Robert Adams

Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937 and moved to Wheat Ridge, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, when he was 15. In 1956, he began to study English Literature at the University of Redlands, Southern California. Adams’ later writing reflects his deep appreciation of modern literature, particularly his affection for T.S. Eliot.

In 1963, whilst travelling in Europe, Adams bought a 35mm handheld Rolleiflex camera (which produced 2½ square negatives – see here for a detailed account of Adams’ photographic technique during this period) and, once home, began to take pictures, mostly of vernacular architectural subjects, later published as White Churches of the Plains (1970) and The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado (1974). He studied photography alongside his doctoral studies and, on completion of his PhD (on James Joyce), he returned to Colorado and began to teach English at Colorado College.

In 1969, after Adams had met John Szarkowski in New York, MOMA bought 4 of Adams’ prints and the following year, Adams turned to photography full-time. 

Adams’ subject has been the American West, or rather the transformation of the natural beauty of the West through creeping urbanisation, industrialisation and the consequent destruction of the landscape. His work has centred around Denver, Los Angeles and Oregon but not exclusively so and Adams also produced numerous but less well-known seascapes, for example, taken off the West coast of the USA.

His work has been extensively published and exhibited both within the US and internationally and he has been recognised through a range of prestigious awards and Fellowships.

Adams portrayed an American West, 

…  made up of a seemingly endless series of ill-made structures embodying the tangles of easy compromise and unremarkable venality that saw them built (a portrayal drawn at the height of the Vietnam War, and, for the most part, in a harsh, monotonous light) proposed a radically different and, for photographers, revolutionary, frontier. In his view, even the immemorial land itself was implicated in a general disaster, exhausted, as he revealed it, by human busyness.

Papageorge, T. (2001)

Adams’ photographic engagement with landscape runs deeper than its immediate contemporary context however. His photographs are more fundamentally concerned with the relationship of beauty to truth and to the significance of beauty to the human experience. 

In his collection of essays, Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values, Adams defines beauty as “a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life” (p. 24). For Adams, the discovery and rendering of such structure provides a limited but vital consolation for the fear that life is mere chaos and that “our suffering is without meaning” (p. 25). Adams’ understanding of beauty is a reflection of the moral seriousness that he invests in photography and its potential to create “new illusions in the service of truth” (p.86).

Of necessity, picturing beauty risks encountering its opposite and Adams has noted,

I began making pictures because I wanted to record what supports hope: the untranslatable mystery and beauty of the world. Along the way the camera also caught evidence against, and I eventually concluded that this too belonged in pictures if they were to be truthful and useful.  

Adams, R. (2010) Frontispiece to ‘What Can We Believe Where? Photographs of the American West’ New Haven: Yale University Press

It is this that distinguishes Adams’ work (he referred to himself as a ‘radical traditionalist’ in the vein of T.S. Eliot) in that Adams did not share in the romanticising, boastful, ‘magisterial gaze’ of the American landscape that was the convention of the time, perhaps best exemplified by his namesake, Ansel Adams. (Nor was he part of the more fashionable East Coast (New York) street and freak photography of the period that came to be best exemplified by Diane Arbus.) 

In his early work (specifically in The New West, 1974 and denver, 1977), his focus was not on the epic cloudscapes and the towering grandeur of mountains that had become associated with American ‘National Park’ photography, but on the intrusion of tract housing into the desert, the proliferation of mobile homes, gas stations and the indistinct mall sprawl of Colorado Springs and Denver. 

In 1975, images from The New West were included in an exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography, Rochester, NY and Adams is sometimes bracketed with Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher and others who were included in the exhibition.

Some contemporary and much subsequent criticism of the New Topographics photographers has centred less on the way in which they clearly subverted landscape photography in the US and more widely (which they self-evidently did) but on the ‘political’ content of the exhibition and the work of those whose work was included. The work was regarded as passive, nominative rather than declarative and void of any commentary of the context in which the photographs were made. However, this is to miss the point of the apparently style-less style of Adams’ work in particular. Sandeen (2009a), for example, in contrasting Adams’ images of The New West and denver with his earlier published work (White Churches of the Plainsand The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado) sees a continuous line of argument in Adams’ work concerning the nature of human communities expressed through their buildings and the occupation of land – the one rural, the other (sub-)urban but both bound by similar, vernacular, ‘home-making’ claims to culture(s) and identities. In both bodies of work, “he photographed life that persisted in ruin.” (Sandeen, 2009b, p. 55). (See also Mirakhor (2013), who provides a gloss on Adams’ work as a ‘Disavowal of the American Way of Life’).

