On Robert Adams

“After people live awhile in a place to which they’ve laid waste, it gets to be easy to hate a great many things. Including themselves. And anything green that tries to rise again.”

Robert Adams

“There is another world and it is in this one.”

Paul Éluard

There have been few post-war American photographers, if any, who have both written about and photographed the transformation of this country’s landscape by suburban development and commercial enterprise with as much sorrow and anger as Robert Adams. Though the specific geographical focus for Adams has been the American West, from the prairies and plains of Colorado and Missouri, to the dense and complex forests of Oregon and the greater Pacific Northwest, the straightforward and unadorned manner of description in his photographs has allowed the full force of their collective argument to be extended to the rest of this country, and even, it must be said, to anywhere else that has seen the landscape spoiled or degraded as the result of organized social activity. Being a critical observer of how the landscape has been transformed under the banner of historical progress or economic gain, or by real estate speculation or resource extraction, is not in itself a mark of distinction or singularity, nor is it an indication to the viewer or critic that the age in question is necessarily new or different from those preceding it or those which came after. Rather, what has distinguished Adams’ perspective from those of his aesthetic predecessors as well as from his contemporaries – those who also looked askance at the state of the American landscape in the 1970s and onward – has been his steadfast insistence that pessimism, while justifiable, must assiduously be resisted, and that there is something to be found – pursued even – in the landscape that can sustain us no matter the ruinous mess that may surround it.

For as long as he has made photographs that show, at the very least, a casual disregard for the land, and at worst an open disdain for it, Adams has also utilized a morally weighted vocabulary in writings that preface his books and comment on the work of many others. To think in the style of Adams is to use words like hope and courage, redemption and beauty, and to do so without a trace of sheepishness or sarcasm. Instead, those words are made essential and urgent, solid as stone. Adams uses them to affirm art and our experience with it as a counterweight to the difficulty of bearing witness to and taking part in all that we deem wrong in the world, from imperial wars and environmental destruction to local acts of moral turpitude and corruption. To see as Adams does is to find structure and coherence in the landscape rife with social contradiction, something he has described rather simply as “an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important.” Though essentially a way of describing a successful and complex composition, for Adams this ability to observe wholeness within a landscape, and to then render it photographically, is made possible by the material and metaphoric qualities of light, which, in the high-altitude air of Colorado, for example, is rendered as pure illuminance in his pictures, capable of making even the most shoddy constructions or litter strewn sidewalks into sites of original beauty.

Though much had already been written about Adams’ work, it was not until Sarah Greenough’s essay in the exhibition catalog for American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams, published in 2022, that the importance of spirituality and faith, as underlying concepts, were given their due within the larger thematic landscape of his work, whether by camera or by pen. Reading that essay, and then returning to Adams’ books and writings, allowed me to see clearly for perhaps the first time just how ethically focused – if also seemingly passé – the tone of his work so regularly is. For as often as he shows us the ill effects of our interventions into the landscape, so too does he offer the possibility of, as he might say, becoming reconciled to those facts rather than being defeated by them. Drawing inspiration from Greenough’s essay (along with other perceptive critics of his work), and using three of Adams’ books, each recently republished in slightly revised and expanded editions from Steidl, I hope to offer some meaningful reflections on his art, and to look with special emphasis at the ways he has tried to structure his photographs and his books around a principle of unity both aesthetic and, as we shall see, ethical in equal measure. The persistence of that quality, despite the risk of it slipping into moralism or sentimentality, or simply failing to persuade, makes his work ever relevant, if not inexhaustible.

First published in 1999, Eden brought together 17 pictures that Adams made in 1968 in a small area south of Colorado Springs called Eden (the edition from Steidl slightly enlarges that sequence to 21 pictures). In the book’s epigraph Adams summarily lists what we might assume his pictures will describe: “To the east of the interstate highway that bisects [Eden] are railroad tracks, gas tanks, and a prefabricated metal shed. To the west, a roadhouse (closed), a military salvage lot, a car-wrecking yard, and the Westland truck stop. Extending beyond along the freeway are billboards advertising whiskey, real estate, and ice.” Writing as though he were setting out to survey and then catalog this seemingly nondescript parcel of land, the pictures he made here show something altogether different in tone and emphasis, pictures which can perhaps be understood as precursors to what The New West would express as a fully realized vision just six years later.

