ROBERT ADAMS: The final strength in really great photographs
is that they suggest more than just what they show literally.
Photography and poetry both center on metaphor.
My subject has fundamentally for forty years been the American West.
The first serious photography I did that had any success to it began in Colorado.
Living in Colorado Springs at the time I started
to photograph along the emerging suburban strip.
I was taking pictures of the tract houses and highways.
I came into the dark room and printed them and I was really surprised.
I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated,
but there was something about these pictures,
they were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious
and from that grew a project called The New West
which really was the first serious work I did.
I’d like to document what’s glorious in the west,
and remains glorious, even despite what we’ve done to it.
I’d like to...to be very truthful about that but I also want to show what is…
what is disturbing and what needs correction.
The best way to do that, and it’s the way every artist dreams of,
is to show it at the same time in the very same rectangle.
The effort is to find that perfectly balanced frame where everything fits.
It’s not exactly the same as life, it’s…
it’s life seen better.
Here’s a picture of mine that I’m happy with.
The bottom of the picture is a kind of bowl of dark trees.
In this bowl is the city of Boulder and beyond it is a few of the plains and to me,
that’s a successful picture because
it does suggest some of the contradictory nature of the western experience.
Similarly, I took a picture once of a woman silhouetted in a tract house window,
and in one sense that’s a picture of the saddest kind of isolation
and most inhumane building.
But also raining down over this picture onto the roof and the lawn,
is glorious, high altitude light.
There’s no light like Colorado and you can see it in this picture.
It’s just absolutely sublime light.
Your decision to make a photograph is a kind of seduction
and the seduction is worked by light.
Many, many times, thousands of exposures,
were made in a state of helplessness.
I simply had to do that.
There was nothing could keep me from pressing the trigger.
Most of my pictures at the ocean were taken from the south jetty
on the Oregon side of the mouth of the Columbia River.
In five or ten minutes the whole surface of the sea will change.
To retake a landscape picture is almost impossible.
But it’s even more so for seascapes.
It was a wonderful experience.
It was just surrendering yourself to something.
Every photographer wants to do books.
For obvious reasons, they reach a wider audience than exhibitions do
and they allow the audience to consider the work over a longer period of time.
Putting pictures next to each other inevitably influences the nature of both pictures.
We work hundreds upon hundreds of hours.
A major book will require that in terms of editing
and that’s what Charsten, my wife, has helped me with, t
hat together with being my text editor for my entire working life
and our married life together.
She’s the person whom I have absolute trust in.
Almost every book begins with a gift.
A picture you didn’t expect.
There are a lot of surprises in photography
and if you’re not interested in surprises you shouldn’t be a photographer.
It’s one of the great, enlivening blessings of the…
of the medium.
At your best, it teaches you to try to remain open to new…
new experience because the gifts are sometimes really exciting.
I took pictures in southern California over a period of three years.
The strange thing is that although southern California
of course stands under this pall of smog,
nonetheless the light that filters down through that smog is extraordinary.
It’s an amazingly verdant if somewhat ominous landscape.
Very beautiful country, still.
After I spent some time working in the…
in California I then began to turn to the northwest.
The book Turning Back is fundamentally about deforestation.
It’s not just a matter of exhaustion of resources.
I do think there is involved an exhaustion of spirit.
Look at that...all those little industrial trees.
Not a single tree in sight that’s over thirty-five, forty years old.
I think the reason I care about that awful place
was not only that it sat within about six feet of the road,
they had the temerity to cut this tree,
but this contemptuous beer can.
Boy does that capture what this landscape does to the spirit.
It brings out everything desperately close to nihilism
in everybody who passes by.
It’s a breeding ground for contempt.
Some of the earliest memories I have with my father
are in teaching me how to saw wood and hammer nails,
and if you learn it early it becomes mysteriously central
and helpful to your health of spirit.
It’s a mainly just a wonderful way to relate to the world in another way,
it’s like you might use music.
Now you can remember things in your hands
and you can know things with your hands
that you can’t know with your head.
Edward Thomas observed that people and trees are quote,
imperfect friends, unquote,
citing the tragic nature of people and the silence of trees.
There are however, times of harmony.
With Lombardi poplars, for instance,
whose thirst and fragility might tempt us to cut them down,
but whose beauty gives us pause.
They seem to say with us what we can not say perfectly by ourselves.
I will praise thee, oh Lord, with my whole heart.
This is a wonderful poplar that Charsten and I found on the high desert of Oregon,
and we spent about eight hours over two days photographing this tree
in different lights at different hours.
I have yet to know anybody who does not have some response to poplars.
There’s a voice. And uh, thank goodness it’s there.
You know if you haven’t loved a tree enough to if not hug it
at least want to walk up to it and touch it,
as if you’re touching a profound mystery,
if that experience has eluded you,
I feel bad for you.
This was such a dramatic place.
I think both you and I knew that…
that something had to come out of this kind of valley of death here,
and then we found these enormous stumps.
And you went and sat down, and I thought, god there it is.
There’s the...the posture that conveys the utter sorrow one feels here.
ADAMS: What a place.
CHARSTEN: Well, what strikes me is the fact that it’s a black and white landscape.
With a tiny fringe of green sometimes.
And that’s how I think of that place.
ADAMS: I was just going to say, that’s...that’s almost what it was.
ADAMS: I remember there didn’t seem to be anything possible to say
and then we read some lines by W.S. Merwin.
“After an age of leaves and feathers,
someone dead thought of this mountain as money,
and cut the trees that were here in the wind and the rain at night,
it is hard to say it.”
Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of,
is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world.
But I don’t think you can get along without it.
It’s the confirmation frankly of...of meaning in life.