The challenge is despair: How to look straight at it, and then look away and get back to life. The challenge is particularly acute today. Just look to the headlines, to environmental degradation and ecological collapse, to wars and genocide, and the wholesale shredding of democratic norms by reckless and corrupt demagogues and autocrats.
Robert Adams has photographed the United States during some of its darkest decades, from the mid-1960s to the present, documenting American decline and recklessness through the particular lens of landscape and humanity’s imposition on it. A comprehensive National Gallery of Art survey of his work, “American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams,” is one of the most moving and important exhibitions at the museum in a long time. It convincingly demonstrates that Adams is not just an important photographer with a significant impact on contemporary art, but also a great artist whose nearly seven decades of work are an essential document of the national conscience, and a thing of majesty.
Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937 and moved with his family to Denver in 1952. He began taking photographs in 1963, and much of his work has centered on the interface between new suburbs and open land along what is known as the Front Range urban corridor, which includes Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins and sprawling in-between suburban conglomerations. In his earliest photographs, he made images reminiscent of Ansel Adams, moments of poetry carefully extracted from the natural world and so perfectly presented that their beauty is more ethereal than real. He photographed landscape, trees, wide-open plains, stormy desert skies and evocative architecture, rendered with the geometrical precision of Paul Strand, another early influence.
But the world around Adams was changing, and he sensed himself in crisis. Even as he was still figuring out how a camera could help him explore unknown pockets of beauty in Colorado, including old Hispanic towns and pioneer settlements, the land was being chewed up and run over by housing developments. He sensed the need to “reach some sort of reconciliation with the landscape I thought I no longer loved,” he said in a 1982 interview. Adams had been using a large 4-by-5-inch camera, which required a tripod, and produced wonderfully detailed images. But he moved to smaller, more portable formats, often making small, square images in black-and-white that are drenched in sunlight and full of stark tonal contrast.
Adams grappled with the tendency to despair by looking straight at it. In 1975, he was included in a now-legendary exhibition in Rochester, N.Y., called the New Topographics, which took a bracingly unsentimental view of our “man-altered landscape” (the show’s subtitle). He was now photographing suburbia, tract homes, treeless neighborhoods, strip malls, parking lots, highways and pollution.