Eden utilizes a relatively linear structure for its sequence: the first picture shows Adams working at a time that shadows suggest is close to high noon, and the pictures that follow allow us to track the passing hours and available light into the early evening, eventually concluding with night having quieted the land completely. With the sun most at his disposal Adams traversed either side of the interstate that ran through Eden, showing us distant mountains framing the truckstop, patches of dirt and shrubs, a row of power lines stretching far beyond the signs nearest to us advertising gas and food. In these pictures Adams moves around the interstate on foot, using it as a way of bisecting his compositions to emphasize light and shade, or more often as a way of contrasting the vast openness of this landscape with the comparatively meager attempt by some to establish themselves there with permanence. Though I do not have the earlier printing of this book to compare with Steidl’s, this edition is printed on a paper with a texture that can feel close to smoothed sandpaper. This stock effectively softens the tonality from the bottom through the middle of the range, such that the blacks remain just shy of being absolute, and the grays read thin where we might otherwise expect them denser – they seem fully permeated by the high-altitude light.

What these pictures try to express, and what Adams tries to create through sequence, is something like a harmonic balance between Eden’s built environment and the landscape that surrounds it. The brilliant sunlight that suffuses his prints, and the soft humming glow that remains of it once night has fallen, does more than describe the conditions of the place he worked in. Beyond that, the light in these pictures (and in those to come) functions as the material that binds all into one; it is the unifying substance that animates, without prejudice, whatever has been arranged in front of his camera. For Adams, it is light, and specifically the light he encountered in Colorado, that holds the capacity to “redeem” what has already been degraded. In Eden we can see him working through this process and trying to refine his focus; we can sense, I think, that he is struggling to resolve the disjunction between the land and our presence in it, or that he remains unsure of the beauty that may still be witnessed there in spite of our actions.

It is hardly the case, though, that in later work Adams simply idealizes the landscape or willfully ignores the evidence of our misdeeds. Instead, what the best of his pictures contain is what I can only describe as a form of dialectical seeing that effectively becomes a mode of thinking as well. In pictures from The New West, From the Missouri West, and Los Angeles Spring, among other books, Adams uses the frame to wrestle together what has been ruined along with what might sustain us in the face of that realization, and moreover we come to see that the one is no longer separable from the other – that our appreciation of and even love for the landscape can no longer be disentangled from an awareness that we too bear some measure of responsibility for its care. We might consider these qualities in close relation to what Lewis Baltz called the “complex moralism” of Adams’ work. In writing about The New West, Baltz argued that it was the literal distance Adams leaves between himself and the explicit subject of his work (suburban strip development) that then allows for the the moral tone of his work to assume a kind of distance, or “disengaged quality”, as well. Adams can direct our focus to the squalor in these views without delighting in their “Pop vulgarity”, what someone like Ed Ruscha, who was also interested in suburban development taking place across the American West, would have emphasized more of. There is a moral position taken up in these pictures, that much is clear, but rarely if ever does Adams seem to preach to or admonish us. Instead, his project is more constructively oriented: he is working to replace the image of the American West inherited from the likes of Ansel Adams (which was in its own way an argument for the preservation of America’s national parks in particular and its natural resources and diversity in general), with one that would, by comparison, seem less idealized and instead more “realistic” (here we can understand the “realism” of the later Adams existing inasmuch as he did not seek to keep out of frame those details which attest to human intervention, error, or carelessness).

