Collection Publications: To the Mouth of the Columbia: Photographs by Robert Adams

Adams was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937. His family settled in Denver, Colorado, in 1952, where he spent the summers working and camping throughout the West with friends and family. After attending college and graduate school in Southern California, Adams returned to Colorado in the early 1960s to teach English. It was also at this time that he purchased his first camera. As his facility with the medium grew, it became the conduit for a continuing exploration and understanding of the landscape. By 1970, Adams had stopped teaching to devote himself fully to photography. His work became known through a number of important exhibitions, including "Photographs by Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, "New Topographies: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape," organized by the George Eastman House in 1975, and a 1989 retrospective, "To Make It Home: Photographs of the American West," which traveled throughout the United States. Adams has published numerous monographs, including The New West: Landscapes along with the Colorado Front Range; Denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area; From the Missouri West; Perfect Times, Perfect Places; and Listening to the River, as well as two collections of essays on the practice of photography. Throughout the twentieth century, American landscape photographers sought out dramatic scenery that reinforced the myth of a pristine and unpopulated West. Adams was among the first photographers to turn his lens away from the thin sliver of terrain that remained wilderness, often confined within the boundaries of a national park, and toward the everyday landscape. Upon his return from Southern California, Adams had been startled and distressed by the expansion of the suburbs around Denver and north along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. The characteristics of the West that he most cherished-- a sense of space, silence, and the possibility of walking undisturbed for hours-- were obscured not only by the weight of an expanding population, but by the dismal quality of the developments huddled along the flank of the mountains. Undertaking a dispiriting task, Adams began to photograph this new landscape. In the essay "Truth and Landscape," he explained: Our discouragement in the presence of beauty results, surely, from the way we have damaged the country, from what appears to be our inability now to stop, and from the fact that few of us can any longer hope to own a piece of undisturbed land. Which is to say that what bothers us about primordial beauty is that it is no longer characteristic. Unspoiled places sadden us because they are, in an important sense, no longer true.' There is a desolation and severity to Adams's photographs of the Front Range. Although every frame carries evidence of human intrusion, his images are notably devoid of people. Our view of the horizon is obstructed, the silhouette of the mountains blocked by row after row of roofs. An undisturbed vista is nowhere to be found. While his photographs may appear removed at first, Adams asks us to look more carefully: Paradoxically, however, we also need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolute persistent beauty. The subject of these pictures is, in this sense, not the tract homes and freeways but the source of all Form, light. The Front Range is astonishing because it is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. In their ability to unite the physical qualities of the subject with the qualities of the print, Adams's photographs are an expression of the medium at its most effective. There is a remarkable empath y in his prints. In their dry, austere tone we feel the sun burn the back of our necks as it beats against the siding of a house. We shield our eyes from the raking afternoon light. In recognizing the care and sensitivity with which these photographs were made, we are able to love these places as they are. Adams returned to Southern California in 1982 and 1983, when he made the series Los Angeles Spring. Monumental images, the photographs are larger in scale and scope than those of Denver, befitting the city that created the sprawl that has overtaken the contemporary urban West. They are also relentlessly bleak: 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. Even now we can almost extrapolate an Eden from what has lasted‚—from the architecture of old eucalyptus trunks, for example, and from the astringent perfume of the trees' flowers as it blends with the sweetness of orange blossoms‚—¶ Whether those trees that stand are reassuring is a question for a lifetime. 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. The heaviness of the air is palpable‚—the smog that suffocates Southern California seeps from every corner of these prints. Yet they are also charged with pathos. They seem to suggest that a tree can, in its gesture, mourn, that a mountain can struggle to free itself from a shroud of haze. Seen alongside these photographs from Los Angeles Spring, Southwest from the South of Jetty appears transcendent. The geography is stunning‚—the mouth of the Columbia River is four miles across, and nearly as far west as one can travel in the United States. It is a place that Adams has returned to over many years, and to which he and his wife‚—¶ relocated. These rpints embody a feeling of abandon in the radiance of the light‚—light not simply revealing of form but form itself. In the meditative cadence of the surf and its continual renewal, there seems to be an anodyne to the damaged landscape he left behind. These photographs also serve, however, as a reminder that few places have been left untouched: At the end of the Columbia River there is an especially complex weaving of suggestion. This is the farthest point to which Lewis and Clark traveled in their exploration of the American frontier. Today the shore of the estuary is becoming crowded with human activity‚—there are condominiums, malls, airports, mooring basins‚—even while the estuary itself remains home to a reduced but still significant population of marine animals. The air is usually clean, but the river carries dioxins from paper mills and radionuclides from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Situated along a bend in the Columbia River about 370 miles upstream, Hanford is the government facility that refined plutonium for the nuclear weapons arsenal. Invisible in the shimmering surface of the river, the level of radioactive byproducts entering the river from Hanford is over 500 times above EPA standards. Robert Adams's photographs of the West are among the truest and most affectionate images ever made of this country. They are also among the most challenging. We are asked to acknowledge what we have made of the landscape and, more difficultly, to consider what it is we love. Given that the West has been forever altered, how will we choose to treat what we have left? What obligations do we owe a place? In his photograph Berthoud, Colorado, 1976, a lamp casts the shadow of a tree across the side of a frame house; the cover of darkness creates a sense of stillness and security. But, most importantly, this photograph offers us a moment of grace. In the precision of the line drawn by the lowest plank of siding as it rests upon its stone foundation, there is confirmation that small moments of perfection can still be found, and that in these we can take comfort and build hope.

--Toby Jurovics Assistant Curator of Photography