Review: TAD'S EMERGING WORLD – GLEN CANYON EXPOSED at Sedona International Film Festival

The late Tad Nichols expressed his life-long love of the outdoors through the art of photography. A student of luminaries like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Brett Weston, he became famous for his chronicling of the natural beauties of the Southwest, most notably Glen Canyon, Arizona.

His book, Glen Canyon: Images of a Lost World, Photographs and Recollections, has been hailed as a classic visual history of Glen Canyon before it was submerged by the waters of Lake Powell. 

Conservation photographer, Dawn Kish, retraces Nichols’s footsteps in what is a moving documentary love letter to him and to the grandeur of the canyon. The short film (20 minutes), TAD’S EMERGING WORLD – GLEN CANYON EXPOSED is Kish’s homage to a place that remains monumental despite being boxed in by a dam and the recreational lake that it created ~ a flooding that drowned archaeology sites, flora, and fauna and that irreversibly altered the habitat. The lake is now at its lowest level in sixty years.

Armed with a Crown Graphic 4x5 camera (the one used by Nichols) and accompanied by fellow photographer, Cierrra Murretta, Kish speaks in quiet and tender tones and poetic notes of awe as she captures the expansive scope of sandstone sculpted by the winds of time and traverses corners of the canyon that had not been visible in Nicholas’s time.

As she navigates the highs and lows of what has been called “America’s lost national park.” she exhibits a reverence for the land that is palpable. There is a quiet intensity in her voice that conveys a large and urgent message about the imperative of conserving and preserving such treasures, lest they be lost to us and future generations forever.

The film is a tenderly told and beautifully filmed portrait of a spectacular topography. It succeeds in evoking a strong spiritual connection with the place and with the spirit of the man to whom Kish speaks with admiration.

TAD’S EMERGING WORLD is one of the featured shorts at this year’s Sedona International Film Festival and will be screened at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on Thursday, February 29th at 1:10 p.m. and then again at Harkins Theatre 2 on Saturday, March 2nd at 4:10 p.m.

Sedona International Film Festival ~ https://sedonafilmfestival.com/ ~ 2030 W. State Route 89A, Suite A-3, Sedona, AZ ~ 928-282-1177

Photo credit to Kish and Murretta

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