Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968

Art in America, March, 2002 by Leo Rubinfien

Robert Adams is preeminent among the many photographers who have concerned themselves with the urban development of the once-wild lands of the American West. He began to photograph on the Colorado high plains in 1965, and the subjects of his broad body of work have included the spreading of tract houses along the Rockies; strip malls, parking lots, freeways, cheap motels and garishly lit discount houses; abused land and brutalized animals; the defunct orange estates of outer Los Angeles; the ruined forests of coastal Oregon, and the adult and child citizens of the new West as he finds them, often enough, marooned in bleak trailer parks or graceless rooms.

Adams had no formal training in photography, but took it up after earning a Ph.D. in English for the love of literature and then becoming disillusioned by the academic life. He absorbed the influences of Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston ans Timothy O'Sullivan, as well as those of writers and filmmakers--from Dickinson to Roethke, from Ozu to Godard. He composed two little-known books of his early photographs of the simple, elegant, antique architecture of the plains--White Churches of the Plains (1970), and The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado (1974)--but had already turned to the artifacts and landscape of the modern West before they were published, thus making the central decision of his career. In so doing, he found the themes and style that would define his pictures for the next three and a half decades. The first of his books in which these concerns were evident is the celebrated The New West (1974), whose foreword, by John Szarkowski, associates Adams with Thoreau and identifies the dilemma that powers Adams's work: "He has, without actually lying, discovered in these dumb and artless agglomerations of boring buildings the suggestion of redeeming virtue." Since The New West, Adams has published 18 more collections of photographs, of which the most admired are perhaps Denver (1977), From the Missouri West (1980), Summer Nights (1985), Los Angeles Spring (1986), What We Bought (1995) and Eden (1999). He has had many one-man exhibitions at major museums and galleries in America and Europe, including a retrospective, "To Make It Home," which was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989 and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. He became a MacArthur fellow in 1994, and moved from Colorado to Astoria, Ore., after producing West from the Columbia: Views from the River Mouth (1995), a luministic body of work largely concerned with the Pacific Ocean. In the last year, he has been photographing, among other subjects, the ravaged areas of the Coast Range, where entire mountainsides of forest are unselectively harvested or "clear-cut."

Adams, who is eloquent on many subjects, represents that strain in the art of photography--evident particularly in America--in which photographers have nurtured literary interests, searched for what their medium might share with literature, and been (like Walker Evans, Wright Morris and Szarkowski, among others) superb writers of English. He has published two books of essays on photography--Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981) and Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews (1994)--as well as various pieces on the natural world and its misuse The most extensive of the latter is the bitter essay "In the American West Is Hope Possible," which appeared in the monograph To Make It Home Dedicated viewers and readers of Adams's work thus often find their understanding of his pictures somewhat informed by his writing, but, as the present essay maintains, the photographs contain a crystallized ambiguity that the writing never fully explains or captures. The complete set of photographs that appeared as What We Bought was acquired by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2001. Adams's most recent large exhibition, "Sunlight, Solitude, Democracy, Home ...," was presented in 2001 at Reed College, Portland, Ore., and included 80 photographs made between 1968 and 1990. A fuller version of the following essay appears in the show's catalogue.



Even today, Americans think of their West as new and full of possibility, and perhaps it is. when it becomes hard to gain or hold a stake in cruel Washington or fierce New York, we still say with Willy Loman's son Biff, "I could be happy out there." As late as World War II you could not drive from Chicago to the Pacific without leaving paved road, and it was only 50 years earlier that the superintendent of the 1890 census, in the report made famous by Frederick Jackson Turner, declared that the frontier was no more. Just before the Civil War its newness was feared--people of European descent who went to dwell in the prairie or desert would, it was widely said, fall into savagery, becoming nomadic hunters and herders like the Indians, or preying on each other as bandits. In the 1960s, when the Santa Clara Valley was still rich with plum and apricot and nobody thought of naming it for silicon, you could tell the standing of the best families from the number of times they went back East each year; on Nob Hill today, the Union Club inhabits a lordly mansion that was built of the somber brown stone of Brooklyn Heights and Boston, and still directs to the Atlantic cities anyone in white and blue San Francisco who might doubt where authority truly sits. The small Palo Alto garage where Hewlett and Packard built their first oscillators is honored by a plaque embossed with the California grizzly, but the setting is a garden of dusty sage and fragrant, windblown lavender, and although the plaque was fashioned of the same heavy bronze, it has little of the imperial stateliness of, say, the one on Manhattan island that commemorates the hanging of Nathan Hale near the foundation stone of the Yale Club, at Vanderbilt and 44th. 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 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, 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."

