The Place We Live

About 5-6 weeks ago, I took some students to New York City for the weekend.  It’s an annual trip, and gives us all a chance to see some pictures.

There were lots of great things – chief among them were these photographs of dry-land farming in Spain made by Edward Burtynsky – but nothing left me with that feeling.

This past summer, I spent close to a month in Indonesia, in Bali and Java, and finished the trip in Jakarta.  Strangely, this was a highlight of the trip; actually, an afternoon in the sculpture garden at the Indonesian Nationally Gallery was the highlight.  The courtyard is filled with wonderful stone carvings from the Mataram and Majapahit (the medieval Hindu-Buddhist empires of Indonesia).  I spent hours here; I really just wanted to share my presence with these pieces.  There was a magic or mystique to it all.

I love this feeling, a high from art.  It is what drew me into it all from the beginning.

I spent the last week in Denver, and again found that feeling I had in Jakarta.  I went for a few reasons, among them to make some photographs (a series I began a year ago, photographing along Colfax Ave), and to see the Robert Adams retrospective at the Denver Art Museum.

It’s an extremely well organized exhibition, put together by Jock Reynolds and Josh Chuang at the Yale Art Gallery, and Eric Paddock at the Denver Art Museum.

Each of his major bodies of work is included, from the Prairie photographs made in Colorado in the late 1960’s (begun while he was a professor of English at The Colorado College) to his most recent pictures made in Oregon.

Walking into the gallery, the viewer is immediately greeted by two large grids of photographs.  The pictures are small, on 8×10 paper, but each grid is stacked with a number of photographs.  Each grid is composed with multiple looks at one tree, the same cottonwood.  One can presume the tree was close to Adams’ home in Longmont, CO, if not simply in his backyard.  It is striking and poetic to see how dynamic, wonderful, and full of love this one trees can be, how much of life is in the tree, the best and the worse.

After discovering the two grids, at the end of the same wall are three more small photographs.  Again, the same tree, but this time in the the photographs we witness the destruction and removal of the tree, and immediately recognize the magnitude of our lose.  All these photographs of the cottonwood were made over about 18 months.

And this is a wonderful introduction to the life’s work of Robert Adams.  Throughout his photographic life, Adams stayed close to home, and time and again has reminded us of all the poetry, beauty, and longing that constantly surrounds us.

From here the galleries are designed to show each  of his major bodies of work, shown in chronological order.  All of his iconic images are here, as well as many I’ve never seen (including pictures from Sweden, the Bodhisattva series, and Iraq war protests in Oregon).

First are the photographs from the late 1960’s, as he gave up his career in academia and began photographing full-time.  Originally published by the Denver Art Museum in 1978, Prairie is a collection of works photographed in eastern Colorado, right around 1968.  Many of these pictures are on display.  These show Adams embracing his homeland, though don’t yet reveal his distinct style or voice, but rather seem reminiscent of Dorthea Lange and the FSA, looks at the humble beauty of small town farmlands in middle America.

Next to Prairie are some works from a smaller body that I’ve always rather liked, The Art and Architecture of Early Hispanic Colorado, photographed largely in the San Luis Valley and Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southwestern Colorado.

And this brings us to the 1970’s, and Adams’ most innovative and influential works.  I believe first exhibited in the seminal exhibition New Topographics (though around the same time, Adams exhibited at MoMA in New York, a show with Emmet Gowin – it’s possible the MoMA show as the first exhibition of these pictures), in the first years of the decade Adams photographed that wonderful trilogy – The New West – Denver – What We Bought.  The last of these three, What We Bought, was first published about 20 years later than the others, printed in Germany.  Apparently at the time, these pictures were deemed too cynical to publish.

Strangely, these photographs are quite beautiful.  Despite the candid look at the socio-political development of Denver and the surrounding landscapes, these pictures are full of a wonderful sense of the light and space characteristic of Colorado, fully articulated and radiant in the small and intimate prints.

