Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film, by Ric Burns, 2002, 100’
Introduction by Urs Stahel, curator of the MAST Collection and PhotoGallery
Saturday 28 October 2017
Ansel Adams first visited the Yosemite National Park in 1916. He was 14. There, he started taking pictures of it with his brand new Kodak Brownie box camera and never really stopped, turning it into his all-time favourite subject. A visually mesmerizing retrospective of Adams’s career, the film examines the inspirations and intentions of an artist who transcended the medium to become an American folk hero. Through the memories of curators, writers, family, and Adams’s own letters, the documentary explores the themes that absorbed him throughout his career: the beauty and fragility of “the American earth,” the inseparable bond between man and nature, and the moral obligations that the present owes to the future. Timed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ansel Adams’s birth, the film is an elegant, moving and lyrical portrait of one of the most eloquent and quintessentially American photographers, a man who helped transfer the meaning of wilderness and what people thought about it.