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" - that were the product of the frontier. They had been traded for what Parkman called the "irresistible commonplace," 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.

Adams is not precisely an elegist, and although he is often compared to Edward Hopper, in whose mysteriously reserved art the elaborate cornice and the vacant windows beyond the El seem to offer a great promise and at once to leave unknown whether it will ever be fulfilled, Adams's pale gray photographs lack the compensations of crimson and sun-gold. Neither will you find much in them like the romantic, undressed lady who hugs her knees on the bare, melancholy bed, and gazes blankly out a window full of dying afternoon. Their tone is, rather, that of a keeper of accounts--they seem empty of passion or bias and are so undramatically composed as to appear at times to be formless; they are meticulous, factual, orderly, scrupulous in detail. In this Adams recalls one side of Thoreau, whose first chapter of Walden was "Economy" and who reported with pride that, in eight months at the pond, he paid out $1.73 for molasses, 99 3/4 cents for Indian meal ("cheaper than rye") and two pennies for one watermelon. The uninvaded natural landscape is rare in Adams's best work--it is the encounter of man-made and natural that concerns him before all else--and the first action of his pictures is usually to measure the extent of the human, to ask how far have we gone? how much has been lost? If America long ago overran the 2,000-mile frontier across which civilization once faced the wild, it still now has a million frontiers in microcosm, like one dark monolith in southwestern Colorado that the desert wind sculpted for thousands of years, revealing in the rock's striations a three-dimensional map of geological time (Untitled, Latimer County, Colorado, 1979--rock formation and beer bottle). One of the rock's very newest visitors marked his day with almost the care you give to placing votives at a shrine, by setting at its base a drained-out bottle of beer. All over Adams's ledger are painstaking entries written in red. Ruin is everywhere.



Occasionally in Adams the touch of the human is exquisite--as with one delicate, unpaved, unmarked road through the Pawnee Grassland that takes you out from a haft-mile-wide shadow into 10 miles of glorious light, and gives you a little of that joy you have in those rare dreams in which you find that you can fly (Untitled, Pawnee Grassland, 1973--prairie road). More often our intrusion is brutal, as on one clear-cut mountainside in Oregon where the tree stumps have all been burned (Clear-Cut and Burned, East of Arch Cape, Oregon, 1976--slope in shadow) and the scorched ground and a sinister, circular roadhead call up in the mind such mythic precincts as the assault helicopter's bloody landing zone and the grisly site of the ritual sacrifice. Adams brings an assayer's exactness to the points where the human and natural meet. He can tell you where in the mowed-down forests of the Coast Range the timber companies have engaged landscape architects to conceal the damage; what substances poison the Columbia River in which seasons, and which of the salmon boats in the river's mouth were brought around from the Gulf of Mexico, have keels meant for calm, not ocean water, and are likely to capsize in the 80-foot waves of a Pacific storm; where an arroyo at the edge of Denver was gouged not by wind or snowmelt but by the tires of dirt bikes (An Arroyo Worn by Motorcycles, Denver, early 1970s); where an elegant silver dollar of a pond in the prairie is not a miraculous work of nature, as the uninformed viewer will think, but a bulldozed water hole (Bulldozed Water Hole, Weld County, Colorado, late 1970s). If he is sometimes entranced by the blatantly horrible--"several men step out of a jeep, and, firing from the road, shoot the legs from a fawn before killing it" --what is more remarkable is his connoisseurship. In the text for Los Angeles Spring, for example, he recalls a gully beside a freeway, in a wasteland scraped bare by great machines. There, with superb precision, he recognized as "some farm woman's treasure" three kumquat bushes that--although she was long gone and her house reduced to debris--had covered themselves with hopeful golden fruit, not knowing the year to be different from any other.

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would ... be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample ... we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! ... Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her.... She flourishes most alone, far from the towns.... Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.
Though he addresses us gorgeously and with no lack of confidence, Thoreau was already in his own time a dissenter, a solitary, not much of a democrat, and well on the way to the skepticism of the 20th century. The more popular view of the natural world, then and now, was expressed by Emerson, who wrote that "Nature is ... made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mold into what is useful." From here it is a short way to the extermination of the plains buffalo and the inundation of Glen Canyon, and to Walt Whitman, who loved and, more important, trusted the vulgar crowd that Thoreau reviled. Whitman follows directly from Emerson with a glorious paean to the transcontinental railroad, the "passage to India":

... seest thou not God's purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann'd, connected by network ...
The lands to be welded together.
A worship new I sing
You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours
You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours
You, not for trade or transportation only
But in God's name, and for thy sake O soul.

