Portrait of the artist as a human being: in a film airing on PBS in April, Ric Burns explores the "quietly extraordinary" life of Ansel Adams - television documentary on life of photographer - Brief Article

Sierra, March-April, 2002 by Reed Mcmanus

Truth be told, nothing really dramatic happened in Ansel Adams's life. And the vaunted Sierra Club leader wasn't all that fiery an activist, either. Even so, filmmaker Ric Burns finds plenty of evidence that the renowned landscape photographer was "heroic" and an "exemplary American."

Burns, writer and director of Ansel Adams, a documentary coproduced with Sierra Club Productions that airs April 21 on PBS, discovered much more than spectacular photographs when he delved into Adams's world. "Ansel believed in beauty," Burns says; the photographer's ceaseless drive to communicate that simple conviction made his life "the most poignant and dramatic in the world." Burns's film explores the meaning of Adams's work through the themes that absorbed him: the fragility of the land, the bond between humans and nature, and the moral obligation we have to future generations.

Ansel Adams's genius was fashioned in an extraordinary time. The American frontier had officially "closed" just a dozen years before his birth in San Francisco in 1902. By then, a growing number of Americans considered the culture of conquest no longer relevant; nature could be revered, not merely dominated. The first of many childhood trips to Yosemite Valley transformed Adams "like Paul on the road to Damascus, Burns says, and his parents serendipitous gift of a Kodak Box Brownie camera gave him the means to record and express his inner experiences of nature.

According to Burns, one of the best distillations of Ansel Adams isn't a photograph, but a letter Adams wrote to fellow photographer Cedric Wright in 1937 after he "saw a big thundercloud moving down over Half Dome ... so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me. Adams articulates a blueprint for his artistry that, Burns says, describes nothing less than "the essence of real living": "Art is the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the re-creation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these."

Though Adams's photographs are not explicitly political (in fact, in his early career Adams was castigated by fellow Depression-era photographers for focusing too much on "rocks and trees"), Burns says that the authentic expression of a human being is itself political. He points to Adams's photographs of the Japanese-American internment camp at Manzanar in California during World War II: Choosing not to portray debased conditions, Adams instead showed internees carefully tilling their fields with the escarpment of the eastern Sierra looming behind them--"creating beauty, order, and meaning under the harshest conditions."

Adams's environmental work flowed from his passion for the redemptive power of wilderness. When he lobbied Congress in the late 1930s to create Kings Canyon National Park, his most effective tool was a deeply personal photographic tribute he had made several years earlier to honor the life of Club leader Walter Starr's son, who had died in a mountaineering accident. (When Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes showed the book to Franklin Roosevelt, the president purloined Ickes's only copy; the national park was designated in 1940.)

Admittedly, Burns says, even the young Adams was "an environmentalist without already knowing it." He was acutely aware of how wilderness "put humans in touch with the deeper side of creation" and how easily the spirit of wilderness could be shattered by roads, clearcuts, and telephone lines. By the 1950s and '60s, Burns says, "Ansel's passions had become America's imperatives" and the purist had become an engaged citizen.

The best news is that anyone can follow Adams's "quietly extraordinary" example, Burns says, "engaging the world with openness and fierceness of response." Burns, whose documentary portfolio includes the nine-episode, Emmy award-winning opus New York, the six-hour The Way West, and The Donner Party, hopes that his latest work will be more powerful for having followed the "inner drama" of Adams's life. "I've learned a simple, quiet confidence," Burns says. "If it's real, it doesn't have to shout."