Washington- Robert Adams His artistic ancestors lovingly and carefully photograph the landscape of the modern western United States, no matter how degraded. Timothy H. O’Sullivan When Carlton E. Watkins, It was bestowed with a sublime view in the 19th century.Borrow the words of a Polish poet Adam Zagaevsky, He attempts to “praise the disconnected world.”
His powerful ally is Western light. With the skill of an indigenous tracker, he examines the quarry (a subdivision of a clear-cut house) to determine when the site will be illuminated with a brilliant feeling of blessing. And he shoots.
“I know I have the feeling that the world is collapsing when I’m taking pictures in clear cuts,” he lived with his wife in Astoria, Oregon in 2001. I talked to a group of college students in Japan, Kirstin Adams. “But after being there enough time to overcome the shock of violence, working for an hour or two, and getting hooked on the structure of what’s displayed in the viewfinder, I’m not just thinking about disasters. I’m discovering things in the sun. You can stand in the most desperate place, and if it’s in the sun, you can experience the right moment , It’s perfect. “
“American Silence: A Photograph of Robert Adams” A spectacular career study at the National Museum in Washington, DC, revealed that during the half-century of making black-and-white photographs, 85-year-old Adams has become increasingly difficult to maintain this attitude. The sacrifice of time in his spirit, landscape, or both can be identified in the constantly dark photographs that dominate his output in recent decades. The sky is excluded from many of these photos, and when it does, it often stains gray smog.
Adams received widespread attention as one of the 10 photographers who participated in the famous exhibition. “New Terrain: Photographs of Human-Modified Landscapes” Mounted on George Eastman House In Rochester, New York in 1975.Bernd & Hilla Becher, and even Luis BalzThe artist, who has the closest relationship with Adams, took a series of photographs that could provide forensic evidence in the prosecution proceedings. Adams identified a poem that others felt terribly rude. He states that he influenced Paul Cézanne’s paintings. He shines on a geometrically simplified house that mysteriously presets a box-like repeating house that he saw in Colorado. Edward Hopper shines a gloomy light at the beginning and end of the day.Unforgettable awakening Loneliness. Two-thirds of “Suburbs of North Denver”, 1973Given to a cloud comparable to it Cezanne overlooked Mont Sainte-VictoireThe house below remains shabby, forming a collection of architectural blocks that the French modernist master could have rendered directly without abstraction. “Longmont, Colorado” In 1977, a photo of Adams, a woman sitting in a siding den of Tract Home, is an illustration of the jacket of Richard Yates’ classic novel “Revolutionary Road” about the disillusionment of the American suburbs. May be useful.
Adams once declared O’Sullivan “our Cezanne” and found interest and tension in the quiet and empty landscape. In the excellent catalog of the exhibition, Sarah Greenaf, In addition to portraying spectacular American landscapes, O’Sullivan recorded the Civil War massacre, a senior curator and head of photography at the National Gallery. The wreckage of the majestic fir was scattered throughout the terrain, just as it was scattered on the ground after a clear cut.
Adams stands in a pedigree. O’Sullivan and Watkins did not ignore the accidental traces of human invasion, portraying the mountains and valleys of the west.Indeed, as documented in “American Geography” A magnificent and magnificent monograph by Sandra S. Phillips and Sally Martin Katz last year (conceived as a catalog for a larger exhibition abandoned for a pandemic at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), of Western land. The scars are in the 19th century with the advent of agriculture, industry, mining and railroads. But the big impact will come later. The epic period of deforestation in the west Darius Kinsey, In Washington State in the first half of the 20th century, I photographed a logger standing on a fallen tree like a Great White Hunter posing with a murdered elephant.
At the beginning of his career, Adams surveyed early settlements in the prairie of eastern Colorado. There, houses and churches made of wood and sun-dried bricks lightly trample the terrain. “Horizontal clapboard of the houseClarkville, Colorado,In 1972, rhymes with the vast grasslands and sky that dominate photography, and the thin, faintly perceptible overhead lines above. Adams chose to include only the narrow parts of the building, so it penetrates the right margin of the frame moderately.
Looking at the densely populated area near Boulder, Adams saw a break in the harmony between nature and civilization.of “Northeast of Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder County, Colorado” In 1975, the ominous shadow at the bottom of the photo highlights a bare mountain overlooking a featureless housing development that stretches terribly toward the horizon. The Shadow of a tree In 1976, it was projected on the door of a garage in a tract home in Longmont, Colorado, with night lights, floating like a ghost and witnessing what was destroyed.Return to the crime scene “Boulder County, Colorado” 1983Adams investigated a valley where smog was invisible and photographed a mountain fire-blackened pine as a tortured and twisted victim.
The trees in Adams’ photographs are anthropomorphic and, in some cases, universal. A huge trunk of a series of close-up tree portraits, “Poplar in Harney County, Oregon” In 1999, it contains the whole world of supported life, like the giant Redwood that drew attention in Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory. But more typical are less optimistic specimens.A row of trees on the unstable edge of a cliff “New Development at a Former Citrus Plant in Highland, California,” 1983, A lost war sentry.And two embarrassed trees “At Signal Hill overlooking Long Beach, California,” 1983, like Philemon and Baucis — An old Greek mythological couple is taken to the mountains in return for hospitality, sees a flood that has washed away their ungenerous neighbors, and is eventually transformed into Linden and Oak by the gods. , Alongside.
Adams’ influence on photographers, usually after working in color, is widespread. To quote some prominent examples: Mitch Epstein’s “property rights” Record the pockets of local resistance to environmental invasion, published last year, in gorgeous details. Alec Soth is still young, working like Epstein with an 8×10 view camera, recording the fallen landscape with graceful lyricism. Photo of Soth taken in Wisconsin in 2002 Illuminated gas pump standLocated next to the graveyard and under the mountains, it could act as Adams’ magnificent, twisted hopper-like mordant pendant. Photo At a similar hillside facility, the advertising banner “Frontier” is displayed with unintended irony.
The latest photo of the show was from 2015 and was taken on the beach near Adams’s house in Astoria. For one thing Huge stump, Launched on the shore, witnessing brutal acts. All painted in gray tones on the wet sand under the striped sky, tragically beautiful.
Life is not as simple as pure black and white, so the subtle ambiguity of gray fits Adams’s heart and his eyes.Trees planted at regular intervals along the highway “Interstate Highway 10, West Edge in Redlands, California,” 1983, A study of infertility, a proof of nature that has been suppressed and tamed in the name of progress. However, if you look closely, you can see that the bird is perched on one of the four overhead lines against the background of the pale sky, like the memo of the clef. Even in this broken and declining world, Adams says it’s possible to sing with joy — no, it’s essential —.
American Silence: Photograph of Robert AdamsUntil October 2, National Museum, Six Street and Constitution Avenue, Northwest, Washington, DC. 202-737-4215, nga.gov.