If we still preserve of Thoreau the strain of thought and feeling which has it that people and what they love and make are worth less than water, tree, deer, hawk and cloud, and that you do not own your farm, that it owns you, most Americans have been students of Whitman anyway. We have believed that we can domesticate the continent and build something better than what was here before the first Europeans came over. For most of their history Americans have had that much optimism, that much confidence in their abilities.

In the last 50 years it has been popular to say that we have made Whitman's road to India into many hideous freeways, and that, roaring down them with fear and loathing past the diamond as big as the Ritz, we have come at last into Las Vegas, Beverly Hills and Anaheim, where Frontierland has done a good business since 1955, but to give in so much to self-derision is unjust. In the same year that Frontierland opened, exactly 10 years before Adams began to photograph on the Colorado prairie, John Kenneth Galbraith began the book in which he observed that the experience of nations with well-being is exceedingly brief. Nearly all throughout all history have been very poor. The exception, almost insignificant in the whole span of human existence, has been the last few generations in the comparatively small corner of the world populated by Europeans. Here, and especially in the United States, there has been ... quite unprecedented affluence.



Whatever its rampancies, the expansion of European America across the continent has been inseparable from the central and unique accomplishment of modern times, a sustained and enlarging prosperity. To say that this prosperity has been reached on a gasoline of greed, that violence has often occurred and waste and devastation have been frequent is reasonable, but you cannot honestly despise the tract of uniform houses, the discount store too full of goods that meet dubious needs, the rant of advertising that would teach you to believe that you need them after all, without also recalling that "poverty had always been man's normal lot ... not the elegant torture of the spirit which comes from contemplating another man's more spacious possessions [but] the unedifying mortification of the flesh, from hunger, sickness and cold." In Adams's New West, the new thing is not an America that has been filled up, but an America that has become rich.

It is a paradox of Adams's work that what he eloquently says in his essays and book texts, and in conversation, is not exactly the same as what his photographs say. For him, the ruination of the western country has been painful, and he has put this into despairing words again and again, with force. His pictures, however, almost always stand carefully back. Unmitigated damage is not usually their central subject, any more than unharmed nature; the jackrabbit crushed on the highway (On Interstate 25, late 1960s--rabbit carcass), the mauled, burnt forest slope at Arch Cape, and the ethereal ocean and gleaming air at the continent's misty end (the series "Southwest from the South Jetty, Clatsop County, Oregon," 1990) are all exceptions. More often, the photographs seem less to brood over what has been destroyed, over what we have spent, than to ask (as the title of one of his most powerful books compactly and bitterly says it) what we bought. Although Adams is often called a landscapist, majestic alps are missing from his work, and where he gives us the seared mesa, the lumpish butte, the scree slope, mud-flat, ice-shelf and dry gulch (and while these often have an austere majesty of their own kind), they are most important as the measure of the human work that has scarred them, trussed them with fences, besmirched them with garbage. The landscape is of interest in and of itself, yes, but as the ground on which we act and demonstrate ourselves, it tells us what we are. The sun-shocked miles of Jefferson County ask the reason for the naked ranch houses that have strung themselves out over the dusty grass (North Table Mountain, Jefferson County, Colorado, late 1970s); the soft, bright Pacific air and the immaculate sand in a flood wash of the Santa Ana River demand the meaning of the Air Force C-5 that floats in the luminous distance (Santa Ana Wash, Norton Air Force Base, California, 1979--transport plane); the grandeur of a great mesa and one wide-open day in Pueblo County press us to say whether the snarl of tire tracks on the mesa's top is not like the wild, random tangle that is democracy (Quarried Mesa Top, Pueblo County, Colorado, 1978). One doubts that the simple presence of human industry in the natural world is what really offends Adams. In this he differs from the naturalist and polemicist Edward Abbey, though he names him as a principal influence on his work (the intolerant Abbey wished that people might be expelled from vast ranges of the West except where they were willing to walk there over hundreds of miles, and he considered the great national parks an insult, in that they preserved a fraction of the land in an exhibition case while giving up the rest to commerce). In an Adams photograph, the castoff length of rusty cable, the bare white church on the silent flatland, the shaggy eucalyptus of a defunct windbreak in the pavedover groves of Los Angeles are not repellent. Plastic is. So are cheap goods en masse, savage cuttings into the natural contours of the earth, and, above all, advertisements, intrusions that seem to express an arrogance that the dirt road and the elegant high plains windmill do not. The old cable will degrade into ferrous grit, and enough winters will return the dirt road to grass, but the Styrofoam trash that fouls the weeds of Adams's vacant lots and freeway embankments will endure for a long time, as will the mental damage we are done by the outsized, theatrical proclamations of the billboards (see numerous photographs in Denver and What We Bought). They inflict on the innocent future the adamant and thoughtless hungers of the present.

