Perfect uncertainty - Robert Adams and the American West

Art in America, March, 2002 by Leo Rubinfien

Robert Adams published The New West in 1974, 56 monochromatic photographs full of the brilliant, weightless light of the high plains, where less water than fine powder floats in the air and where the miniature, half-built houses of the subdivision eight miles across the valley are as sharply clear as the scraps of vinyl-coated clapboard in the backhoe ruts at your feet. Everywhere in these pictures (4) the land has been grabbed or is on its way to being grabbed, and city spills over each grassy rise into the far distances, as unopposable as the pillowy white clouds that drift through the flawless sky. The vast building tract has been shorn of every bush and the concrete sidewalk extrapolated into nowhere, thorny weeds pushing up through the cracks; the hundreds and thousands of bright, hopeful houses are as much alike as if they had been chucked out of a high-speed press; the glittering gas station is bedecked with shiny plastic pennants; the raucous electric signs howl through the dusk about hamburgers, gas, tires, Buicks, sweet and bubbly drinks, beds, booze and cash loans; and everywhere there are innumerable cars, covering huge lots in the blazing sun, silently flowing up small roads and great, transformed by the overflowing light into pools and streamlets of minute jewels.

This is the familiar stuff of postwar, suburban America, of course. It spread over central Long Island, the San Fernando Valley and the outskirts of Chicago well before it washed up at the Front Range of the Rockies--and if, as Adams writes, America's most precious treasure was its enormous open spaces, (5) and if these have mostly been lost to habitation, trade and industry, their loss was not itself the very newest thing in his new West. Already in 1892, Francis Parkman had given the old a sad lament:

The sons of civilization, drawn by the fascinations of a fresher and bolder life, thronged to the western wilds in multitudes which blighted the charm that had lured them.... The buffalo is gone; ... the wolves ... have succumbed to arsenic; the wild Indian is turned into an ugly caricature of his conqueror; ... the all-daring and all-enduring trapper belongs to the past.... In his stem we have the cowboy, and even his star begins to wane. (6)

Turner regretted not just the loss of the open country but, even more, of those human qualities--"coarseness ... strength ... acuteness ... inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind ...; that masterful grasp of material things ...; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism ...; that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom" (7)--that were the product of the frontier. They had been traded for what Parkman called the "irresistible commonplace," (8) which is still as good an expression as there is for the Arvada, Aurora and Lakewood of Adams's photographs, and countless new towns around America whose names, as Adams observes, have been contrived from euphemistic elements like "glen" and "green" whether or not hills or forests were ever found in their parts of the country. (9)