Perfect uncertainty - Robert Adams and the American West

Art in America, March, 2002 by Leo Rubinfien

All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candle-lit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we--you and I--shall build. (35)

Adams seemed to be alarmed by this, and he asked me, perhaps even with some anger, "Where does he get that confidence?" After one allows that there is here a great deal of the writer's characteristic, many-masked irony, one must still admit that Cheever longed to be able to feel the unalloyed enthusiasm we find in Whitman. "I'm not a great follower of Whitman," Adams said. (36) One more effect of his work's meticulousness and its eschewal of drama and chiaroscuro--and of the small size of his prints, which are rarely larger than a page in a book--is to denounce all self-indulgence, all hyperbole. The pictures aim for an assiduous honesty. "Is it possible," he wrote in one essay, "for art to be more than lies?" (37)

Adams often speaks of the transfiguring power of light itself, "light that sometimes still works like an alchemy." (38)

The subject of these pictures is ... not tract homes or freeways, but the source of all Form, light. The Front Range ... is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. Even subdivisions, which we hate for the obscenity of the speculator's greed, are at certain times ... transformed to a cold, dry brilliance." (39)

Light is the source of the redemption for which his work strives, but of course the light in a photograph is not the same as the real light of the sun, the moon, the pregnant clouds and the shining sky. As soon as it is trapped on paper it is converted into something new, and no less of an artifice than the words of a hymn or a clause in a contract.

The light in an Adams photograph might be thought of as the voice in which it speaks about its houses, trees and plain, unheroic people, and it may recall to some of us the calm, patient, exacting voices of the Nadezhda Mandelstam of Hope Against Hope, the Primo Levi of The Reawakening, and the J.M. Coetzee of Boyhood. Each of these writers confronted a far greater offense than Adams, it is true, but he is with them in renouncing the poet's drunken love of sounds; with them, he prefers the fastidiousness with facts that we find in the courtroom, where the self is suppressed for the sake of fairness, and the right to judge is gained. The light in the best of Adams's photographs addresses things from a position so high, so believably impartial, that it persuades me that our flawed, human artist had, even if only in his work and only for brief spells, the ability to be fair. It is a torrent in his famous picture of the two-tone Ford that stands in a half-built cul-de-sac for everyone's hopes (New Housing, Colorado Springs, 1968--housing development under construction), and no matter what you think of tract houses and although he will tell you that the range to the west includes Cheyenne Mountain, the site of the subterranean fortress of NORAD, the light is generous even to what the photographer frankly loathes. It insists that there is nothing here that may not be innocent, that today is as good as the very first day.