Blasts from the Past

Yes, and Robert Adams is also one of the best writers on photography. I return to the essays in "Why People Photograph" and "Beauty in Photography" whenever I need a lift or lose faith.

Because Adams is all about faith--in the medium, in the process of trying to decipher what we are looking at and reveal its significance (the mysterious thing that stopped us in the first place).

Your quote from Szarkowski puts its finger on another key word regarding Adams--love, which is not far removed from faith.

I haven't seen The New West in full, and it's been awhile since I've seen the photos from it that are available in anthologies and such. But my feeling is that his perfection of form may temper or disguise the intensity of his dismay. Love and dismay may be more in balance in some of his later books, such as "Summer Nights" and "To Make It Home."

Which isn't a knock on those books. On the contrary, the embrace of the scarred landscape, the willingness to face what our own kind have wrought (without exempting himself), raise the pictures above polemic.

Adams doesn't wag his finger at his fellow man. Though you feel his pain (and share the shame) you never doubt his faith in the power of art to redeem through order and aesthetics. The subtitle of "Beauty in Photography" is "Essays in Defense of Traditional Values." Adams never takes refuge in cynicism, and I don't think he goes in much for simple irony, pretty remarkable for an artist whose sensibility is so contemporary.

Defending the beauty of what endures, even in the face of appalling loss, gives Adams' photographs a spiritual dimension more persuasive, to me, than the paeans to unspoiled nature of Ansel Adams (no relation to Robert, as far as I know).

In the section of R. Adams' "Looking Back" that deals with the clear-cutting of Western old-growth forests, he almost loses his cool, and little wonder. Somehow he keeps a lid on his outrage, but these pictures are his most wrenching that I have seen.

Yet there is beauty--however gruesome and grotesque--in what he allows himself (and us) to take in.

The critic Max Kozloff wrote in an essay about Adams' pictures of the American West,

"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."

I disagree that there is no tenderness in Adams, but Kozloff's summation is damn good writing (unlike what Richard was rightly flaying a few days ago.)

One last thing about Adams. He can photograph things that, unlike the landscape, are moving and changing before his very eyes. Namely, people. He isn't just a tripod guy.

One of his lesser known books, "Our Lives and Our Children: Photographs Taken Near the Rocky Flat Nuclear Weapons Plant" (1983) is full of uncanny off-kilter photographs of people going about their daily lives, doing mundane things like shopping, seemingly oblivious yet somehow apprehensive.

I wonder what I would have read into the pictures without that slyly understated title. I'll never know, because once you view the pictures in light of the title, a dread creeps up on you. After I looked at the book for the first time, I recall feeling like I needed to lie down until I regained my equilibrium.