The Photographs of Robert Adams

“Robert Adams explores some of the difficult questions of our time – our care of the land and the moral dimensions of progress”

“The responsibility of Artists”, Robert Adams has suggested, “is to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it”. American Silence traces his lifetime effort to address that obligation.

The photographs by Adams that are reproduced here were made in Colorado, California, and Oregon, between 1965 and 2015. Their subjects include open country and suburban sprawl, splendor and disarray; they are at once about the geography of the American West and about an even wider crisis of spirit.

At the center of Adam’s pictures and the world they reflect is a mystery – an inextinguishable beauty. It is a commonplace as sunlight, and it implies a reassuring promise.

By a living room window, the artist and his wife Kerstin have placed a passage drawn from Simmone Weil: Beauty requires us “to give up our imaginary position as the center”. It is a brief that informs much of Adams’ best work.

American Silence features some 180 full-page illustrations, a perceptive, in-depth overview by award winning curator Sarah Greenough, as well as personal reflections by the highly regarded author Terry Tempest Williams.

If there is such a thing as an ideal of stance, technique, vision, and social contribution toward which young photographers might aspire, it’s embodied in this man.

Barry Lopez, about Robert Adams

“There are at least two kinds of silence that define us. One is the eloquent silence of the world as we were given it – the silence of light and beauty, the silence that holds a promise. It is a stillness especially audible on the prairies or next to trees, but it can be heard in many places throughout the country.”

There is also sometimes a dark silence within us, one that results from willful blindness and deafness. We struggle against it.”

Robert Adams

Co-edition: National Gallery of Art; Aperture, org., New York, USA, 2021

Hardcover, 332 pages, 215 illustrations

ISBN: 978-1-59711-511-7