There’s a lot going on underneath the surface of photographs by Robert Adams. In his photos of nature untrammeled — ocean, trees, leaves, plains — there’s respect and awe. In photos of the impact, largely negative, of man’s intereference with nature — clear-cut forests, quarried mesas, unimaginative tract housing, randomly scattered garbage — there’s sorrow.
Or as Adams himself puts it: “Southern California was, by the reports of those who lived there at the turn of the century, beautiful; there were live oaks on the hills, orchards across the valleys, and ornamental cypress, palms, and eucalyptus lining the roads. … What citrus remain today, however, are mostly abandoned, scheduled for removal, and large eucalyptus have often been vandalized … All that is clear is the perfection of what we were given, the unworthiness of our response, and the certainty, in view of our current deprivation, that we are judged.”
There’s one trait in common with all his photographs, however. Whatever the subject matter — a desolate former forest, a strip of road, a toddler standing on the hood of a car, everyday office furniture — Adams finds beauty there, somehow.
A retrospective of the work of Adams is on the walls now at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, a show so huge it had to be split between the first and the fourth floors.
Joshua Chuang, the curator of the exhibit, says that Adams’ ability to create aesthetic worth by photographing unlovely things places him at the top of contemporary American landscape photographers, even if you figure in Adams’ inspiration, the legendary Ansel Adams (no relation).
“Ansel Adams made beautiful places look beautiful. He did not often turn to the harder realities,” Chuang says. “So Ansel Adams was maybe not as truthful.
“Robert Adams’ subject matter is not just pristine beauty, but the reality of what’s out there,” Chuang says. “Some photographers make their photos so real that the beauty is gone. But in Robert Adams’ work, the world is not all good and not all bad. Everything is somewhere at the middle. That’s so true to the complexity of life.”
The exhibit is made up of about 250 small-format black-and-white photographs. Chuang says that Adams considers color to be “like free verse, so much going on, so many variables.
“People react to color, and there’s no way of telling how people will react to the color red,” Chuang says. “Color is a superfluous element. Black and white is the way he prefers to see the world.”
The show has a wide variety of themes, each played out in its own dedicated gallery space. “The Plains” shows Adams’ love for what many see as a desolate landscape. Throughout the exhibit, the wall text near the photos is minimal, and Adams wrote it all himself. About the Great Plains, he writes “Mystery in this landscape is a certainty, an eloquent one. There is everywhere silence.”
“Eden” and “Ludlow” are series of photos taken by Adams of towns by those names in Colorado. The “Los Angeles Spring” and “The Pacific” photo series were taken when Adams was living in Southern California and Oregon, and document both the unspoiled areas that remais and those that were gone, what Chuang calls “a balance of beauty and decay.” Other series focus on cottonwood trees and alder leaves, the latter beautifully silhouetted against the sky but eaten away by insects.
Adams is best known for the work that makes up the group “What We Bought,” a sad chronicle of a mid-century population boom in Colorado Springs. Ironically, the people who were drawn to the state’s natural beauty came in such great numbers that development robbed the state of much of that beauty.
“In a few years, however, the area’s ruin would be testament to a bargain we had tried to strike. The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid, and what we could not buy. They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love,” Adams writes.
Tract housing and random development figure prominently in the exhibit, a fabricated backdrop where humans live their lives, blocking the view of the natural backdrop. The exhibit’s most haunting image is of a shadowy silhouette of a woman deep inside a common home, alone in the dark while the sun shines brightly outside. “In a New Subdivision” shows two people chatting between newly built homes, with nothing in the background except more cookie-cutter houses. “Pike’s Peak” does show that iconic peak in the background, but with a brightly lit gas station in the foreground.
On the fourth floor of the museum, Adams’ jaded observation grows into fury, in his “Turning Back” series of clear-cut forests. “As I recorded these scenes, I found myself asking many questions, among them: What of equivalent value have we inherited in exchange for the original forest? Is there a relationship between clearcutting and war, the landscape of one being in some respects like the landscape of the other? Does clearcutting originate in disrespect? Does it teach violence? Does it contribute to nihilism? Why did I never meet parents walking there with their children?”
Still, while Adams mourns for the world that existed before human intervention, he does not look down on humans themselves. His charming “Our Parents, Our Children” series of snapshots photos of people in a store parking lot — taken with a camera hidden in a shopping bag — is accompanied by this musing: “If we come upon innocence, beauty, caring, joy, or courage, even in lost places, are we not obliged to acknowledge them in defiance of ironists?”
“ROBERT ADAMS: THE PLACE WE LIVE” will be at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St. (at York Street) in New Haven, until Sunday, Oct. 28. Hours are Tuesday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday 1 to 6 p.m. Admission is free. Details: artgallery.yale.edu.