Lewis Baltz, another of the New Topographics photographers, later noted of Adams that it is not necessary to be obvious or polemical to be political (Baltz, 1984). It is the ‘reticence’ of the pictures, according to Phillips (1996) that indicates “passionate conviction and sometimes dread at the implications of truth.” (p. 41). With Adams in particular, it is the light that reveals the truth of what he saw. In a 2009 interview, Adams relates how, “light is the age-old symbol for truth or the expression of truth … a deeply mysterious, compelling ingredient for your understanding of life and your response to it.” His images from the New West in particular were, according to academic and distinguished photographer, Tod Papageorge, produced “to distill the brilliant Colorado sunlight to a virtually nuclear intensity” (2011).

Under such light, “wringing out of the tonal range of his prints to the bright end of the photographic scale” (Papageorge, 2011), it is the “spare and devastatingly honest” (Adams, T., 2011:709) nature of Adams’ work that is so compelling. His is an unflinching look at the way in which beauty is so easily destroyed on a daily, acre by acre, tree by tree basis. For this his subject has to be the familiar, the banal, the unspectacular because it is precisely the sheer banality and familiarity of destruction and desecration; the very ordinariness of the ugliness we build into the world that is so disturbing. It is this on which Adams shines a light so powerfully.

Adams was not however a natural pessimist. Throughout his early work, Adams saw the possibility of redemption if not restoration of the despoiled landscapes of the American West. In this he anticipated rather than avoided the environmental activism that was to come. He continued to see beauty in the landscape and he understood the importance of building homes as well as a nostalgia for home in the wildernesses. His role is not to document (or imply) a “pristine fantasy’ (Mirakhor, 214 p. 658); but, in the fierce light of the Colorado sun, to tell the whole truth,

… we do not live in parks … we need to improve things at home, and … to do it we have to see the facts without blinking. We need to watch, for example, as an old woman, alone, is forced to carry her groceries in August heat over a fifty-acre parking lot; then we know, safe from the comforting lies of profiteers, that we must begin again.

Adams, R. ‘New West’ (1974) p. xiii

He continues,

Paradoxically, however, we also need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty … Nothing permanently diminishes the affirmation of the sun.

Adams, R. ‘New West’ (1974) p. xiv

Adams work has developed over the last 40 years and has widened in scope but it is his work on the New West and denver that has most influenced me. His determination to bring into view the ugliness of our man-altered landscape that we might prefer to place behind more reassuring images of the natural or artificial landscape; his understanding of how the buildings we make encode fundamental social processes and structures; how the built environment is a basis for understanding of humankind and what humans do to make a living and to make a home; his ‘spare’ depiction of what he saw and his commitment to Keats’ maxim that in the light of truth, literally as well as poetically, there is beauty.

All of the images used here are scanned from Adams, R. (2010)What Can We Believe Where? Photographs of the American West, New Haven: Yale University Press and are copyright to Yale University

References:

Adams, R. (1996) Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values. Second edn. New York, NY: Aperture.

Adams, T. (2011) ‘On Robert Adams’s New West Landscapes’, Environmental History Vol. 16 (October 2011): 701-714 

Baltz, L. (1984) ‘Robert Adams: Our Lives and Our Children’,Artspace 852-53

Miarkhor, L. (2013) ‘Resisting the Temptation to Give Up: James Baldwin, Robert Adams, and the Disavowal of the American Way of Life’, North American Review (Winter 2013): 636-670

Phillips, S. (1996) ‘To Subdue the Continent: Photographs of the American West’ in Phillips, S., Betsky, A., Moores, E. and Rodriguez, R. Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West 1849 to the Present. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Sandeen, E.J. (2009a) ‘Robert Adams and Colorado’s Cultural Landscapes. Picturing Tradition and Development in the New West’, Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Vol. 16 No. 1 (Spring 2009): 97-116

Sandeen, E.J. (2009b) ‘Robert Adams and the ‘Persistent Beauty’ of Colorado Landscapes’, History of Photography, Vol. 33 No. 1: 55-70