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ROBERT ADAMS: The final strength 
in really great photographs

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is that they suggest more than 
just what they show literally.

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Photography and poetry both center on metaphor.

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My subject has fundamentally for 
forty years been the American West.

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The first serious photography I did that 
had any success to it began in Colorado.

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Living in Colorado Springs at the time I started

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to photograph along the emerging suburban strip.

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I was taking pictures of the 
tract houses and highways.

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I came into the dark room and printed 
them and I was really surprised.

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I thought I was taking pictures 
of things that I hated,

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but there was something about these pictures,

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they were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious

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and from that grew a project called The New West

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which really was the first serious work I did.

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I’d like to document what’s glorious in the west,

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and remains glorious, even 
despite what we’ve done to it.

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I’d like to...to be very truthful about 
that but I also want to show what is…

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what is disturbing and what needs correction.

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The best way to do that, and it’s 
the way every artist dreams of,

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is to show it at the same time 
in the very same rectangle.

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The effort is to find that perfectly 
balanced frame where everything fits.

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It’s not exactly the same as life, it’s…

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it’s life seen better.

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Here’s a picture of mine that I’m happy with.

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The bottom of the picture is 
a kind of bowl of dark trees.

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In this bowl is the city of Boulder and 
beyond it is a few of the plains and to me,

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that’s a successful picture because

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it does suggest some of the contradictory 
nature of the western experience.

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Similarly, I took a picture once of a 
woman silhouetted in a tract house window,

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and in one sense that’s a picture 
of the saddest kind of isolation

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and most inhumane building.

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But also raining down over this 
picture onto the roof and the lawn,

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is glorious, high altitude light.

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There’s no light like Colorado and 
you can see it in this picture.

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It’s just absolutely sublime light.

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Your decision to make a 
photograph is a kind of seduction

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and the seduction is worked by light.

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Many, many times, thousands of exposures,

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were made in a state of helplessness.

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I simply had to do that.

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There was nothing could keep 
me from pressing the trigger.

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Most of my pictures at the ocean 
were taken from the south jetty

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on the Oregon side of the 
mouth of the Columbia River.

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In five or ten minutes the whole 
surface of the sea will change.

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To retake a landscape 
picture is almost impossible.

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But it’s even more so for seascapes.

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It was a wonderful experience.

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It was just surrendering yourself to something.

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Every photographer wants to do books.

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For obvious reasons, they reach a 
wider audience than exhibitions do

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and they allow the audience to consider 
the work over a longer period of time.

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Putting pictures next to each other inevitably 
influences the nature of both pictures.

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We work hundreds upon hundreds of hours.

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A major book will require that in terms of editing

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and that’s what Charsten, my 
wife, has helped me with, t

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hat together with being my text 
editor for my entire working life

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and our married life together.

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She’s the person whom I have absolute trust in.

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Almost every book begins with a gift.

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A picture you didn’t expect.

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There are a lot of surprises in photography

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and if you’re not interested in surprises 
you shouldn’t be a photographer.

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It’s one of the great, 
enlivening blessings of the…

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of the medium.

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At your best, it teaches you 
to try to remain open to new…

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new experience because the gifts 
are sometimes really exciting.

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I took pictures in southern California 
over a period of three years.

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The strange thing is that 
although southern California

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of course stands under this pall of smog,

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nonetheless the light that filters down 
through that smog is extraordinary.

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It’s an amazingly verdant if 
somewhat ominous landscape.

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Very beautiful country, still.

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After I spent some time working in the…

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in California I then began 
to turn to the northwest.

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The book Turning Back is 
fundamentally about deforestation.

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It’s not just a matter of exhaustion of resources.

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I do think there is involved 
an exhaustion of spirit.

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Look at that...all those little industrial trees.

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Not a single tree in sight that’s 
over thirty-five, forty years old.

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I think the reason I care about that awful place

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was not only that it sat within 
about six feet of the road,

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they had the temerity to cut this tree,

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but this contemptuous beer can.

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Boy does that capture what this 
landscape does to the spirit.

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It brings out everything 
desperately close to nihilism

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in everybody who passes by.

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It’s a breeding ground for contempt.

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Some of the earliest memories 
I have with my father

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are in teaching me how to 
saw wood and hammer nails,

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and if you learn it early it 
becomes mysteriously central

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and helpful to your health of spirit.

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It’s a mainly just a wonderful way to 
relate to the world in another way,

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it’s like you might use music.

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Now you can remember things in your hands

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and you can know things with your hands

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that you can’t know with your head.

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Edward Thomas observed that 
people and trees are quote,

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imperfect friends, unquote,

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citing the tragic nature of 
people and the silence of trees.

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There are however, times of harmony.

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With Lombardi poplars, for instance,

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whose thirst and fragility 
might tempt us to cut them down,

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but whose beauty gives us pause.

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They seem to say with us what we 
can not say perfectly by ourselves.

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I will praise thee, oh Lord, with my whole heart.

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This is a wonderful poplar that Charsten 
and I found on the high desert of Oregon,

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and we spent about eight hours over 
two days photographing this tree

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in different lights at different hours.

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I have yet to know anybody who does 
not have some response to poplars.

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There’s a voice. And uh, 
thank goodness it’s there.

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You know if you haven’t loved 
a tree enough to if not hug it

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at least want to walk up to it and touch it,

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as if you’re touching a profound mystery,

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if that experience has eluded you,

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I feel bad for you.

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This was such a dramatic place.

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I think both you and I knew that…

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that something had to come out of 
this kind of valley of death here,

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and then we found these enormous stumps.

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And you went and sat down, and 
I thought, god there it is.

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There’s the...the posture that conveys 
the utter sorrow one feels here.

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ADAMS: What a place.

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CHARSTEN: Well, what strikes me is the 
fact that it’s a black and white landscape.

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With a tiny fringe of green sometimes.

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And that’s how I think of that place.

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ADAMS: I was just going to say, 
that’s...that’s almost what it was.

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ADAMS: I remember there didn’t 
seem to be anything possible to say

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and then we read some lines by W.S. Merwin.

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“After an age of leaves and feathers,

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someone dead thought of this mountain as money,

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and cut the trees that were here 
in the wind and the rain at night,

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it is hard to say it.”

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Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of,

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is an extremely suspect word 
among many in the art world.

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But I don’t think you can get along without it.

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It’s the confirmation frankly 
of...of meaning in life.