his review is actually a DVD review. However, since the program on the DVD was produced and originally shown on TV, it is best filed in this section of the reviews.

The Ansel Adams episode of PBS' American Experience series.  I have never reviewed a TV show before, but since this one was 100 minutes long, expertly-produced, and is basically a documentary about one person, it fits well enough with my documentary rating scale, previously used only for the F9/11 review.

Ansel Adams, on PBS' American Experience
Holds Your Interest: 7
Presents/Explains the Issue Clearly: 7
Contains New Information: 7
Replayability: 6
Is Entertaining: 8
Overall: 7

I knew something about Ansel Adams (he's one of the most famous photographers ever, if you're wondering) and is mostly famous for his nature photography. His best work was done in the years around 1920-40, and he was the first to extensively document much of the wilderness of the American West, especially the Yosemite Valley National Park. He's also famous as an early environmentalist, and his fame, lobbying efforts, and ground-breaking photography had a lot to do with convincing congress to set aside some of the major tracts of land for national parks. And yes, I know much of this from the biography.

What I liked about the feature is that it concentrated on the enduring legacy of his work, with time spent on his personal life, but mostly as it related to and inspired his work. We found out that he was a very energetic, unfocused kid who couldn't sit still; the type that parents drug into submission these days. Fortunately for Ansel, and the history of photography, he came along decades before Ritalin, and had a very understanding father, who pulled him out of school when he was 12 and let him do his own thing. Dad hired tutors, taught the kid himself, and did all he could to expose Ansel to cultural events, knowing that the boy would fix on something demanding enough to hold his attention sooner or later. Ansel did, first on the piano, which he played for years and intended to be a professional concert pianist well into his 20s. He discovered the joys of the untamed outdoors in his teens, and got his first camera on a family visit to Yosemite, and was immediately fascinated by it, even though he didn't give any serious thought to being a professional photographer until many years later.

The information about his work was extensive, with lots of long, slow looks at his best photographs, information about how some of them were taken, discussion of how his career got going, who his early backers were, and all of that tied in with his early efforts at conservation and environmentalism. The National Park Service was new, land was just being set aside for National Parks, and Ansel was one of the first to document some of the most beautiful wild lands in the American West. In fact, his photos were instrumental in building public and congressional support for more national parks, and he was the first well known environmentalist, as that term came into existence in the middle of the 20th century. In the years after WWII, as highways and cars brought all of the United States into each reach, few people really gave any thought to if or why we should set aside some land to remain unspoiled. The documentary phrased it in interesting fashion, comparing America to Europe, and pointing out that it was in Ansel's day that people really had to face the concept of enduring open, wild space, and what that meant. Did we want to build and explore and develop almost everything, as Europe had done, or did we want to leave some areas of Western America in a truly wild state?

The documentary is studded with interviews with his kids and other people who knew him, modern art experts who comment on his work, biographers who discuss his often-troubled life, and so on. It's well balanced, keeps moving, and has a fascinating figure as the focus. I find a lot of resonance with Ansel's life, professionally. He came late to photography, bucked all the trends of the day to work in his own style, slowly gained skill and recognition, and eventually won over some of the most influential people in the art world. He even gained widespread fame and at last some measure of financial reward, though he had to wait until he was in his 70s to actually become famous. I love the stories of artists who stick to their own style, work to buck the system, and eventually triumph over all of their hide-bound detractors.  Analyze the would-be parallels to my own life goals there all you wish.

When Ansel began working, in the 1920s, the style of the day was a sort of soft focus photography, like an oil painting. This was especially true for nature photos, and Ansel used that for a time before moving to the crisp, detailed B/W he grew famous for. Photography was hardly considered an art at that time either, and his were some of the first gallery-exhibited works to draw widespread attention to the art form. Arthur Stieglitz, a famous photographer and art expert with his own gallery in NYC, was one of Ansel's first backers. On Ansel's second visit to NYC, Stieglitz, one of Ansel's heroes, was looking through Ansel's portfolio. He looked through the entire thing, twice, silently turning the pages, and then closed it, turned to Ansel, and said, "This is some of the finest photography I have ever seen."

The documentary wasn't perfect; I'd have liked to learn more about the changes in the field of photography over time, how it went from a hobby to a legitimate form of art, how Ansel struggled for recognition against the conventional photographic wisdom of the time, etc.  I'd also have liked to hear some other opinions on his personal life; he loved his wife and they had two kids, but he was constantly gone for months at a time on photography trips, he was in the field when she gave birth to both of their children, and he had an intense (though possibly non-sexual) love affair with a much younger woman he hired as an assistant when he was in his early 40s, and basically had a nervous breakdown afterwards due to guilt and tension over being torn between two women and a huge art show he was working frantically to prepare for. The documentary presented the information, but was entirely neutral about it, and there was nothing from his wife or the other woman about how they felt.

I would also have liked more information about how he created his art. There was a bit about how he first decided to try tinting the negatives to make the sky so dark and the ground so light, and lots about how he spent his whole life trying to recapture the perfect silvery light he'd seen once in his teens while hiking at dawn, but very little about what others thought of his initial alterations on reality. They worked tremendously well, as his photographs testify, but how were they received at the time? Was it considered sacrilege to tweak and modify natural light as he did? What did other famous photographers think at the time?

Overall though, it was a very interesting and informative documentary/biography, and that's about all you can ask.

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