Though the pictures in Eden are what we can label as “early work”, the sequence they first formed is decidedly not, made as it was when Adams was already in his 60s. No such discrepancy is present in Summer Nights, Walking, which was first published by Aperture in 1985 with pictures that Adams had just recently made over a six-year period, from 1976-82. A classic in the genre of night photography, whether urban, rural, or suburban in focus, Summer Nights still occupies a unique place within Adams’ career. In no other book that I am aware of does he work without some semblance of the midday light that functioned like a kind of magic for him in Colorado and the American West more generally. Instead, moonlight is what he uses most in these pictures, often accompanied by what was available to him on sidewalks and highways, or what filtered out of a living room or kitchen window. Sometimes, he seems to have coaxed out of dusk what little light remained, and the skies he describes then are laced with charcoal, silver, and gray, all mixing together into a single, complex gradient.

The significant alteration to Summer Nights happened in 2009 when it was first expanded and reprinted by Aperture. Though I do not have the first edition from 1985, I do have the one from 2009, and other than the slightly larger size of the newest printing from Steidl along with what are, to my mind, barely noticeable or felt changes to the edit and the sequence, the printing in both books is exceptional and differences are hard to notice without straining to do so. In the epigraph to the 2009 edition, which has been retained, Adams remarked that in the 1985 edition he pursued through the edit and the sequence what he called the “beauty and peace” of summer evenings that he recalled from childhood. If instead a wider variety of pictures had been used, he then suggested, the result would have been closer to his actual experience of making the work, and to one of “wonder, anxiety, and stillness”. The rosy depiction of nighttime that he felt “duty bound” to present in that first outing was then expanded to include pictures that are at least somewhat ambiguous in tone and feeling, those which use absolute darkness to suggest something other than calm and quiet, something ominous and, at times, close to danger.

Without an unobstructed sun shining down on the neighborhoods, rivers, and fields of the Colorado Front Range that Adams walked through to make these pictures, one might think there would be less evidence of mistreatment and carelessness. Though that would be mistaken, the difference here is one of frequency rather than attention. Adams frames litter and forgotten patches of grass and shrubs just as he shows houses that appear empty if not abandoned altogether. Whereas in previous books dealing with suburban space, such as The New West or Denver, in which pictures such as these might build upon more expansive views of shoddy tract house construction in the shadow of distant hills or mountains, in Summer Nights they have the tone of a mild reproach, as though one could correct the error there and then. What Adams deals with more directly in these pages is isolation and silence, phenomena that, while hardly absent from previous bodies of work, are intensified here by a dark of night that is transformed into a vehicle of suggestion and metaphor. Indeed, it seems a testament to the fluidity of tone in Adams’ pictures that one can see in them an affirmation of suburban solitude along with a critique of it as well. Though he shows us houses and buildings that appear completely separate and alone, such that even a light shining from within does little to dispel a feeling of loneliness, he also shows us stretches of warmly lit neighborhood streets, houses full of memory and present living, flowers that glisten and trees which seem dignified on their own. There is placid beauty here, and one need not strain to see it because Adams has already done so. He has also seen the absence of collective concern and the withering away of communal ties, and he shows us how suburbia, janus-faced, can foster reaction and self-concern.

What is apparent in Summer Nights is that Adams seems to be, on some level, grappling with the contradictions inherent in what he is photographing. The beauty he pursues and so often locates in suburbia or the open plains is by this stage of history inseparable from, and even conditioned by, those very details that introduce the social and historical processes that have in his eyes tarnished the landscape, and with it our moral equilibrium. In other words, one can no longer see the prairie without thinking of the parking lot as well, and by some strange alchemy it is the very proximity of these examples (whether out there in the world or simply in our minds), and more specifically the ways in which they contend with one another, that produces for the prairie a kind of beauty specific to our time, perhaps one that only we can see. Though we may not believe that the suburbanization of America or the clearcutting of its forests are processes that can be interrupted or corrected, at least not within our presently existing political system (at the very least they cannot be reversed), it is against this very absence of an imagined alternative that the aesthetic space of Adams’ photographs can be said to stand, where a resolution to these problems can be approached from another position – one from which, at the very least, we might be able to grasp them as problems or contradictions in the first place. Perhaps this is why in his pictures essential formal devices such as distance, scale, and atmospheric light can so often be read as both liberatory and damning, or as conveyors of an emptiness both physical and spiritual in equal measure. There is rarely an either/or operation at work in Adams’ pictures such as affirmation or critique, beauty or squalor, hope or despair. These categories are fluid and flexible; we are meant to shuttle back and forth between them, seeing how each is true and accurate while also partial, incomplete and ideological.