We are reminded of Galbraith again, in whose bitter, tragic view the peculiar mechanism of the affluent society was what he called the "production of want": for the sake of the humane goal of economic stability, of giving people work to do, we had always to be making more house trailers, french fries and self-adhesive wallpaper; but in order that so many things might be bought and paid for, we had to persuade ourselves that we needed them. The artificial stimulation of want--the conversion of want into greed--and the waste and psychological distortion that follow from it, became the cost of security:

"Were it so that a man on arising each morning was assailed by demons which instilled in him a passion sometimes for silk shirts, sometimes for kitchenware, sometimes for chamber pots and sometimes for orange squash, there would be every reason to applaud the effort to find the goods, however odd, that quenched this flame. But should it be that his passion was the result of his first having cultivated the demons ... there would be question as to [whether] the solution lay with more goods or fewer demons. Production only fills a void that it has itself created."

Galbraith observed that in postwar America a person was less likely to die of malnutrition than of overeating, and in the most famous passage of his most famous book, delineated the territory Adams afterward worked to understand:

"The family which takes its ... air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are ... made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground, [and] on into a countryside ... rendered largely invisible by commercial art.... They picnic on ... packaged food ... by a polluted stream and [doze] off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of ... refuse."

"Is our real problem not one of overproduction?" asked Rachel Carson, writing four years after Galbraith on the quantities of insect poison that were used to grow food. As one moves toward the core of Adams's work, it becomes hard to believe that the ostentatiously graceless motels and junked shopping carts beside his barren highways are anything but materialized forms of waste and greed.

It is a further paradox that, although Adams might have tried to organize his efforts as a photographer to be of practical help to those people who work, professionally, to prevent the further despoilment of the American West, he has not done so. His pictures have never been anything but art, the purposes of which, in the modern period, have always been difficult to define. On the slippery question of the utility of art, he argued recently, "You give people courage. That's useful," and indeed his pictures are contrived to minister to the spirit. It is fascinating to learn that in the '50s, as a very young man, he was drawn for a short time to office in the Methodist church, and although he insists that he didn't know anything then, he went as far as obtaining a Local Preacher's License before he turned away from the metaphysical and toward the artist's world of tangible things. Bits of the language of belief often surface in his writing about pictures. He speaks of humility, of redemption, of our worthiness as people and as Americans, and he writes of "the order in art that mirrors the order in the Creation itself." Once in a while, without any embarrassment, he speaks of God.

As much of a frontier as any there is in the world today extends along the southern edge of the Sahara, where a string of impoverished settlements runs from the Atlantic as far as Niger, pulling a scanty crop out of the waterless earth. Not long ago I was walking in a village called Batama, in western Mali, and my guide there, Adama Mara, asked me, "Who you Western people talk to when you need to talk to God, when you have some problem and you need to talk?" After a moment I said that I thought that, where I came from, we had gone far away from all our old names for God and had none now on which everyone could agree, but inside myself I was always talking to someone, and this was the same thing, wasn't it? Adama thought not. He asked, "When you see that"--and he waved west at the orange-gold bleeding of the clouds near Senegal--"don't you say `This is God?' What do you say?" I said, "I say that it is beautiful." It may well be that Adama, who turned to Mecca five times each day, was already half a modern, half an American, even, in that he isolated God in unhuman nature, but he was not happy with my answer. Beautiful. "That's all you can say?" he said.

