public and backstage actions over the past three months, in his role as managing trustee of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, have proven nothing short of reprehensible and scandalous,” wrote author and critic A.D. Coleman in an online article. “The time has come to depose him — in the several senses of the word.”
But Mr. Turnage would not be deposed. He would serve Adams or his estate for 40 years, reducing to part time during the eight years he served as president of the Wilderness Society.
When he accepted that job, in 1978, Mr. Turnage took Adams along with him, in effect. In succession, Mr. Turnage arranged meetings between Adams and Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In 1980, Carter awarded Adams the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But Mr. Turnage also had a big impact on the Wilderness Society.
“Bill Turnage transformed the Wilderness Society into a professional, credible and highly effective conservation group,” said Mike Anderson, senior policy analyst for the organization.
Big and loud, Mr. Turnage was a perfect foil for James Watt, the secretary of the interior appointed by Reagan to put federal lands to work in the name of capitalism.
“That was the first time there was such an assault on our lands,” Anderson said. “Bill Turnage was a powerful and relentless critic of James Watt and his policies.”
Watt was hounded out of office in 1983. Mr. Turnage left the Wilderness Society three years later.
William Albert Turnage was born Dec. 9, 1942, in Tucson, and was raised mostly in Washington, D.C.
He graduated from Yale in 1965 and was later enrolled in the Yale School of Law before abruptly switching to the university’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. He became manager of the Chubb Fellowship Program at Yale, and it was in this capacity that he invited Adams to lecture.
Years later, after leaving his position with the Wilderness Society, Mr. Turnage was on a hiking trip in Kitzbuhel, Austria, when he met Annemarie Murauer, manager of a boot shop. He had already been married and divorced twice, but he gave it a third try in 1987.
They moved to Mill Valley, where they were living at the time of his death.
Survivors include his wife; brothers James Turnage of Redmond, Wash., and Robert Turnage of West Sacramento; and sisters Margaret Hebson of Gainesville, Fla., and Diane Keedy of Sonoma.
A memorial service is pending.