It is in Los Angeles Spring that the full complexity of Adams’ aesthetic position is articulated, and in that process of articulation we can also grasp just how deep the tension is in his pictures between bitter critique and steadfast affirmation. In the book’s epigraph Adams describes a California at the turn of the twentieth century overflowing with citrus and eucalyptus, oaks and orchards – a California that could be confused for some kind of earthly paradise. By the time Adams was making these pictures in the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, the diminishment of this natural abundance was severe enough that what remained for him to photograph would seem like the ever-fading ruins of a prior civilization. The tone in these pictures is not simply elegiac, however; in them runs a persistent undercurrent of anger and distress as well, such that the interpretive problem Adams poses in the epigraph assumes a kind of totalizing framework for the book as a whole: “Whether those trees that stand are reassuring is a question for a lifetime.”

That aesthetic, even ethical, ambiguity is evident from the start of the sequence: across the first half dozen landscapes that open the book we are shown how dense the light is over the hills and through the valleys, light that has absorbed smoke and dust and smog, and which at so often sits like a haze over the middle distance. The clear crystalline light that Adams was bewitched by in Colorado, which permitted him to capture vast distances with great acuity and precision of craft, is in these pictures significantly reduced, if not gone altogether. Even when he takes up his position overlooking a great valley, as in Northeast of Riverside, looking toward Los Angeles (1982), the distant hills seem to struggle for clarity of line and detail, and beyond them, against the horizon, are yet more hills that are barely visible through the heavy and nearly opaque light. In typical fashion, though, Adams has rendered the scene with such delicacy and such precision that surely no light has ever seemed so brilliant or so full of subtlety and texture. Indeed, a regular occurrence in an Adams picture is that the light captured therein encourages a hyperbolic reaction like those that have already been written here, as each picture seems to contain the apotheosis of light as it can be photographically expressed. Though the light may not grant us complete visibility nor seem to touch every aspect of the frame evenly, the way it gradually unfolds is what unifies the scene, creating a sense of wholeness and proper proportion. It creates the conditions for beauty in the way that Adams intends it, which is through unity and the interrelation of disparate elements, or through the bestowal of formal significance across the whole picture so that each point within it is made to seem as though it were balancing on every other.

Again, we need to keep in our minds the reverse image of this nearly bucolic scene, in which rampant construction, runaway pollution, and the disregard for a region’s biodiversity is symbolized by the smokestack or the landfill, an image in which carbon emissions and industrial runoff are understood to be reshaping the atmosphere around us right now and in ways that are tangibly felt. Adams literalizes this back-and-forth, image/reverse-image dynamic throughout the sequence by regularly following a picture of a landscape beautifully rendered with one made awkward, uncomfortable even, by the dense light and forceful presence of, for example, power lines and electrical towers, or of freeways that stretch beyond vacant lots. These details provide compositional balance, it’s true, as they regularly do in previous bodies of work as well, but in Los Angeles Spring they are given a dark, almost sinister edge – they contribute to the completeness of a picture, while at the same time suggesting its eventual undoing. This sense that the world is ready to come apart is something Adams entertains in several pictures that imply a kind of cataclysm, as in Uprooted shrub, landfill, Pomona (1982), in which the titular form is photographed from overhead, its contour invoking a human heart, and the picture as whole symbolizing violence of kind senseless and explicable in equal measure. In At the curb of a city street, Loma Linda (1982), Adams points the camera straight down to the ground, showing us a flattened, entirely two-dimensional picture of dirt scattered with brush and broken branches, fragments of leaves and a curled up rodent carcass. Stretching across the very top of the frame is a sliver of curb before the city street begins, beyond which we can easily imagine passing cars that choke the air with their exhaust. It is a rare occurrence for Adams to completely compress space in this way, and the implication is clear: there is no light that might redeem this scene, no vast expanse of hills and fields that could overwhelm us. Instead, the picture is a purely negative one – there is no possibility of reconciling ourselves to what it shows on either a formal or metaphorical level. The critical effect of such a picture filters through the rest of the sequence and primes us to look upon the foliage that Adams continues to photograph with a doubtful eye, as citrus groves may evoke stubborn resilience, but without the possibility of future flourishing.

