Ansel Adams (2002)
Sierra Club Productions, Steeplechase Films

Description

American Experience presents Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film, written and directed by Ric Burns and co-produced by Sierra Club Productions and Steeplechase Films. For the centennial of the artist's birth, Burns has created an elegant, moving, and lyrical portrait of this quintessentially American photographer. The documentary weaves together archival footage, photographic images, dramatic readings of the artist's own writing, and interviews with leading photographers, historians, curators, naturalists, as well as Adams's family, friends, and colleagues, to tell the story of a man who was at once a visionary photographer, a pioneer in photographic technique, and an ardent crusader for the cause of environmentalism.

Tags

Environment, Photography, America, Yosemite National Park

Collected reviews and ratings

10 DVD Movie Guide | David Williams

Ric Burns’ Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film amazingly captures the spirit and intensity of a man who understood better than most the spiritual connection and indivisible bond between man and nature. To my knowledge, there’s not a better documentary available on Ansel Adams and his work and you’d be hard pressed to convince me that anyone could do it better than Ric Burns anyway.
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10 The Cinema Laser

ANSEL ADAMS is a fascinating portrait of one of the greatest still photographers of the twentieth century. Watching this film made me want to run out and acquire some of Adams’ work in both book and art print form.
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9.2 digitallyobsessed.com | Jon Danziger

... he was far more than someone who made pretty pictures of mountains, and Ric Burns' fine documentary, now on DVD as part of PBS's American Experience series, is an opportunity to revisit some of Adams' work, and to situate him more solidly in his time and place.
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8.0 The Documentary Site | Heather McIntosh

The film tries to be poetic in its homage to Ansel Adams [...] with the migrating camera, the plethora of voices, and the aural dramatizations. Combine this style with a heavy music score, and the end result is a pretty standard treatment of an amazing subject in a pretty standard film.
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8.0 DVD Verdict | Dezhda Mountz

This documentary is extremely thorough. Pictures of his home, movies of his wife Virginia, behind-the-scenes shots of Adams at work, and especially films of the young Adams appear to be rare looks at his life. We get more than the typical still photos of baby pictures, and that is most welcome, as to give a fascinating biography of a photographer, moving image evidence of his life and times add interest to the static shots of his work.
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8.0 Amazon user reviews

With great sensitivity to Adams's process, specifically how he achieved the distinctive look of his photos, Burns handles his subject with understated reverence, profiling the artist-as-environmentalist.
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