Robert Adams

Born in 1937 in Orange, New Jersey (US)
Lives and works in Astoria, Oregon (US)

  

Dead palms, Partially uprooted, Ontario

1983
Black and white photograph, gelatin-silver print
37.5 x 47.5 cm
Purchased in: 1990

At the curb of a city street, Loma Linda
Bethoud, Colorado
Dead palms, Partially uprooted, Ontario
Remains of eucalyptus windbreak among ci...
Summer nights # 16
Summer nights # 2

Robert Adams photographs lost paradises, natural sites suffocated by urban development, places on the verge of disappearing. As an ecologist in this sense, his eye nevertheless pronounces no verdicts; rather, he is looking for redemption, using his photographic statements to try and reveal the potential of ideal beauty existing in the landscape. He takes note of damage caused to the environment – a kind of rigorous and intractable report of the state of things – which he sets loose from historical circumstances by including them in an attempt to get beyond triviality: ‘I think that good images are metaphors of a timeless reality. They are produced from a here and a now, but they aim beyond this.’¹
Classical in structure, his photographs use light and framing to construct a formal unity within the image upheld by a sensitive approach to the subject. Adams thus proposes a melancholy interpretation of the myth of how the west was won, but without perpetuating the grandiloquent vision of those early 20th century photographs of American landscapes. Alert to the presence of man, to an illustration of the ordinary, and to the sublime nature of landscape, Adams is part of the tradition of topographical American photography. But this ‘new’ approach, revealed in 1975 in Rochester in the form of an exhibition bringing together nine photographers, including Adams and the Bechers, and meaningfully titled ‘New Topographics’, ousts from the image all sociological and documentary discourse, in order to grasp the objective nature of things thanks to a previously worked-out approach, and special attention to the technical properties of the medium.The clear and precise photograph helps to reveal the hidden coherence of nature that has become poor and lost to the edges of cities (Los Angeles Spring series), a shadow of its former self, ghostlike, almost irreal like the suburbs invading it (Summer Nights). Adams uses it to conceive this moving boundary – a mythical metaphor of the American dream – which is both propensity and limit inscribed in the space and time of landscape.

^{Maïté Vissault}

¹ Interview with Michael Köhler, in Camera Austria, no.9, 1984, pp. 2-6.

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