Ruth Leon recommends… Ansel Adams – A Documentary Film

Ansel Adams – A Documentary Film

 I don’t know much about the art of photography, always having preferred painting, but even I know that Ansel Adams was the acknowledged master of the art.
 
Here is a documentary about the man and his life but, more significantly, about the landscapes in the High Sierras and Yosemite National Park that inspired him and which were the subject of his astonishing photographs.
 
Blessed with a father who understood and encouraged this rather odd boy who couldn’t learn anything at school but who, from an early age, could see the world in ways that are denied the rest of us, and, later, with a wife who accepted uncomplainingly his obsession with the mountains and valleys of the West, he flourished.
 
Today, undoubtedly he would have been diagnosed as dyslexic and probably neuro-atypical or autistic. But those diagnoses didn’t exist in the early years of the 20th century and he was lucky they didn’t because he was able to develop as an artist with his unique vision untrammelled.
 
At first he thought to be a concert pianist and was, from all accounts, talented enough to make a career of music, but he was torn between his settled life as a musician with his family in San Francisco and the pull of the landscapes which compelled him into remote places to make photographs which amaze and move us in ways we don’t understand.
 
This film is often slow, taking its time with its display of his photographs juxtaposed with the places where they were made, but are enlivened by interviews with Adams’ biographer, editor, and other experts who provide background and depth to his story.
 
It took me a while to get into Ansel Adams: a Documentary Film, but, once I did, I was hooked.

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