Christine and I were wrapping presents and getting into the holiday spirit tonight. We came across Christmas Remixed by a San Francisco D.J. who calls himself D.J. Snoman. It’s an Internet radio station chocked full of electronic holiday music, everything from a soulful drum and bass version of “The Christmas Song” to a banging techno remix of Elvis’ “Blue Christmas”. The station is the perfect soundtrack for your hip, cosmopolitan, yule-tide soiree. If you want something more eclectic, check out Soma FM’s Xmas in Frisko, but note that not all of the songs are appropriate for family gatherings.

When I was attending Indiana University in Bloomington and studying art history, I came across the work of Robert Adams.  His photographs from the 1970s and 1980s show the interaction between suburban development and the natural landscape - with an ambivalence.  I included pictures from his photography book The New West in my art history thesis, along with photographs from Bill Owens’s book Suburbia.  These two photographers have not received much attention, yet their work reveals the values of American society as expressed in the physical and social structures of suburban development (maybe eventually I will post my thesis here).  I was excited to see that SFMOMA has a new series of photographs by Adams on display and even a lecture on his work.

Colin Westerback, curator and professor, gave the lecture entitled “A Man of Few Words: The 30-Year Journey of Robert Adams.”  He started out comparing Robert Adams to the well-known Ansel Adams.  Though it seems very obvious to me now, I had not considered Ansel Adams as an American Romantic Transcendentalist, similar to Whitman or Thoreau.  Westerback contrasted the work of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams, showing how Ansel went out of his way to find the perfect moment when the sun was shining through the clouds onto the meadow, highlighting the horse in the field with the mountains in the background.  Ansel also went out of his way to modify the picture to obscure graffiti that had been scrawled onto the face of the mountain.  Robert, on the other hand, took pictures of mobile homes, parking lots, suburban signs, and tract houses.  Robert Adams does not censor the imperfections, rather he brings attention to them. Westerback contends that Robert Adams’s work is not romantic, but cold and indifferent, with no political agenda.  I think this interpretation misses the point of his Adams’s work.  He is at the same time cold and romantic, optimistic and pessimistic, showing the paradox of suburban development in his work from the 1970s.  Though I’m not aware of any overt political agenda Adams might have, his photographs and writings certainly suggest that we are destroying places we care about.  Robert Adams writes in The New West in 1974:

“Towns, many now suggest, are intrusions on sacred landscapes, and who can deny it, looking at the squalor we have laid across America?  But 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.”

I think it is very romantic for Adams to believe that no matter what people do, the sun will continue to shine beautifully on their mobile homes.  His photographs show the destruction nonetheless. Adams traveled westward documenting the landscape from Colorado to the west coast, and in his new exhibit, Turning Back, he heads east through the forests of Oregon.  He takes you on paths through the forests through clear-cut areas, to an occasional old growth tree, and to an apple orchard he discovers.  At the end of the exhibit Adams makes a statement similar to his 1974 statement:

“Clear-cutting appears to me to be what most of us see in the world most of the time.  There are not many people as kind as our benefactor in Halfway, [the apple orchard Adams came upon during his travels] and not many places as whole.

Of what significance is minority evidence?

Photography is inherently fragmentary, and I find I base my faith on perfect moments.”

Adams presents both the happy times at the apple orchard and the destruction in the clear-cut forests.  While I find the photographs in Turning Back less interesting and less dramatic than his earlier work, his point is still the same.  He coldly presents destruction and romanticizes about the greatness he finds.  His photographs show that the natural world is beautiful, and has a strong, lasting power that people gradually diminish through consumption.  I couldn’t help but think of the irony of the photographs of clear-cut forests printed on paper that came from trees.  Adams is a great photographer, and I am quite fond of his earlier work.  He presents problems with our culture - settlement patterns and resource utilization - that have solutions.  I love good art, but I like changing reality even more.

Robert Adams: Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration is on view at SFMOMA through January 3, 2006.