It is often noted that the most celebrated 19th-century American paintings present nature unabused as the work and the location of God. "Those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched," wrote Thomas Cole. "Amid them the consequent associations are of God the creator--they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things." Emerson wrote at just the same time of nature's "ministry to man," that nature is "ever the Ally of Religion," and that standing in its midst "I am part or parcel of God. Looking at the work of the Hudson River painters today, we feel that the God of their place and moment was thought to make vast, dramatic gestures, and was susceptible to evocation by great pourings out from the clouds of sublime light. There is little of humanity in most Hudson River School pictures, of course, and where you can find a figure, the picture is telling you how insignificant he is. In the slightly later work of the Luminists, people and their artifacts are more frequent, and the human is woven into a sweet symbiosis with nature--into what Barbara Novak called a "perfect equipoise." At the same time, God would seem to have been less easily available to them than he was to the painters of the grand landscape; he hovers for them in mists, in risings and fadings of radiance; we have of him only a qualified suggestion of a presence that might yet come some moments into the future, or of one that has departed and survives only as a glowing trace. It is useful to remember the Luminists, especially John Frederick Kensett, in the present connection. The qualities that characterize their art are conspicuous also in Adams's--exceptional lucidity; the impression of what Novak called "limitless amplitude"; "quietism"; "pure and constant light" and "transcendentalism"; what Robert Hughes identified as self-effacement, the powerful sense of time arrested, and the affinity for subjects humble and trivial. Novak wrote of the "clarity" of the Luminist atmosphere, equally "applicable both to air and crystal, to hard and soft, to mirror and void." One thinks of the glasslike transparency of a photograph by Adams, which offers the same justice to the shelf of plastic toys (Untitled, Colorado, early 1970s--child's toys in bedroom of tract house) and the blazing parking lot full of cars that it does to the immense, profound Pacific.

If I was right that in the rationalistic America of the last half century we have had no one name for God that most people can share, we nonetheless retain from the time of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Kensett a belief in the holiness of nature. At any moment, many of us will affirm that the natural world is "sacred" and speak of its "desecration," and if the exquisite harmony of man, dog, boats, sky and water that we see in Martin Johnson Heade's Approaching Thunderstorm cannot be found in the photographs of Adams, if the human in Adams is almost always the enemy of the natural, then it is not overreaching to say that the innermost subject of Adams's pictures is how far we have fallen. As we defile nature, we lose God, who is, I think, the projected conception of what we intuit to be best in ourselves. It is hard to find a human artifact in an Adams photograph that is worthy of nature, though many exist. I asked Adams recently why he had never photographed the Golden Gate Bridge, that faultless, cloud-swept interchange between a sky road and a sea road that seems not only to link San Francisco and Marin County but to span continents, and he answered, in effect, that it needed nothing from him, that it is perfect. It is imperfection, then, to which his work is dedicated. He writes that our houses and roads are "unworthy of us." To ask what we bought is to ask how well we have failed, and on the largest stage there is.

If in Adams's work the land that people have touched is full of ruin, it is yet again a paradox that he avoids the fantastic, egregious constructions of Las Vegas, Disneyland and Beverly Hills. He is uncomfortable with his own wonderful photograph of a heavy-duty garbage truck whose cab is wholly covered with the stars and stripes (Untitled, Colorado, early 1970s--garbage truck, U.S. Cargo); he seems to feel that the truck is irredeemable, too easy to denounce--and that it might better be left out of the reckoning as an anomaly, a spike above the usual trend line of ugliness. At the same time, it is rare in Adams's work (before 1990) for the purely natural world to allow much respite. Mostly, nature as he offers it to us is dismayingly foreign, uncomfortably empty, harsh and bright with sun; its details are minute and so numerous as to be overwhelming, its spaces so vast as to bring on a sort of vertigo; it often has about it some of the whiteness of the whale. God, who was already receding from us in Kensett, Heade and Fitz Hugh Lane, is here well beyond our reach. Better people might achieve a better human world in which to live, but it would still not be the natural world as the 19th century knew it. In Adams, nature is its own property and people are orphans; there is no home for us there but such home as we make; all we have is our struggle with ourselves. Even the joyless children in Adams's photographs seem--against our every protest that children are more innocent than we--already beset by responsibility, already moral, already citizens.

All this must be moderated by saying that Adams's desert is not the place where Beckett's tramps wandered and stumbled; it is the American desert, and his work never suggests that humanity is a ridiculous accident. Even in his reduced Luminism there persists the belief that nature is ordered and that God might possibly be found if we looked hard enough--or, more precisely (and in this he is most characteristically an American), if we made better things. Here again, Adams's grimmer writings dissent from his own pictures, which are made not of hopelessness, but of perfect uncertainty, of unshakable doubt. And it is not true that one is never at home, at peace, in any of his work. In addition to all those images he has made in the brightness of a too hot, too cold or too vast day, there is the extended series he made at the end of the '70s in the darkness of Fort Collins, Longmont, Denver and Colorado Springs, and which became his most unequivocally loving book. The deep shadows in Summer Nights are kind to everything that would be hideous by day, and the random scintillae strewn over the black, distant hillsides softly signal the preciousness of every life, and every wish that every life contains.

