Abbott,
Berenice
Adams,
Ansel
Adams,
Robert
Alvarez Bravo
Arbus,
Diane
Atget,
Eugene
Bellocq,
E.J.
Blossfeldt,
Karl
Brandt,
Bill
Brassai
Callahan,
Harry
Cameron, Julia M.
Coburn, Alvin L.
Cunningham,Imogen
DeCarava,
Roy
Doisneau,
Robert
Eggleston,
William
Evans,
Walker
Friedlander,
Lee
Gutmann,
John
Hine,
Lewis
Kertesz,
Andre
Klein,
William
Koudelka,
Josef
Lange,
Dorothea
Lartigue,Jacques H.
Laughlin,Clarence J.
Levitt,
Helen
Mapplethorpe,Robert
Modotti,
Tina
Muybridge,Eadweard
Nadar,
Felix
O'Sullivan,
Timothy
Outerbridge,
Paul
Porter,Eliot
Riis,
Jacob
Rodchenko,Alexander
Salgado,Sebastio
Sherman,
Cindy
Smith,
W. Eugene
Sommer,
Frederick
Steichen,
Edward
Stieglitz,
Alfred
Strand,
Paul
Talbot,William H. Fox
Uelsmann,
Jerry
Weegee
Weston,
Edward
White,
Minor
Winogrand, Garry |
|
Robert
Adams
Biography: ...Landscape seems to call upon us to be intimate
with ourselves, as if to awaken in us pleasures, memories, or
hopes that are not yet acculturated. The meaning of landscape
is arguably bound up with an appeal to the illusion that within
each of us lies something unshareable and not yet socialized.
This is partly because of the ineffability of ungrasped sensation
perceived in the far reaches of land under open air and partly
because it still pleases North Americans to fantasize about nature
not as culture and therefore not as a communal experience. Of
course we know very well that the reserve into which we place
our ideas of nature is a cultural reserve. But perhaps alone among
the developed nations, we can still imagine our actual contact
with nature to extend past that reserve, as if there were a frontier
we hadn't yet transgressed. One photographer who knowingly works
within that conflict between the imagined and the transgressed
is Robert Adams.
Off the freeway near Colton, California, Adams climbed an eroded
hillock. Fumes, haze, and effluents halate the otherwise graphically
silhouetted black-and-white tones of photographs such as this
and others he made for his book Los Angeles Spring. While the
effects are redundant, the compositions are individually realized,
each of them variants in an expanding poetic search. What Adams
achieves is a poetry of depredation. In an era of landscape color,
the black and white strikes a memorial note, and a curious mournfulness
pervades scenes of an otherwise humdrum brutality. It's not that
Adams appears to think tenderly of these undeserving views, but
that in capturing them as moments of lonely experience he projects
them back into a nineteenth-century landscape tradition and perceives
their horizons as seemingly deserted now as they were then. A
weariness of view fuses with the freshness of radiant seeing,
as if Robert Frank's vision of a fifties America had blended with
the imagery of Carleton Watkins's post-Civil War Yosemite. Adams
shows withered eucalyptus trees, abandoned orange groves, and
bulldozed, broken stretches of earth. Having earned his attention,
they stay in mind as naturalized forms, lost to a process symbolized
by the road or developers' trails.
In the introduction to The American Space: Meaning in Nineteenth-Century
Landscape Photography, Adams writes, "Physically much of
the land [the West] is almost as empty as it was when Jackson
and Timothy O'Sullivan photographed there, but the beauty of the
space-the sense that everything in it is alive and valuable-is
gone." Adams considers the nineteenth-century photographers
privileged because the clean skies they saw could illustrate the
"opening verses of Genesis about light's part in giving form
to the void." Their cameras could take their fill of scenes
that are now obscured or faded out by an amorphous whiteness against
which the reminiscent photographer now has to struggle to describe
depth.
In Los Angeles Spring, that description and the conventionally
nostalgic desire that went with it is foiled, leaving us to judge
only unkempt things in the foreground. Deep space is equated with
a past we cannot restore. Consequently, these recent images evoke
a regret about the wealth of information steamed out in the light.
They are comparative pictures.They imaginatively comprehend a
span of events in which affection for nature must be misplaced
if it is to have any object at all. (Max Kozloff - Lone Visions,
CrowdedFrames)
More on Robert Adams:
Documenta
X
Biography and Images of Robert Adams
|
Profotos > Education
> Reference Desk > Photography Masters > Robert Adams |
|