Robert Adams in "Ecology" - Season 4 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.