If Robert Adams Wants His Eco-Conscious Photography to Change Anything, It’s Us

Turning Back could be put in the context of other iconic environmental photos: the Cuyahoga River aflame in 1969; sea birds choked in oil; Midway Island albatross carcasses burst by ingested trash; Edward Burtynsky’s arresting views of dumps, strip mines, and oil fields. But that likely wouldn’t give Adams comfort.

“If art has a function, it’s probably not social reform,” he says. He acknowledges that the celebrated nature photography of Ansel Adams (no relation) may have rallied support for environmental policy changes, but “probably more has been done by people who attended meetings.” (He himself has attended such meetings. A self-described Democratic Socialist, he has been involved with the campaign to ban animal trapping in his area of Oregon, and he’s donated to activist causes, perhaps most notably when he gave winnings from the 2016 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize to Human Rights Watch.)

Instead, he sees the role of art in change as more personal and poetic.

“[A]rt addresses an inner struggle whereas journalism more often reports on the outward consequences of it,” he wrote in his 2005 book Beauty in Photography. “And though poems and pictures cannot by themselves save anyone—only people who care for each other face to face have the chance to do that—they can strengthen our resolve to agree to life.”

His intention isn’t activist: he champions environmental protection, but he doesn’t seek to instrumentalize his art in service of policy changes. Still, he does have a rhetoric of persuasion in mind. He creates photos that Sarah Greenough, who curated American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams for the National Gallery, describes as quiet and “unemphatic”—images that, in the era of social media, where the loudest and the boldest get noticed, just . . . are. In their stillness, these photos invite us to slow down and look closely, itself a form of rhetoric.

“He draws on our assumption that the camera blindly records what’s in front of it, as if it’s just an objective recording device, when of course it’s anything but,” says Greenough. “But he’s playing on our misreading of photography, which ends up giving us pictures that seem all the more truthful because of that seeming neutrality.”

When Adams says that he would allow “no redemptive skies” in his Turning Back pictures, he reminds us that, in most of the rest of his works, he’s attentive to the role of glorious light. It saves even the most desolate scene, which provides another form of persuasion: interlacing hope with grief.  

Greenough points to a work in his series on the expanding western suburbs. In the photograph, a woman is inside a newly built tract home; we see her framed by a window.

“It’s a scene that, if you and I walked by on the street, we might casually glance at it and not think about its implications. But as Adams has recorded it, we see a woman frozen in place, seemingly trapped in a house,” she says. “It’s a pretty devastating picture of suburban life, but at the same time, Adams writes, ‘Raining down onto the roof and the lawn is glorious, high-altitude light. It’s a splendor that has no explanation and is a kind of forgiveness.’”

Finding hope amid despair is a familiar theme in both poetry and the environmental movement. Adams, who holds a PhD in literature and started his career teaching college-level English, names Wendell Berry among his favorite writers. The rural Kentucky poet offers a no-nonsense pragmatism that, like Adams’s, is cut with hope for the future. In his 1973 poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Berry includes a pointed critique, “Praise ignorance, for what man / has not encountered he has not destroyed.” Then, one line later:

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Likewise, Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) says, “We can’t have an awareness of the beauty of the world without also a tremendous awareness of the wounds; we see the old-growth forest, and we also see the clear cut. We see the beautiful mountain, and we see it torn open for mountaintop removal. One of the things that I continue to learn about, and need to learn more about, is the transformation of love to grief to even stronger love.”

In the end, that transformation of love to grief and back to love again seems to be at the heart of Adams’s pictures. The change he wants is, first and foremost, inside of us.

Part of American Silence is set along the Nehalem Spit, a peninsula on the Oregon coast situated between the Nehalem River and the Pacific. The images are haunting, focusing on grassy hummock dunes; the sandy shore glistening under a western sunset; and, most arresting, a stunning series of images of massive silvered stumps, washed down from the clearcuts in the Oregon interior. Alien, they appear to be sad artifacts, monuments perhaps, from a lost civilization.