ADAMS, Robert - Gone?

Background information

"Robert ADAMS' photo book 'Gone?' is a walk through the landscape of his home region of Colorado made in the mid-1980s where a balance seems to have been struck between civilization and nature.
 The US photographer starts us off within a suburban development where foliage on the tree-lined streets dwarfs the homes and cars of the residents. His vantage point is of a pedestrian, looking forward, our path clearly laid by the road ahead stretching off into the distance. On our periphery, things get our attention; an alder in a yard, some small brush scrub in an undeveloped lot, and most dramatically, the sky of a near perfect afternoon.
Within several pictures we have moved away from civilization and into the hills discovering streams and secluded spots that feel relatively untouched. Here Robert ADAMS basks in the sunlight allowing his lens to be flared - a reminder that a living being is behind this point of view and not simply a recording device.
His 35mm multiple frames - sometimes slight variants of the same picture - 'walk' us through the book which is a strategy of bookmaking he explored in Listening to the River.
In a brief statement the photographer writes about his work, 'In middle age I revisited a number of marginal but beautiful landscapes that I have taken for granted when I was a boy. As I walked through them I sometimes asked myself whether in the coming years they would survive overpopulation, corporate capitalism, and new technology. On those days when I was lucky, however, my questions fell away into the quiet and the light.'

Content

There is a comfortable loneliness about the pictures in the photo volume 'Gone?' by Robertt ADAMS as if all one would hear is a slight breeze and the repetitive footfalls on loose soil. Towards the end of the book we return to the outskirts of town - our trance shaken but perhaps calmed by the presence of a white steepled church. The last triptych stretches the road in front of us in a straight line towards a far away tree dominating the horizon. Within the three pictures, our progress feels slowed, perhaps we are just exhausted or maybe intentionally dragging our heals perhaps to avoid the inevitable return to those disturbing questions of where we are going." (© Jeffrey Ladd, in: 5B4)

About US-american photographer Robert ADAMS (b.1937, in New Jersey)

Photo books by Robert ADAMS