WASHINGTON — Robert Adams photographs the landscapes of the contemporary American West, humiliated as it may be, with the loving care of its artistic ancestors, Timothy H. O’Sullivan and Carleton E. Watkins, donated to sublime vistas in the 19th century. To borrow the words of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, he tries to ‘praise the mutilated world’.
Its powerful ally is the western light. With the prowess of a native tracker, he explores his quarry—a subdivision of houses on the tract, a barren forest—to determine the time of day when a site is illuminated with an aura that feels blessed. And then he shoots.
“When I shoot sharply, I know I feel like the world is falling apart,” he told a group of college students in 2001 in Astoria, Oregon, where he lives with his wife. , Kerstin Adams. “But after I’ve been there long enough to get over my terror of the violence, after working an hour or two and getting absorbed in the structure of things as they appear in the finder, I don’t just think about the disaster. I discover things in sunlight. You can be in the most hopeless place, and in daylight you can experience moments that are good, that are whole.”
“American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams,” a magisterial career survey at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, reveals that over a half-century of black-and-white photography, Adams, 85, has found it increasingly difficult to maintain this attitude. The toll of time – on its psyche, the landscape, or both – can be discerned in the relentless gloomy photographs that have dominated his output over the decades. The sky can’t be seen in many of these photos, and when it comes in, it’s often a gray smog patch.
Adams received a lot of attention as one of ten photographers to be part of a celebrated exhibition, “New Topography: Photographs of a Man-Made Landscape”, mounted on George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, in 1975. Such fellow participants as Bernd and Hilla Becher or even Lewis Baltz, the artist most closely associated with Adams, took serial photos that may be forensic evidence in a prosecution. Adams distinguished poetry where others found it starkly prosaic. He has cited the paintings of Paul Cézanne – with their play of sunlight on geometrically simplified houses that eerily foreshadowed the repetitive box-like homes he saw in Colorado – and Edward Hopper, with their melancholic light at the beginning and end as influences. of the day and their haunting evocations of loneliness. two thirds of “North Denver Suburb”, 1973is given to clouds that can match it Cézanne saw over the Mont Sainte-Victoire; and the houses below, shabby as they are, form an ensemble of architectural blocks that the French modernist master could have rendered directly, without abstraction. ‘Longmont, Colorado’, 1977, an Adams photograph of a woman sitting in a paneled den in a tract house, could serve as the jacket illustration for ‘Revolutionary Road’, Richard Yates’ classic novel about the disenchantment in America’s suburbs.
Adams once stated that O’Sullivan is ‘our Cézanne’, who finds interest and tension in quiet, empty landscapes. In the excellent catalog accompanying the exhibition, Sarah Green, the senior curator and head of the National Gallery’s Photographs Department, points out that, in addition to his depictions of grand American landscapes, O’Sullivan documented the Civil War massacre, in which the corpses of soldiers and artillery-destroyed trees were scattered across the area. terrain, just as the remains of majestic spruce dot the ground after a clear cut.
Adams stands in line. O’Sullivan and Watkins, while portraying the mountains and valleys of the West, did not ignore the occasional marks of human encroachment. Indeed, as documented in “American Geography”, last year’s succinct and admirable monograph of Sandra S. Phillips with Sally Martin Katz (conceived as a catalog for an even larger exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sunk due to the pandemic), the scars of the Western land started in the 19th century with the arrival of agriculture, industry, mining and railways. But the big impact would come later. The epic period of deforestation in the West was memorably depicted by: Darius Kinsey, who in the first half of the 20th century in Washington state photographed loggers standing over fallen trees like great white hunters posing with slain elephants.
Early in his career, Adams explored early settlements in the eastern Colorado prairie, where houses and churches made of wood or adobe lightly straddle the property. The horizontal shingles of a house in “Clarkville, Colorado,1972, rhymes with the expansive grasslands and sky that dominate the image, and the thin, vaguely discernible overhead wires. Adams chose to include only a narrow portion of the building so that it modestly intrudes into the right margin of the frame.
Turning to the more densely populated areas near Boulder, Adams saw that the harmony between nature and civilization had been broken. In “Northeast of Flagstaff Mountain, Boulder County, Colorado,” 1975, an ominous shadow across the bottom of the image underlines a bare mountain, overlooking featureless housing developments that stretch bleakly into the horizon. The shadow of a tree cast by night lights on a garage door of a house in ‘Longmont, Colorado’ 1976, hovers like a ghost, testifying to what has been destroyed. Return to the crime scene in “Boulder County, Colorado”, 1983Adams photographed fire-blackened pines on the mountain as tortured, twisted victims, overlooking a valley shrouded in invisibility by smog.
Trees in Adams’ photographs have an anthropomorphic presence – and in some cases even universal. The massive trunks in a series of close-up tree portraits, Poplars, Harney County, Oregon, 1999, contain entire worlds of supported life, such as the giant redwood that stars in Richard Powers’ novel “The Overstory.” More typical, however, are less optimistic specimens. Into the row of trees on the perilous edge of a cliff “New Development on a Former Citrus Farming Estate, Highland, California”, 1983, his sentries in a lost war; and the two crumpled trees in it “On Signal Hill, Overlooking Long Beach, California”, 1983, are like Philemon and Baucis — the elderly couple of Greek mythology who, in exchange for their hospitality, are taken to a mountain to witness the flood that has washed away their less generous neighbors and are eventually transformed, at their will, by the gods into a lime tree and a oak, side by side.
Adams’s influence on later photographers, who usually work in color, is widespread. To name a few eminent examples: Mitch Epstein’s “property rights”, published last year, describes in wonderful detail the local resistance to industrial encroachments on the environment; and Alec Soth, even younger and working like Epstein with an 8-by-10 camera, captures the fallen landscape with elegiac lyricism. Soth’s 2002 Wisconsin photo of a illuminated gas pump standlocated next to a graveyard and under a mountain, could serve as a caustic pendant to Adams’ magnificent dusky Hopper-esque image from a similar mountainside which, with unintended irony, bears the advertising banner “Frontier”.
The most recent photos in the show, dating from 2015, were taken on a beach near Adams’ home in Astoria. In a, a giant stump, washed up on the shore, shows an act of cruelty. Resting on the wet sand under a streaked sky, all rendered in shades of gray, it is tragically beautiful.
The subtle ambiguity of gray suits Adams’ mind as well as his eye, for life is never as simple as pure black and white. The trees planted at regular intervals along a highway in “Interstate 10, West Edge of Redlands, California”, 1983, are a study in sterility, proof of nature suppressed and tamed in the name of progress. But if you look closely, you can see a bird perched on one of the four overhead wires against the pale sky, like a note on a music clef. Even in this broken and diminished world, Adams says, it’s possible—no, it’s absolutely necessary—to cheer and sing.
American Silence: the photos of Robert AdamsThrough October 2, National Gallery of Art, Sixth Street and Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, DC; 202-737-4215, nga.gov.