American Experience: Ansel Adams

This a very inspirational film for me...I never seem to tire of it. The spokepersons are well chosen and speak in eloquent reverie about Ansel. I find it magical and beautiful - Ansel's spirit is just what the world needs to be reminded of: his relentless affinity to nature and her magnificient-bounty of grace, beauty,harmony and truth - I treasure this work of art and watch it whenever I need to be reminded of what is possible and that "yes" one person can make a difference E.M.

This DVD contains video that was directly copied from the PBS "American Experience" program. You can tell it was not touched up or enhance their fixed or anything else. I suspect that they were not planning on people having 46 inch televisions. The credits in the beginning part of the program are really fuzzy. But when it gets down to talking about Adams he gets down to talk about Adams and many of the photographs mysteriously get sharper. We get so engrossed in the subject matter both Adams and his pictures that we know longer care one way or the other were sharp or not.

My only complaint is that it was in a soundbite form. I don't know who designed the program that but they could have focused on one person or another instead of person A, and B, and C, and a, and B, and c, again and again and so forth so forth so forth. It breaks the continuity of thought.

For me the experience is enhanced because I've been to most of these places several times. I hope to go back again. I've also been intrigued with the mechanics of photography before it became the digital age. I'm now still interested in digital photography. But photography aside by the time that you get to the end of this program you will feel that you've lost your only friend.

This presentation gave me a different way of looking at life and being conservative with what nature has brought us.

American Experience: The Wizard of Photography

This ninety-minute film by Ric Burns, for the public television series "The American Experience", is a thorough documentary on the life of Ansel Adams. Much of Mr. Adams life can be summarized using his own words: "If I feel something strongly, I make a photograph. I do not attempt to explain the feeling."

After a short philosophical prologue, the film details Ansel's awkward childhood years in San Francisco. These years were lived, fortunately, under the benevolent care of a loving father who supported Ansel's twin redeeming passions for piano and photography. A family trip, in 1916, served to introduce Ansel to Yosemite. It was a location that would provide healing inspiration for much of the rest of his adult life.

In 1927, Ansel abandoned the world of piano performance, finding its complex social realities to be ill suited to his keenly introspective nature. In that same year, he finally found the technical means to adequately capture on film his transcendent experience of light. Ansel was now able to accurately convey a sense of his intimate identification with the natural landscape. The first book of his starkly beautiful photography followed within a year's time.

Ansel's significant body of photographic work grew over the years culminating in a 1936 show at Alfred Steglitz's New York City gallery, An American Place. Almost simultaneously with the exhibit, Ansel suffered a nervous breakdown, which partly led to a rediscovery of the value of his ten-year marriage to Virginia Adams.

Starting in the late 1950's, initiatives on the preservation of the natural environment took hold of Mr. Adams attention, for much of the remaining years of his life.

In the year 1979, Ansel Adams was honored by a retrospective of his photographic work at the Museum of Modern Art. He passed from this world in April of 1984, but as this riveting documentary suggests, will long be remembered for capturing on film his quasi-religious spiritual union with the American landscape.