This new edition of Los Angeles Spring follows the enlarged format that Steidl used for their reprint of From the Missouri West, which was published in 2018. Both of these editions are significantly larger than the original publications: the original 1986 Aperture edition of Los Angeles Spring was 13 x 10 inches in size, whereas the new Steidl edition is 15.5 x 13 inches. Though the measurable increase may seem trivial, the effect when handling the book is significant, as the larger edition is too cumbersome to be easily held in the hand and ultimately feels better suited to the tabletop. While an increase in size typically comes at the expense of intimacy, what this new edition gains is a quality not often associated with Adams’ work: monumentality. When coupled with the rich and incredibly subtle quadratone printing, the book effectively functions as a stage for each picture, creating a sense of scale and proportion that, as Adams has remarked, feels as though one could walk right into straight off the page. Another critical feature of this edition, made possible specifically by the printing, is the way it registers the quality of the light that Adams captured: its density, texture, and material complexity – its function as atmosphere as much as illuminance.

It is the atmosphere in these pictures that most forcefully grounds the original question that Adams posed to himself and, by extension, to us as well: is the beauty that remains in nature a reassurance, or is it instead a form of condemnation that, through our experience of it, invokes a greater and more complete whole that is now lost? Put more simply, can our experience in the forests nearest to us remain untroubled by the knowledge of what clearcutting is doing to the forests in Oregon, or what deforestation and resource extraction is doing to the Amazon? Has too much been irrevocably destroyed for us to savor and find meaning in what remains? Though Adams leaves this question unanswered, at least rhetorically, his pictures articulate a response that is, by virtue of its own contradictions, a genuine expression of the political, ethical, and philosophical bind of his historical moment, one so very close to our own. The atmosphere in and around greater Los Angeles, the one that Adams wrestled with and deciphered, is the descriptive element that effectively performs the reality of this bind in picture after picture, as it oscillates between clarity and obfuscation, between the weight of history and the suspension of its affect.

–

I have tried to describe the qualities of Adams’ art that express an enduring truth about our experience of history, and to do so by closely attending to some of the principal components, both formal and conceptual, that animate his pictures and his books. That his pictures seem always to be pursuing the complete interrelation and interdependence of all that exists within their frames is itself an inducement to us to think structurally, which is to say historically. And though his pictures show how the discrete can be subsumed into something greater and more complex – that in fact, the singular subject can be said to derive its own meaning and ultimate coherence through this very relationality – they never reduce the detail to the status of an ancillary fact, something to be seen before then being forgotten. Instead, the tract house at the foot of a mountain underneath the sun and crystalline sky is, in spite of its relative impermanence, also a form of beauty, complicated though it may be. Adams does not avoid asking us whether our failures might present new types of beauty and meaning in the landscape and how we have chosen to live in it, and whether these types of beauty and meaning are themselves essential, or else have become so because of their irreversibility. We can never go back – nor can we recover the landscape that has been lost and which Adams’ pictures tirelessly invoke through their grandeur and honesty of observation. Their affirmation of what still remains, though, is never given simply or argued for without qualification. It is not offered up as a panacea or an imaginative solution to what actually exists. In other words, pictures and books are not presumed to have the capacity to change the world even though, in Adams’ case, they speak to that part of us which knows the world can be made again because it has already been made once.

Robert Adams

Eden / Summer Nights, Walking / Los Angeles Spring

Steidl, 2023

(All Rights Reserved. Text © Zach Ritter. Images © Robert Adams.)