Robert Adams was one of the photographers showcased in the celebrated New Topographics exhibition held at George Eastman House in 1975, which explored the ‘man-altered landscape’. That is, instead of the romantic, picturesque or sublime tradition of landscape photography exemplified in the US by Ansel Adams, the Topographics participants did not try to avoid evidence of human presence or intervention, but instead made this their main subject. And their aesthetic was, in most cases, one of blankness and detachment: certainly there were no romantic, picturesque or sublime images. Much of the emphasis in New Topographics was on suburbia, on the liminal zones around cities that had greatly expanded in the post-war period, an expansion made possible both by the proliferation of cheap, generic housing estates, and by the huge increase in car ownership, along with the concomitant growth of freeways.
Robert Adams, however, was not blank. His approach was more critical. One of the reasons he carried weight for me was that he worked as an English lecturer while creating these images, and he’s an eloquent writer on photography. The New West is not text-heavy, but it does include a short introduction by John Szarkowski, followed by another from Adams, who also wrote brief passages introducing each of the five chapters into which The New West is divided. These move through consecutive ecological zones in Colorado, each characterised by different patterns of human settlement or intervention: ‘Prairie’, ‘Tracts and Mobile Homes’ (i.e. suburbs), ‘The City’, ‘Foothills’, and ‘Mountains’. However, apart from these very brief chapter introductions, we revert to the Evans/Frank model, with no text accompanying the images themselves other than short titles. As with American Photographs, the images are arranged one per spread on the recto, but with the titles on the preceding verso as in The Americans. The titles also follow the same pattern as Frank’s book, with most limited to a statement of location and/or a categorisation of subject (‘Along Interstate 25’, ‘Newly occupied tract homes. Colarado Springs’), with an occasional described detail or indication of context where Adams thinks it might not be sufficiently obvious from the image itself (‘Grazing land with pines. Near Falcone’).
Szarkowski's foreword sets out the issues at stake succinctly:
As Americans we are scarred by the dream of innocence. In our hearts we still believe that the only truly beautiful landscape is an unpeopled one. …. Now however we are beginning to realize that there is no wilderness left. … a generous and accepting attitude toward nature requires that we learn to share the earth not only with ice, dust, mosquitoes, starlings, coyotes, and chicken hawks, but even with other people. (5)
Adams’s pictures describe with precision and fastidious justice some of the mortal and venial sins that we have committed against our land in recent decades. …. But his pictures also show us that these settlements express human aspirations, and that they are therefore not uninteresting. (8–9)
Though Robert Adams’s book assumes no moral postures, it does have a moral. Its moral is that the landscape is, for us, the place we live. If we have used it badly, we cannot therefore scorn it, without scorning ourselves. If we have abused it, broken its health, and erected upon it memorials to our ignorance, it is still our place, and before we can proceed we must learn to love it. (9)
Adams’s introduction is even more direct:
Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue—why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?
One reason is, of course, that we do not live in parks …. we also need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.
The subject of these pictures is, in this sense, not tract homes or freeways but the source of all Form, light. The Front Range is astonishing because it is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. Even subdivisions, which we hate for the speculator’s greed, are at certain times of day transformed to a dry, cold brilliance. (11–12)
I haven’t seen the first edition of The New West, but the Steidl reprint from 2015 is of very high quality – along with the tri-tone reproductions, I suspect that digital pre-print processes and Photoshop have allowed a longer tonal range and greater sharpness relative to the first analogue edition. (I think there was also an earlier reprint in 2008, perhaps by Aperture, which I may in fact have a copy of in a box in a shed in Melbourne, but I'm consulting the 2015 edition for this post).
Adams's images are mostly high-key, i.e. with predominantly bright tones and few shadows. As Tod Papageorge puts it:
[he] printed his photographs to distill the brilliant Colorado sunlight to a virtually nuclear intensity that, even as it glared down on the poor things it exposed, seemed to envelop and, occasionally, succor them.
This effect is also due to the fact that a significant proportion of the images were shot close to midday, so that the light is coming straight down, and there's little shade. A more conventional photographer would have preferred the warmer, more sculptural side-lighting of late afternoon or early morning (as Evans did, for example).
In some ways, Adams’s approach recalls that of David Goldblatt, shooting in Apartheid-era South Africa, in which deliberate overexposure was used not only to suggest the cutting light of the veldt, but the brutal social realities depicted. There is nowhere to hide in this pitiless light, no escaping the photographer’s clear-eyed judgements. But Adams is careful to retain detail in the highlights. Papageorge relates how the latter used a particularly laborious developing method, because he wanted to make sure that the empty skies retained smooth tones (the skies are bright but never blown-out to pure white in these images).
It’s also worth noting that the predominant high-key images are occasionally alternated with low-key images shot at dusk, or even at night. The Steidl edition has tritone reproductions, which means each image had three separate passes through the printer with different inks to ensure clear tonal separations. So there’s a high level of visual detail and texture, in both the shadows of the low-key images and the highlights of the high-key ones. In other words, things are described with great care – in all senses of the word.