The task of Adams's photographs is explicitly stated, then, in the title of his 1986 retrospective exhibition and the book that accompanied it, "To Make It Home." "To make it home," not as in to get back home, but as in to make a home of it--to find a way of living in a world degraded and fallen. Given the dominance of the human over the natural--as Adams has set them against each other--it is a task that he can never fulfill. He can never do more, in fact, than try to make it home, and if in the prodigiousness of his photographs there is, again, something of the countless numbers punched into an old-time adding machine by a bookkeeper in an eyeshade, there is also something of the repetition with which people murmur prayers. As Adams's work was coming to prominence in the early 1970s, there was a moment when it was often associated with Minimalism in painting--when its austerity was thought by some to be ironic, and by others to represent neutrality. The name of one influential group exhibition of the period, "New Topographics," suggested that the photographers involved had been making something like maps--that they were interested in where a thing was and what it looked like, but indifferent to what it meant. It should be quite clear today that the ironic thread in Minimalism, the deadpan that it inherited from Pop art, could not be further from the feeling of Adams, who is no ironist, and will tell you straight out that art went to hell with Duchamp and Warhol. His austerity is in no way Minimalist, in the sense in which the word was meant in 1971; like that of Walker Evans (though Evans was working to a very different end), it is expressive and functional. How is this so? How is it possible to make the world home if one excludes from the start not only the Golden Gate Bridge but all such other artifacts as materialize the beauty and power of the human spirit? There is a remarkable passage in John Cheever's short story "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear," which I read to Adams recently in his studio at the mouth of the Columbia River. In it Cheever names the things of which he vows not to write. Among them he forswears:

"All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candle-lit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we--you and I--shall build."

Adams seemed to be alarmed by this, and he asked me, perhaps even with some anger, "Where does he get that confidence?" After one allows that there is here a great deal of the writer's characteristic, many-masked irony, one must still admit that Cheever longed to be able to feel the unalloyed enthusiasm we find in Whitman. "I'm not a great follower of Whitman," Adams said. One more effect of his work's meticulousness and its eschewal of drama and chiaroscuro--and of the small size of his prints, which are rarely larger than a page in a book--is to denounce all self-indulgence, all hyperbole. The pictures aim for an assiduous honesty. "Is it possible," he wrote in one essay, "for art to be more than lies?" Adams often speaks of the transfiguring power of light itself, "light that sometimes still works like an alchemy." The subject of these pictures is ... not tract homes or freeways, but the source of all Form, light. The Front Range ... is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. Even subdivisions, which we hate for the obscenity of the speculator's greed, are at certain times ... transformed to a cold, dry brilliance." Light is the source of the redemption for which his work strives, but of course the light in a photograph is not the same as the real light of the sun, the moon, the pregnant clouds and the shining sky. As soon as it is trapped on paper it is converted into something new, and no less of an artifice than the words of a hymn or a clause in a contract.

The light in an Adams photograph might be thought of as the voice in which it speaks about its houses, trees and plain, unheroic people, and it may recall to some of us the calm, patient, exacting voices of the Nadezhda Mandelstam of Hope Against Hope, the Primo Levi of The Reawakening, and the J.M. Coetzee of Boyhood. Each of these writers confronted a far greater offense than Adams, it is true, but he is with them in renouncing the poet's drunken love of sounds; with them, he prefers the fastidiousness with facts that we find in the courtroom, where the self is suppressed for the sake of fairness, and the right to judge is gained. The light in the best of Adams's photographs addresses things from a position so high, so believably impartial, that it persuades me that our flawed, human artist had, even if only in his work and only for brief spells, the ability to be fair. It is a torrent in his famous picture of the two-tone Ford that stands in a half-built cul-de-sac for everyone's hopes (New Housing, Colorado Springs, 1968--housing development under construction), and no matter what you think of tract houses and although he will tell you that the range to the west includes Cheyenne Mountain, the site of the subterranean fortress of NORAD, the light is generous even to what the photographer frankly loathes. It insists that there is nothing here that may not be innocent, that today is as good as the very first day. If Adams would have for himself the right to judge, then what is the standard by which he would do so? Without the aid of the mystic, it is not possible for us to speak of nature's value to itself. Until we are ready to say that a stone, egg or stand of wild buffalo grass is sentient, we cannot claim that the prairie will be any happier if preserved as the Pawnee Grassland than if it were made into an 18-hole golf course, or, as in a proposal I read a few years back, into a theme park where Oz was to be built in Kansas after the vision of L. Frank Baum. We can only speak of the value that the prairie, forest or ocean has to us; our own happiness is all we know how to measure.

There are two standards, then. One is the effect that any malconceived trailer park, chemical dump, eight-lane freeway or missile base may have on the physical lives of people--on their health and on their ability to function, as a society, for the good. Here, however, it is difficult for photographs to say much without the help of detailed explanations. Flying from New York to Tokyo and looking down for long hours on the immense, snowbound reaches of Alaska, one could be forgiven for thinking that people have really done very little damage to the earth at all, but it is said that small amounts of very poisonous chemicals have been found even in arctic ice. Though Adams often writes as though he wished it otherwise, no photograph can show this.

The second standard is beauty. This is of course more properly the concern of art, but while we know that its presence is good and its absence bad, neither can ever be proved; they can only be asserted. Moreover, just what beauty is has been debated for as long as we can remember, and as many formulas for obtaining it have been thrown out as have ever been incautiously essayed. It has been associated with specific prescriptions of how a work of art should look, with pleasure, with attributes of God, with moral, scientific and political truths, with heroism, innocence and Eros. Adams himself has characterized it more than once--"Beauty is, in my view, a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life.... the overriding demonstration of pattern ..."; "the photographer hopes ... to discover a tension so exact that it is peace"; "The form the photographer records ... implies an order beyond itself, a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit perfectly." I do not think that these formulations are wrong in any way, but because I think it may help, I will add to them, with some hesitation, the famous demand that the people made of the man with the blue guitar, in Wallace Stevens's poem: they wanted, he said "a tune beyond us, yet ourselves." They wanted a song that would show them what they wanted to believe they were--that would be the mirror of the best selves they imagined that they had--while still laying out all the hard evidence of what they were in fact. They needed the authority of the latter, of course, in order to trust the former, and the singer's magic would lie in making the two exist as one. The core of Adams's art is right here. It is the continual, ever-unresolved play between cleansing light and the damaged world, a sequence of argument and counter argument that in the end needs no resolution--no matter how much he and we might desire one--because that play is itself his art's transcendent point.

No honest person can speak with assurance about where nature leaves off and the human begins. If, as we are told, the atoms in our bodies were formed in remote, exploding stars an unimaginably long time ago, it is impossible to say that we are not of nature. We can only maintain that consciousness sets people apart and that we have free will, and in each claim we rely heavily on speculation and belief. We cannot say that the propagation of cities at the threshold of the Rockies was not a development of nature itself; that another was not the carving up into plywood for those cities of the forests of fog-wet Douglasf fir that, when I was a student in Oregon, still surged down the dark pitches of the Coast Range to be halted only by the overwhelming Pacific. We can only say that these acts were not beautiful, that we do not like what we have done, and avow our faith that we have the ability to be better than we have been. Well to the west of Cheever's confidence in what you and I will build is Dave Hickey's insistence that what we have done is beautiful, after all. "Vegas is a town that can serve as the heart's destination," he writes, "... where the vast majority of the population arises every morning absolutely delighted to have escaped Hometown, America" (to which, he could have added, towns in the Ukraine, Pakistan and Nigeria). "There is nothing quite as bracing as the prospect of flying home, of swooping down into that ardent explosion of lights in the pitch-black desert--of coming home to the only indigenous visual culture on the North American continent." He headed for a video poker machine as soon as he got into the airport, he says. "I knew how much of a chance I had to win. It was slim, of course, but it was ... real.... In the reality of that chance, Vegas lives--in those fluttery moments of faint but rising hope." What Turner mourned--the "buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom"--would seem to survive fairly well, then, even where we have told ourselves it can't.

One can theorize about beauty all day, but words are weak and at day's end one will go out into the blue and golden and multifarious world, and one will know with the responsive heart, before there is time for words, what is and isn't beautiful. How much is profit and how much loss must be decided on the ground, and in each of Adams's photographs a sorting out is continually going on. In one superb picture that he made on South Broadway, one Denver January three decades ago, there is the barren strip of sidewalk stretching out into the dreadful, frigid distance; there are the jury-rigged mess of light poles and the patches of worn-out, crusty snow and the frozen, stunted grass; there are the glaring sky and the irresistibly commonplace billboards and signs--"Hallcraft Towne Homes, Carefree Living at its Finest," "Orchid Beauty Academy," Old Fitzgerald," "Sharing is Caring," "15 Minute Truck Loading Only 7AM-6PM Sun & Hol Exc"--but then there is also the starburst in the rear window of somebody's Impala, a flung-off quantum of the liquid light of Walden Pond (Untitled, South Broadway, Denver, early 1970s--strip mall). In another there is a room, lit coldly by far too many fluorescent tubes, where you can go to buy nightgowns, camisoles, teddies, housecoats and dusters. They hang in a multitude on big racks, a weird party of hems with no feet beneath them, arms with no hands, necks with no heads (Untitled, Colorado, early 1970s--women's clothing on racks). You can think of them, if you like, as all the faceless women who ever crossed into Hades, but they are, equally, all the careful mothers in America; they are all the kindness of the feminine, all the consolation of sleep.

Chekhov, they say, once taught this lesson: "You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist. In Anna Karenina and Eugene Onegin not a single problem is solved, but they satisfy you completely because all the problems are correctly stated." Talking last spring with a class of students from Reed College, Adams said that it seemed to him that a lot of problems are beyond the reach of a still photographer. Many aspects of suburban living, he said, seemed to demand a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and he said that the psychological penetration of tragedy--a complex kind of tale that may involve pride, intent, evil and guilt--was impossible to achieve in a single frame. It looked to me for a moment as if he felt that a photograph were incapable of touching the large matters that tragedy does, and as if this were connected also to his unhappiness, which he has many times expressed, about the powerlessness of photographs to change the world.

I asked him whether, in an art that can't tell present from past and future, there may not still be hints of the momentous, of the biggest things. I was thinking of Diane Arbus's fearsome photograph of the Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark, in which the lipstick is failing terribly to make glamorous the ordinary lips, and which makes us feel that the consequences of such a slipping of the mask cannot be good, that we are seeing something we have no right to see. Adams replied that yes, there are hints; photographs are capable of that. I wondered then why a man with a tragic sense of life, as he describes himself, would choose a medium by which the tragic causes cannot be defined, nor their effects followed out. I would like to guess that, in Adams's case, it is just because a strong photograph is so very ambiguous, so very open-ended--because it affords its maker neither the Sophoclean catharsis nor the melodrama's happy ending. Must we think that the incomplete story that a photograph tells is weak for its incompleteness, or is it possible that the incompleteness is an essential part of the story--that we cannot know the meanings of our actions, or predict their outcomes, as well as the artist would like? Is it not possible that Adams has chosen to lay form very lightly upon the world exactly because this is the truest way he knows of speaking about it, because we cannot know whether we will come to a good end or a bad, or even know how much we know? To show the subject accurately, he wrote of his early, fundamental decision about how his pictures must work, "required that I stop sorting things out by the degree to which they were picturesque; if beauty were to be discovered in Denver, it had to be on the basis of a radical faith in inclusion."

The doubt that the work celebrates is not the same as the angry alienation of the fashionable rejectionist; neither is it the passivity of the man who counts all evils to be equal, or who calls a flawed good no better than an evil because it is imperfect. It is, rather, the active refusal to render the world beautiful just because we desperately want it to be that way, combined with the refusal to render it ugly just because we distrust our longing for beauty. It is at all times reckoning each against the other, and it is authentically hopeful for as long as the doubter can persuade himself that he is reckoning truthfully, of which he must of course persuade himself anew, every moment his eyes are open. One would like to say that, in his hard practicality, his respect for fact, his curiosity, his skepticism, his joy in the physical and his conviction that there is no better judge than he, such a doubter as Robert Adams preserves the values of the American West that we had feared were lost. One would like to say that, as long as such doubters can still be found and their stories remain unfinished, our West is indeed new, but of course one cannot know.




BOOKS: Robert Adams

* Summer Nights, Walking (2009)
* The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range - Third Edition (2008)
* What We Bought: The New World: Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area, 1970-1974 (2009)
* denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area, 1970-1974 (2008)
* Gone (2010)


VIDEO: Robert Adams

* Art:21 - Episode #045: Robert Adams in his Oregon home
* Art:21 - Episode #041: Robert Adams with photographs in his Oregon studio
* Art:21 - Episode #002: Robert Adams with photogravure plates for Harney County, Oregon (1999-2003) in his Oregon studio.


ASX CHANNEL: Robert Adams

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