Robert Adams: a photographer with a profound sense of place
In December 2011, having posted a list of his favourite photobooks of the year on his blog, the photographer Alec Soth received a response from another photographer, John Gossage. It read: "Is there one book on your list that changed you as an artist? One of these that allowed you to take something from it that you could use to move forward?"
The questions set Soth thinking. The more he thought, the more he realised the book that had influenced him most had not even made his end-of-year list. It was Prairie by Robert Adams, a revised reprint of a catalogue for an exhibition held in Denver Art Museum in 1978.
"Prairie is a simple book," wrote Soth. "It is a small soft-cover with minimal design flourishes. And Adams' early pictures match the book's humility. We see barns, farmhouses, an old church. Some of the pictures brush up against small-town photo cliches. The truth is that if Adams' name weren't on the book, I'd probably never give it a chance. But this is an Adams book. And after 22 years I've learned that there is always more to learn from him."
Robert Adams, Pacific Country, Washington, from Sea Stories. Photograph: Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
To a degree, all of Adams' work is simple, but deceptively so. Since he first came to public attention in the mid-1970s as part of the New Topographics movement, his subject has been the American west: its vastness, its sparse beauty and its ecological fragility. You could say that Adams was a pioneer of eco-conscious photography, but that would be a very reductive way of describing an artist whose vision has remained constant, and constantly rigorous, and whose work demands close attention – and a degree of patient attentiveness – from the viewer.
Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937, but his family moved to Wheat Ridge, a suburb of Colorado, in 1952. There, as a child, he hiked in the woods with his father and later, as a young teenager, spent his summers as a boy scout in nature camps in the Rockies. Interestingly, he also studied architectural drawing for a time at high school. You can sense his abiding love for the great outdoors in his work, as well as the formal rigour of the architect's eye. His is not a romantic vision in the way that, say, Ansel Adams' was, nor does he break with that tradition in the dramatic way Robert Frank did.
As Soth points out, you can detect the presence of Walker Evans here and there in the earliest photographs in Prairie, but the everyday American architecture of freeways, street signs, shopfronts and shacks is not, in itself, the thing that interests Adams. What he has photographed constantly – in varying shades of grey – is what has been lost and what remains.
One mid-70s series of photographs is called What We Bought. It shows how the relatively new postwar landscape of identikit shopping malls and houses of suburbia is advancing inexorably on the mountains and foothills of the old west. A more recent series, Turning Back, made at the beginning of the new millennium, looks at how the great forests of the Pacific north-west have been decimated, and how what remains affords us only a glimpse of a once vast and silent natural landscape.
Robert Adams, North Beach Peninsula, Pacific County, Washington, from Sea Stories, ca. 2005. Photograph: Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Why, though, does he shoot in black and white? There is a subtle tonal quality to his pictures – a shading of light and shadow, and various gradations of the same – that would surely be lost in colour. And, in Prairie, the shades of grey and white are perfectly suited to the landscape, the wooden churches, the big wide skies, the functional interiors, and even the few matter-of-fact portraits that punctuate the book.
What Adams' pictures capture is a profound sense of place and his sympathetic understanding of the same. You can tell that Adams loves these empty, still prairie spaces, and the silence that echoes in them. There is one evocative picture of Adams' wife, Kerstin, standing with her back to the camera, hands on her head, her shirt billowing, beneath a vast, glowering sky. It is called: Kerstin enjoying the wind, east of Keota, 1969. You can almost feel the wind.
In his short introduction to Prairie, written in 1978, Adams hints at his work's other great subtext: "There is everywhere silence – a silence in thunder, in wind, in the call of doves, even a silence in the closing of a a pick-up door. If you are crossing the plains, leave the interstate and find a back road on which to walk; listen." In his photographs, too, you can hear that silence echoing.
Yale Univesity Press have published Prairie alongside two other books: Sea Stories and This Day.
Typically evocative … Colorado, about 1973. Part of a forthcoming exhibition at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London. Photograph: Robert Adams/Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
The Timothy Taylor Gallery in London will be showing a selection of Adams's photographs of urban development in Denver, Colorado in the 1970s from 23 February to 24 March.
Now see this:
A kind of potted retrospective of Boris Mikhailov's long career, Triptychs, at the Sprovieri Gallery in London until 5 April, is not for the faint-hearted. Culled from several series, including Case History (1997-98) and the Wedding (2008), it is an unflinchingly graphic portrait of human suffering and endurance from the Ukraine-born master.