Working Along Freeways
Robert Adams
“I spent several years working along freeways,” Robert Adams says in his Oregon studio. Adams’ photographs range from scenic and picturesque to tattered and crumbling, describing the evolution of the Western landscape and revealing the unignorable and predominantly negative effects of humans.
Despite being typically devoid of human subjects, Adams’s photographs convey human presence through physical traces of life imposed on the natural landscape: a garbage-strewn roadside, a clear-cut forest, or a half-built house. However, Adams’ work also conveys a sense of hope that change can be effected to preserve the American West.
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Robert Adams’ refined black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West of the past four decades, revealing the impact of human activity on the last vestiges of wilderness and open space. Although often devoid of human subjects, or sparsely populated, Adams’s photographs capture the physical traces of human life: a garbage-strewn roadside, a clear-cut forest, a half-built house. An underlying tension in Adams’s 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.
