Robert Adams
Adams’s images were first widely exhibited 20 years ago, at the influential “New Topographics” show at Rochester’s George Eastman House in 1975. These were minimalist studies of suburban tract houses around Denver, near where he lives. With their balanced large-format compositions and full scale of grays, they echo the neutral promotions of architectural photography but deliver a scathing rebuke of these bland emblems of conformity: the West is no place for this, they suggest–it deserves better. (Adams’s 1970 book White Churches of the Plains had shown a better way.) His 1984 book Our Lives, Our Children intimates the damage done to the region by his neighbor, the Rocky Flats nuclear power plant, and many, many other of his photographs show the changes “civilization” has worked on the land, from pollution to the landscaping of highways.
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From the outset Adams’s critique of land misuse has been coupled with a deflation of the grand style of American landscape photography. His polite but pointed attack has been aimed primarily at Ansel Adams, who toward the end of his career was also deeply involved in environmental causes, which in those days consisted of conservation or preservation: setting aside national parks as exceptional samples seemed a sufficient goal. To this end Ansel Adams lent his imagery and his voice to the Sierra Club, a favor Eliot Porter later repeated for the Audubon Society.
Almost as scarce as wilderness in Adams’s photographs is a praiseworthy human relationship to the land–though one suspects photography is that for him. The lone churches on the prairie he recorded are another exception. In his writings he reveres Native Americans but skirts their lesson: that America has never been uninhabited. Though Adams is the photographer of inhabited nature, he still seems to see this state as a tragic contradiction. Yet to assert the sacredness of land regardless of human connection is futile: sacredness usually describes a relationship between people and place. And while industrial civilization’s ferocious depredation of the land threatens to obscure this sacred relationship entirely, so does the concept of “wilderness”–a concept uniquely possible in America, with its fiction of a vacant prehistoric land. Though Adams rejects this idea in the work of his namesake Ansel, he implicitly embraces it in his account of the lost Eden of the West. He cannot avoid setting his compass by such Protestant distinctions.
One senses that these meditative images are secondary to the concentration they required. Walking, like photographing, is a model for that concentration, and these pictures seem to invite viewers to accompany Adams on his walks. The camera perambulates about its subjects: nondescript trees and telephone poles, distant factories and tract houses, fresh snow and wild flowers. Walking decenters viewing, and these images barely have subjects at all–which is at once their disappointment and their genius. Their subject is looking, no matter how mundane the scene, looking until form is revealed where it seems least likely. Wright Morris, another writing photographer, would call this an exercise in “real losses and imaginary gains.”
At their best, these groupings erode expectations of what constitutes a photographic subject, recalling that the walker’s field of vision is broader than the camera’s and less distinctly framed. Adams’s eye wanders to more than can be reproduced, so that one senses the absent as well. But despite the uneventful series of images, only a handful of which stand out, and the images recording places never fully apparent, Adams manages to imply the richness of place. These images only begin their work in the gallery: although few are individually memorable, their quiet angles persist, consoling with their gift of frames to support a world evacuated of purity. Adams has transposed his awareness of the loss of pristine landscapes in the American West to an attack on those traditions of photographic framing that have made the landscape image a pristine space apart.