In the second half of the 70’s, he completed Summer Nights, as well as the parking lot pictures – snap-shot portraits of people in parking lots.  Originally, these pictures were published as Our Lives, and Our Children, as a protest to Rocky Flats, and was later published by Matthew Marks as No Small Journeys.

Then, a bit to my own surprise, I entered that galleries with what proved to be my favorite part of the show, the galleries with From the Missouri West and Los Angeles Spring.

From the Missouri West documents Adams’ first trips outside of Colorado to photograph (aside from a short series – displayed in this exhibition – made in Sweden while visiting Kirsten’s family), photographed in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Oregon, and California.  Perhaps because I don’t know this book too well, but I was deeply attracted to these prints, showing a deeper kind of space, and greater vistas than the earlier works.

The photographs in From the Missouri West evolved into the Los Angeles pictures, which I think are ultimately Adams’ darkest works.

The Los Angeles photographs are full of a competing ugliness and lyricism.  The tones are darker, and carry a misty light brought upon by air pollution.

These pictures are unrelenting in their anger about an abused landscape, and a human inability to see beyond our own needs.  Still the pictures contain a wonderful longing and poetry, perhaps best understood in the lovely and moody tonalities – deep, dark, and warm.

The was the first I’d seen the Los Angeles pictures short of the books.  I felt I was seeing them for the first time.  The tonalities of this work are such a necessary part to complete the poetry.  First published by Aperture in 1986, the printing technologies of the book simply couldn’t fully represent the photographs.

After Los Angeles, Adams completed my favorite work, Listening to the River.  These photographs were first published by Aperture in 1990’s, coupled with poetry by William Stafford:

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me/mistakes I have made.  Ask me whether/what I have done is my life.  Others/have some in their slow way into/my thought, and some have tried to help/or to hurt:  ask me what difference/their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say./You and I can turn and look/ at the silent river and wait.  We know/the current is there, hidden; and there/are comings and goings from miles away/that hold the stillness exactly before us./What the river says, that is what I say.

All verticals, the pictures in Listening to the River present multiple views of different landscapes, and reveal Adams negotiating a unique sense of space.  Reading the pictures across the page is like reading free-verse poetry at its best, as one can feel Adams responding to a landscape one step at time, and trying to find meaning in the different spaces, trying to find beauty while recognizing all the damage and loss.

These pictures are published in three different volumes.  Listening to the River was the first, and is still my favorite; it was his first edit – and with these pictures I trust that first instinct – and I love the pairing with the William Stafford poetry.  The other books are Notes for Friends, and more recently Gone? (beautifully executed by Steidl).

The last galleries are mostly his photographs of Oregon, the beaches and the clear-cuts, and Pine Valley.  While I will never argue anything short of true vision and mastery for these pictures, they simply don’t interest as much.  Perhaps having lived in Colorado between 1970-1996, these early pictures reflect more of my own life and biography.  My immediate response, however, is that the photographs lack the same degree of nuance.  The beach photographs err too much towards sentiment, and the clear-cuts are just clear and blunt descriptions.  Adams’ pictures are at their best when both of these sensibilities coincide, and thus is the originality of his poetry.

Of the Oregon landscapes, I am most interested in Pine Valley, which really seems about the pursuit of visual pleasure rather than anything more.

Also displayed with the Oregon photographs was a small gallery set aside with a few smaller, lesser projects.

These include Bodhisattva, and photographs made at protests of the Iraq war.

Bodhisattva interests me in great deal, more for its place in his greater life vision than as an unique visual statement.  A bodhisattva is a follower of Buddha who works out of compassion, choosing life on earth over samsara in order to help in the cultivation of Buddha’s path for humanity.  In viewing this work, I’ve often wondered if Adams sees himself as a boddhisattva, one suffering in hopes to spread the truth.

I left the Robert Adams retrospective, The Place We Live, with that same feeling I had among the artworks of the Majapahit and Mataram I sat with in Java.  I know I sat with greatness, and left with a better understanding and feeling for my own humanness.