Robert Adams: Light | Art21 "Exclusive"

Episode #045: Robert Adams in his Oregon home.

Robert Adamss black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West, revealing the impact of human activity on the last vestiges of wilderness and open space. An underlying tension in Adamss body of work is the contradiction between landscapes visibly transformed or scarred by human presence and the inherent beauty of light and land rendered by the camera.

Robert Adams is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

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Learn more about Robert Adams: http://www.art21.org/artists/robert-adams

VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Doug Dunderdale. Editor: Steven Wechsler.

Robert Adams: Light

Well, Kenneth Clark remarked in one of his books, that

The thing that distinguishes a landscape painter is an especially intense emotional response to light.

I do believe that's true.

There are, sounds crazy to say, but in my dark room, in Colorado,

After I've been working for days, or sometimes months outside, and if I was working in the dark room,

And I knew that it was day time, I swear I could tell, in the dark room,

When the sun came in and out from behind clouds.

Light is a physical thing that you're working with.

It's also obviously metaphor. It's what you are working with to arrive at metaphors.

It's the age-old symbol for truth. It's the expression of truth.

Yeah, it's a loaded thing, but fundamentally though,

It's just a deeply mysterious, compelling ingredient

For your understanding of life and your response to it.

I'm not sure if I can say anything more about it.

It's at the center of why one makes pictures and how one makes them.