Collection Publications: Robert Adams: From the Missouri West

Robert Adams: From the Missouri West

In 1975, the photographer Robert Adams (American, born 1937) turned his camera to the open spaces that had met the West's first explorers and settlers, relying upon images from the 1860s and 1870s by artists including William Bell, William Henry Jackson, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, A. J. Russell, and Carlton Watkins as his guide. No longer untouched or heroic, however, the places Adams photographed over the next three years mapped more than a century of impact and abuse that extended to nearly every corner of a land that had once seemed limitless: "When else has a region of more than a million square miles been so damaged in so short a time? We catch ourselves thinking, in the bitterness that can accompany the unexpected sound of an aluminum can bending underfoot, that it would have been merciful if Columbus had been wrong and the world flat, with an edge from which to fall, rather than a circular cage that returns us to our mistakes. The geography seems hopeless."' ...Selections from Adams's publication From the Missouri West (1980) [which are in] the museum's permanent collection... [are] arguably the most pivotal body of his work [and where] we find Adams reaching his maturity as a photographer and a printmaker. These images are not structured as a single narrative journey,but rather as a transit along the periphery of the modern West, skirting the massive suburbs that characterize post-war Colorado, Arizona, and California, as well as any illusion of wilderness. Their locations are hard to pinpoint-barren developments, highways, road cuts, and plains etched by dirt bikes-culminating against the Pacific in the clear-cut forests of the Oregon coast. Even more resigned, more elegiac, are photographs made in San Bernardino County, just east of Los Angeles. The air is heavy with smog; a single tree stands vigil over a newly completed freeway: they are scenes laden with disappointment. Adams is a moralist, and these are not easy photographs. We are given a landscape that can be spare and depressing, one that does not allow for a dramatic gesture. Yet his prints convey a sense of light and careful observation, reminding us not only of what has been lost, but that discovery is still possible. To understand Adams's work, it is necessary to recognize that how he makes a photograph is as important as what he photographs, and it is in the empathetic quality of his prints that concern and affection are revealed. We are shown that an anonymous hillside, gently descending across the frame, reveals more of the character and beauty of the West than the anomaly of a Yellowstone or Yosemite. Cottonwood along the Colorado River, Garfield County, Colorado (1978) is among the most elegant images ever made of the American landscape. Discovering a grace in the trunk of a tree arcing across the river's bank-a scene that could be found hundreds of times again, almost anywhere-Adams recalls the harmony found inthe earliest depictions of the West, when both the place and photography were still new.

--Toby Jurovics,

Associate Curator of Photography