NYT Adams

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/arts/design/20chan.html?8hpib=&pagewanted=print

I liked this from the end of the review:

"Often there is no point of focus, no center, in a picture by Mr. (Robert) Adams. You don't immediately know what you are looking at. The images require unpacking. People are mostly absent, too, save for the machinery and wreckage they sometimes leave behind.



Mr. Adams descends from a long line of Western photographers, starting with great ones like Timothy O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins, but including the early surveyors who mapped the landscape. "At their best," Mr. Adams has said about these journeymen surveyors, they "accepted limitations and faced space as the anti-theatrical puzzle it is — a stage without a center. The resulting pictures have an element almost of banality about them.

You can detect the influence of Walker Evans and then of the whole cool, stripped down aesthetic of minimalism and post-minimalist land art, which emerged on the scene, claiming its stake out West, as Mr. Adams did, during the 1960's and 70's. Many of the pictures in "Turning Back" linger over stretches of cleared timber, branches littering the foreground like bones at a mass grave, the clinical affect mitigating pictorial theatrics.



The memorial mood is gradually superseded and overwhelmed by the uplifting sense of a photographer who really sees. The grace of well-made art is its own form of redemption, Mr. Adams reminds us."



He adds, as if talking about himself, "it is exactly this acknowledgment of the plain surface to things that helps legitimize the photographer's difficult claim that the landscape is coherent."

</I>Robert Adams is one of my favorite photographers. He is also one of my favorite writers about photography and photographs. I find his images anything but banal: his is a way of looking directly at things as they are but with he clarity of someone who is a great artist and calm thinker.

If you are unfamiliar with his writings and photography , start with his book 'Beauty and Photography: In Defense of Traditional Values".

My only experiences with Robert Adams' photographs have been reproductions in books. I find them less than impressive; actually more visually boring than thought provoking -- almost like they were snapshots included just to accompany and illustrate his really excellent writing. I have to wonder: are his originals, the prints themselves, of such masterful quality that when viewed one is sucked into them, or are they just photographic dry bones?

Frank, thank you for posting the link, which I would have otherwise missed. Michael Kimmelman's fine review presents the artwork and its subject with appropriate dignity. The phrase "serving reality" is an apt way to see Robert Adams' work.

Ellis, I agree with your assessment. I also find the presentation of subject matter within Adams' photographs to be intellectually and emotionally honest. A singularity of vision informs his visual work and his writing. They come from the same heart.

Thanks, Ellis.

I also share your feelings toward Adams. I often get confused by the "banal" and "snapshot" kinds of comments, because the subtleties of his images seem so rich and lush to me.

I also feel that most of the praise of his work stops short of where it ought to go. So much of what's written about him seems to suggest he hasn't done anything new since the '70s, but he's done whole bodies of work since then. The newer work comes from the same man and the same search, but has gone so much farther--beyond loss and bitterness to different kinds of acceptance and restored affection. If anyone hasn't seen Listening to the River, West from the Columbia, Cottonwoods, or Summer Nights, I'd urge you to take a look.

Adams has always seemed like one of the great visionaries of the medium to me--a model of passion, honesty, and intellectual vigor somehow sustaining itself in a world dominated by fashion and cynicism.

"Adams has always seemed like one of the great visionaries of the medium to me--a model of passion, honesty, and intellectual vigor somehow sustaining itself in a world dominated by fashion and cynicism."

I absolutely agree, and did not mean otherwise just because I don't respond emotionally to his photographs. Wish I did.

Bill, no one can talk you into changing your favorite flavor of ice cream!

I do wonder if if you've spent time with any of those books I mentioned ... and I mean really spent some time. A lot of his work takes a while to start revealing itself.

I wonder whether Adams' work might suffer in the eyes of some as it falls outside the mainstream of "popular fine art," that is, fine art photographs that depend on large scale, immediate visual impact, more direct iconography, or overtly tugging at the heartstrings. More subtle, literate work like Adams' can be overlooked. I've found it worth spending time with.

After reading Kimmellmans "fine review...appropriate dignity...", I'm motivated to see more of Adams work. What turns me off is the B.S. spread by reviewers, the images can speak for themselves.

I think that for the many people who hope to find in landscapes what they see in the work of the other Adams, Robert Adams's photos can seem to be saying nothing at all. Although I do wonder if anyone not already interested in his work would bother reading a review about it, let alone going to see it in a gallery after reading the review.

"Robert Adams's photos can seem to be saying nothing at all"

In the interest of fairness and self-education I made a trip to the library today to look some more at Adams' work. They had "Listening the River," and why we Photograph," (which is already in my library), but "West from the Columbia" has disappeared from the shelves. My conclusion: his photographs "seem to be saying nothing at all" because, despite his eloquent prose, they do indeed have nothing to say.

"... they do indeed have nothing to say."

wow, so everyone who loves his work must be hallucinating. thank you so much for clearing that up for me.

it really rubs me the wrong way when people write defensive nonsense like this when they don't get something. if you don't get it, say you don't get it. if you don't see it, say you don't see it. but to authoritatively announce that there's nothing there is both presumptuous and ridiculous. it suggests that the whole world of people who love something or collect it or study it must be engaged in some kind of conspiracy.

it's great that you made the effort to look at the work. it's sad that you assume that anything worth seeing will be obvious to you with a single viewing. and sadder that you so easily dismiss it.

As they say in my home town: none so deaf as them that won't hear.

God bless Robert Adams.

I wrote my masters thesis (1983) about the history of American landscape photography and focused on contrasting the aesthetics of AA and RA. My original intention was to contrast the two, but as I got to know RA I began to see an evolution rather than a contradiction and came to deeply appreciate his writings, his art, who he is as a person and his profound vision of the American West.

"I began to see an evolution rather than a contradiction ..."

this is exactly what i see, and why it's always struck me as strange when people see a dichotomy. the main difference seems to be that ansel sticks fairly close to the esthetic of nineteenth century romantic painting, even when he adopts the lessons of modernism.

but if you look at weston it's a different story. there's a straight line continuum from weston's early modernist phase to his landscape phase to his social landscape phase; walker evans continues on the same trajectory; then guys like friedlander and eggleston and robert adams continue it further still. excetp that r. adams maintains the most traditional roots of the late 20th century guys; he takes as much from the vision of the 19th century survey photographers as he does from the modernists.

i think the misunderstanding is all about subtlety. some work wears its emotions on its shirt sleeves; some doesn't. maybe if you're accustomed to the former it's difficult to see the point of the latter. if anything, my prejudice has slowly crept the other way. i'm more and more easily bored by work that seems to be telling me how to feel.

To me "from the Missouri West" is both a masterwork and a milestone in the history of American Landscape Photography. It is in many ways a lament to the failed optimism of the romanticism of the previous generation.

His images also remind me of the mental landscapes conjured up by the writings of Cormack McCarthy, one of my favorite western authors.