Perfect uncertainty - Robert Adams and the American West

Art in America, March, 2002 by Leo Rubinfien

Robert Adams is preeminent among the many photographers who have concerned themselves with the urban development of the once-wild lands of the American West. He began to photograph on the Colorado high plains in 1965, and the subjects of his broad body of work have included the spreading of tract houses along the Rockies; strip malls, parking lots, freeways, cheap motels and garishly lit discount houses; abused land and brutalized animals; the defunct orange estates of outer Los Angeles; the ruined forests of coastal Oregon, and the adult and child citizens of the new West as he finds them, often enough, marooned in bleak trailer parks or graceless rooms.

Adams had no formal training in photography, but took it up after earning a Ph.D. in English for the love of literature and then becoming disillusioned by the academic life. He absorbed the influences of Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston ans Timothy O'Sullivan, as well as those of writers and filmmakers--from Dickinson to Roethke, from Ozu to Godard. He composed two little-known books of his early photographs of the simple, elegant, antique architecture of the plains--White Churches of the Plains (1970), and The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado (1974)--but had already turned to the artifacts and landscape of the modern West before they were published, thus making the central decision of his career. In so doing, he found the themes and style that would define his pictures for the next three and a half decades. The first of his books in which these concerns were evident is the celebrated The New West (1974), whose foreword, by John Szarkowski, associates Adams with Thoreau and identifies the dilemma that powers Adams's work: "He has, without actually lying, discovered in these dumb and artless agglomerations of boring buildings the suggestion of redeeming virtue."

Since The New West, Adams has published 18 more collections of photographs, of which the most admired are perhaps Denver (1977), From the Missouri West (1980), Summer Nights (1985), Los Angeles Spring (1986), What We Bought (1995) and Eden (1999). He has had many one-man exhibitions at major museums and galleries in America and Europe, including a retrospective, "To Make It Home," which was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989 and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. He became a MacArthur fellow in 1994, and moved from Colorado to Astoria, Ore., after producing West from the Columbia: Views from the River Mouth (1995), a luministic body of work largely concerned with the Pacific Ocean. In the last year, he has been photographing, among other subjects, the ravaged areas of the Coast Range, where entire mountainsides of forest are unselectively harvested or "clear-cut."

Adams, who is eloquent on many subjects, represents that strain in the art of photography--evident particularly in America--in which photographers have nurtured literary interests, searched for what their medium might share with literature, and been (like Walker Evans, Wright Morris and Szarkowski, among others) superb writers of English. He has published two books of essays on photography--Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981) and Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews (1994)--as well as various pieces on the natural world and its misuse The most extensive of the latter is the bitter essay "In the American West Is Hope Possible," which appeared in the monograph To Make It Home Dedicated viewers and readers of Adams's work thus often find their understanding of his pictures somewhat informed by his writing, but, as the present essay maintains, the photographs contain a crystallized ambiguity that the writing never fully explains or captures.

The complete set of photographs that appeared as What We Bought was acquired by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2001. Adams's most recent large exhibition, "Sunlight, Solitude, Democracy, Home ...," was presented in 2001 at Reed College, Portland, Ore., and included 80 photographs made between 1968 and 1990. A fuller version of the following essay appears in the show's catalogue.

Even today, Americans think of their West as new and full of possibility, and perhaps it is. when it becomes hard to gain or hold a stake in cruel Washington or fierce New York, we still say with Willy Loman's son Biff, "I could be happy out there." (1) As late as World War II you could not drive from Chicago to the Pacific without leaving paved road, and it was only 50 years earlier that the superintendent of the 1890 census, in the report made famous by Frederick Jackson Turner, declared that the frontier was no more. (2) Just before the Civil War its newness was feared--people of European descent who went to dwell in the prairie or desert would, it was widely said, fall into savagery, becoming nomadic hunters and herders like the Indians, or preying on each other as bandits. (3) In the 1960s, when the Santa Clara Valley was still rich with plum and apricot and nobody thought of naming it for silicon, you could tell the standing of the best families from the number of times they went back East each year; on Nob Hill today, the Union Club inhabits a lordly mansion that was built of the somber brown stone of Brooklyn Heights and Boston, and still directs to the Atlantic cities anyone in white and blue San Francisco who might doubt where authority truly sits. The small Palo Alto garage where Hewlett and Packard built their first oscillators is honored by a plaque embossed with the California grizzly, but the setting is a garden of dusty sage and fragrant, windblown lavender, and although the plaque was fashioned of the same heavy bronze, it has little of the imperial stateliness of, say, the one on Manhattan island that commemorates the hanging of Nathan Hale near the foundation stone of the Yale Club, at Vanderbilt and 44th.