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A Parallel World by Robert Adams.
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Photographs by Robert Adams
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, USA, 2021. 48 pp., 32 black-and-white illustrations, 9¾x11¾".
The first time I wrote Robert Adams was in 2019. In my letter, I shared with him my love of rural life, of wood, robins, growing vegetables, and spending quiet time with family. I included a small c-print of my father’s favorite tree, an old Stringybark Eucalypt, under which his first dog is buried, near his former dairy farm. In a subsequent reply, Bob mentioned Rex Vicat Cole’s book The Artistic Anatomy of Trees (Dover Publications), first published in 1915. It is a soul-enriching and thorough analysis of trees and how to represent them, and one of several books I’ve returned to regularly over the past 12 months. I know by heart the first line of the introduction: “We know that a fine picture cannot be described.” It continues, “The emotion aroused by a grand picture may be somewhat closely reproduced by a fine prose essay, by poetry, music, or by a mood in nature herself”.
Vicat Cole was referring to landscape painting, such was his profession (and that of his father, George), but I believe his sentiment applies equally to photography. I think Bob would agree. I am reminded of his response to Gregory Crewdson’s question during a live Q&A in May last year: What was your first aesthetic awakening? “As a family, we sang a lot, curiously, and I think music together with nature, the two of them were probably my first experience of beauty and of beauty’s power”.
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Adams’ latest book A Parallel World takes its title from Sojourns in the Parallel World by the British-born poet Denise Levertov, which is reproduced at the beginning. Levertov refers to Nature as a beauty-filled world that exists simultaneously with ours, but independent of it. It is a fitting choice for Adams who has dedicated much of his life to nature, poetry, and picture-making.
The book contains 32 black and white photographs Adams made between 2015 and 2018 along the Oregon coast, where he has lived with his wife Kerstin for more than two decades. Twenty-one are portrait orientation, 11 landscape, all no larger than 6 x 9 inches. A good number function as diptychs or triptychs. Only two contain the smallest of human figures.
For those familiar with Adams’ photographs and his many books, there are no surprises here; you’ll see what you’re expecting to see. It is a simple book, deceptively so. The edit is water-tight, so tight it makes me wonder exactly how many images he made during that three-year period. The tritone separations and print quality are outstanding. The subject matter points true north at Adams’ visual loves: light, water, sand dunes, leaves, trees, and skies. Not just those things, though, because Adams also points to (or at) our interaction with them. The damage caused by receding dunes, the splinters of trees scarred by deforestation, for example.
The deliberate choice of cover image says it all: a window, sand its main ingredient, reflecting sun glitter on the crimped surface of the Pacific Ocean. A constructed window, taking almost a third of the available image real-estate, offering its owner a mostly uninterrupted view of Nature. A human-made window, of form and function, separating our bodies from the outside, our lips from kissing air of salted pine and toothed poplar.
But I digress, and that’s what fine pictures, grand pictures are great at. Mental digression from stark realities, yet one hopes that via digression we make the decision to emotionally invest in confronting and addressing those realities: of overpopulation, waste management, deforestation, extreme meteorological phenomena, water scarcity, and the many other crises our planet faces. That we take action for putting the human back into humanity; that we consider the weight of our humanness on the surfaces on which we exist.
Adams’ images, as they almost always do, show us the selflessness of our Earth against the oftentimes self-centered nature of human behavior. He need not change the record because it seems we keep ignoring the song. A Parallel World is its own sojourn, its own chorus that asks us to speak together to protect our sublime.
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Odette England is an artist and writer; an Assistant Professor and Artist-in-Residence at Amherst College in Massachusetts; and a resident artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program in New York. Her work has shown in more than 90 solo, two-person, and group exhibitions worldwide. England’s first edited volume Keeper of the Hearth was published by Schilt Publishing (2020), with a foreword by Charlotte Cotton. Radius Books will publish her second book Past Paper // Present Marks in collaboration with the artist Jennifer Garza-Cuen in spring 2021 including essays by Susan Bright, David Campany, and Nicholas Muellner.
The book contains 32 black and white photographs Adams made between 2015 and 2018 along the Oregon coast, where he has lived with his wife Kerstin for more than two decades. Twenty-one are portrait orientation, 11 landscape, all no larger than 6 x 9 inches. A good number function as diptychs or triptychs. Only two contain the smallest of human figures.
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For those familiar with Adams’ photographs and his many books, there are no surprises here; you’ll see what you’re expecting to see. It is a simple book, deceptively so. The edit is water-tight, so tight it makes me wonder exactly how many images he made during that three-year period. The tritone separations and print quality are outstanding. The subject matter points true north at Adams’ visual loves: light, water, sand dunes, leaves, trees, and skies. Not just those things, though, because Adams also points to (or at) our interaction with them. The damage caused by receding dunes, the splinters of trees scarred by deforestation, for example.
The deliberate choice of cover image says it all: a window, sand its main ingredient, reflecting sun glitter on the crimped surface of the Pacific Ocean. A constructed window, taking almost a third of the available image real-estate, offering its owner a mostly uninterrupted view of Nature. A human-made window, of form and function, separating our bodies from the outside, our lips from kissing air of salted pine and toothed poplar.
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But I digress, and that’s what fine pictures, grand pictures are great at. Mental digression from stark realities, yet one hopes that via digression we make the decision to emotionally invest in confronting and addressing those realities: of overpopulation, waste management, deforestation, extreme meteorological phenomena, water scarcity, and the many other crises our planet faces. That we take action for putting the human back into humanity; that we consider the weight of our humanness on the surfaces on which we exist.
Adams’ images, as they almost always do, show us the selflessness of our Earth against the oftentimes self-centered nature of human behavior. He need not change the record because it seems we keep ignoring the song. A Parallel World is its own sojourn, its own chorus that asks us to speak together to protect our sublime.
Purchase Book
Read More Book Reviews
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