Robert Adams :: Photography

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“Are there affirmable days or places in our deteriorating world? Are there scenes in life, right now, for which we might conceivably be thankful? Is there a basis for joy or serenity, even if felt only occasionally? Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?” ~ Robert Adams

For four decades Adams has photographed the changing landscape of the American West, finding there a fragile beauty that endures despite our troubled relationship with nature, and with ourselves. His photos are distinguished not only by their economy and lucidity, but also by their mixture of grief and hope. [Ext]

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‘Colorado Springs, Colorado’
Robert Adams
photograph
1968
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‘A backyard, Colorado’
Robert Adams
photograph
1968
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‘The New West series’
Robert Adams
photograph
1969
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‘Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs’
Robert Adams
photograph
1969
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‘Longmont, Colorado’
Robert Adams
photograph
1979
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‘Eden, Colorado’
Robert Adams
photograph
1969
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‘Longmont, Colorado’
Robert Adams
photograph
1976-1982
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‘Untitled’
Robert Adams
photograph
1978
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Robert Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937. He was a professor of English literature for several years before turning his full attention to photography in the mid 1970s. His work is largely concerned with moments of regional transition: the suburbanization of Denver, a changing Los Angeles of the 1970s and 1980s, and the clear-cutting in Oregon in the 1990s. His many books, well-known to those concerned with the American Landscape, include The New West, From the Missouri West, Summer Nights, Los Angeles Spring, To Make It Home, Listening to the River, West From the Columbia, What We Bought, Notes for Friends, California, Summer Nights, Walking, What Can We Believe Where? and The Place We Live. [Ext]

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Robert Adams :: The Place We Live

Robert Adams :: Fraenkel Gallery

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Richard Long : Textworks

Click Images For Text On  White Background

Nature has always been recorded by artists, from pre-historic cave paintings to 20th century landscape photography. I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking. Walking itself has a cultural history, from Pilgrims to the wandering Japanese poets, the English Romantics and contemporary long-distance walkers.

My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going ‘nowhere’. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, my intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art. Each walk followed my own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking – as art – provided an ideal means for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded or described in my work in three ways: in maps, photographs or text works, using whichever form is the most appropriate for each different idea. All these forms feed the imagination, they are the distillation of experience. Richard Long

TEXTWORKS

EXHIBITION WORKS

HEAVEN AND EARTH : TATE BRITAIN