Papageorge says that Adams used a Rolleiflex for these images – I shot many of my Venice photographs on a version of the same camera. Like the nearly identical camera used by Ed van der Elsken in the 50s, a Rolleiflex creates square negatives approximately 6x6cm, and most models of the camera have a fixed, ‘normal’ lens. If Papageorge is correct, that means that all of the images in The New West likely have the same undramatic angle of view – this seems plausible. (A few are slightly rectangular, but they may just have been cropped. Papageorge says that Adams did not obtain the 6x7 Pentax camera he used for his next project until after finishing The New West.) The square format adds to the sense of detachment, of little visual emphasis being given to any particular element within the frame. Similarly, most of the images maximise depth of field, and most are long shots, surveying landscapes from a considerable distance, sometimes with hundreds of metres or even several kilometres separating the foreground from the background.
Adams had used a large-format view camera for his earlier work on churches. The Rolleiflex allowed much faster operation, but did not permit perspective correction in the way that the larger camera did. This means that, for architectural subjects, you either have to point the camera up and get converging verticals, or stand back and accept that you’ll have a relatively large area of foreground below your main subject in the frame. In some of the landscapes, Adams seems to gone for the former strategy, in particular where there are no real vertical lines. The result is that the sky occupies two-thirds of the frame, to emphasise its enveloping weight. But for the tract houses that form the subject of the longest chapter he keeps the camera alignment level so that the verticals are straight. Many of these images do in fact have a wide strip of foreground: empty, bleached dirt or schist, or sometimes tarmac or pavement. Indeed, these houses and mobile homes are not really shot as architectural subjects, but again from some distance – that is, set within the larger landscape. And Adams uses the foreground to balance – almost seeming to reflect – the blank, or almost blank strip of sky above. In some cases, the houses appear lost between these two empty expanses. In other cases, Adams has obviously sought out an elevated viewpoint, so he was above his main subject, which allows him to create a more synthetic composition, linking houses in the foreground to the larger developments of which they form a part in the background.
Only in the chapter on ‘The City’ does Adams get closer in, and perhaps not coincidentally, he’s also more explicitly judgemental here: ‘Here no expediency is forbidden. …. Read the eschatological chaos of signs.’ (75) Here Adams seems too bleak – for him, cities offer only 'disgust and nihilism' (11). But in the face of the current gathering climate catastrophe, he's elsewhere too optimistic in his conviction that 'even as we see the harm of our work and determine to correct it, we also see that nothing can, in the last analysis, intrude. Nothing permanently diminishes the affirmation of the sun.' (12)
The New West is a powerful book, but it has a narrower thematic range than American Photographs, and less visual variety. The groupings into chapters are an essential part of the book’s organisation, but within the individual chapters I’m less convinced that the precise sequence of individual images is crucial. Rather, each chapter contains multiple variations on the same idea: the repetition and the standardised approach is part of the critique. Papageorge points out that Adams shares several motifs with Evans (who he claims not to have been influenced by): ‘cars, gas stations, roadways, jerrybuilt working class cottages, modest homes sighted down empty streets, improvised churches’. But for Evans these motifs are placed in the context of an encounter between industrial civilisation and popular culture: the mass-produced is juxtaposed with the handmade, the improvised. And Evans is interested in faces – the bodily correlate to the hand-painted signs and appropriated ephemera he also depicts – whereas the few visible humans in The New West are dwarfed by the landscape, and therefore stripped of personality (apart perhaps from the teenager sitting in the minute shade cast by a mobile home, for even the choice to seek that shelter depicts him as having agency). For Adams then, there does not seem to be any possibility of resistance to the shoddiness and soullessness of the world depicted – except, that is, via the light of his photographs.
I’ve already mentioned in my post on Brassaï that I overexposed my images of Venice: partly with the intention of approaching my subject differently to him, and partly by accident. Adams (and Goldblatt) helped me to think further about the aesthetics of overexposure – which I had to think about, whether I liked it or not, since overexposed images were what I had. I was also influenced by a conversation with Ross Gibson about his work on the historical police archive of crime-scene photographs in Sydney, in which deliberate overexposure was a way to ensure that none of the relevant information would be illegible in the image.
Adams’s compositional strategies weren’t of much use to me, since the kind of distance and/or elevation they rely upon are impossible to obtain in Venice (unless you resort to cliché and go up a belltower or stand on the Accademia bridge). But his broader approach was relevant, even though Venice seems to offer completely different lessons to the Colorado West. From its foundation the history of Venice involved radical interventions in the lagoon landscape, but the city has often been seen as an exemplary instance of equilibrium between human settlement and the environment, since Venice was dependent on the lagoon for its survival: for food, transport, access to the wider world, even sanitation. A photographic project more directly inspired by Adams might instead focus on the industrial hinterland of Porto Marghera on the mainland – and indeed there was such a project around the turn of the millenium, which actually recruited two of the original participants in the New Topographics show, among many other international and Italian photographers.
Adams’s example was nonetheless useful by analogy. Just as landscape photographers like Ansel Adams refused to acknowledge the existence of the man-altered landscape, most attempts to depict Venice refuse to acknowledge the contemporary, or decry its presence. Just as Ansel Adams chose to depict scenes in which the only acknowledged human presence was himself (‘acknowledged’ only insofar as someone had to be taking the photograph), so many visitors to Venice dream of finding an ‘unspoilt’ corner of the city in which they are the only alien presence – the only tourist chosen to enter Shrangi-La. So even though almost every detail in my images is not only ‘man-altered’ but human-made – emphatically historical rather than natural – I wanted to start by acknowledging and insisting upon the absurdity of this dream. There is no wilderness untouched by human culture; there is no unspoilt corner of Venice untouched by the contemporary world.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment