Robert Adams

Robert Adams (born May 8, 1937) is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975. 

Adams grew up in the suburbs of Colorado and in 1956, he shifted to South California to study English literature at University of Redlands. In 1965, he did his Ph.D., from University of Southern California, in the same subject.

Adams has worked on American West landscapes for more than 38 years, covering Oregon, Colorado and California. He uses his camera to express his love for landscapes. Also, to understand how industrial and urban growth has transformed it.

 Adams bought a 35mm camera and began to take pictures mostly of nature and architecture. He soon read complete sets of camera work and aperture at the Colorado springs fine arts centre. He learned photographic technique from Myron Wood, a professional photographer who lived in Colorado. While finishing his dissertation, he began to photograph in 1964. In 1966, he began to teach only part-time to have more time to photograph. He met John Szarkowski, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, on a trip to New York City in 1969. The museum later bought four of his prints. In 1970, he began working as a full-time photographer.

The New West

In a seminal series of images representing the suburban southwest, Adams shows the brutal squalor of suburban architecture and its effect on the landscape, as well as the hopeful aspects of nature that are beyond our impact.

Image Analysis

In this image there are man made buildings and structures with the natural scenery of mountains in the background. The man made structure and the natural scenery blend in together seamlessly, as there isn’t much change in tones of black and white, the mountain and the top of the buildings wouldn’t have much between them on the zone system while the sign that is lit up is much lighter and standing out more than the structures (man made and natural) in this image. The beauty of this picture is the fact that the petrol station is something that would be seen as ‘basic’ and it is something you see in everyday life. Their is a clear retro vibe in Adams images which is what I really like and find unique within these images, for example the lighting and electrical wires wouldn’t typically be the same in todays modern world, they are something you wouldn’t typically take pictures of but the idea of making something ugly and neglected and transforming it into a pleasant and interesting image is something Adams was clearly very good at.

This image is different to the first one. You can see a clear change in scenery from the top to bottom as there is a mountain in the top background and buildings at the bottom front. In this image it is easy to say there is signs of poverty and a suburban lifestyle. This is because Robert Adams liked to take these kinds of pictures where there is a ‘poor quality’ life with a beautiful, natural environment contrasting behind it. The homes look like they would not be secure and it looks like an indecent place to live, this conflicts to the mountain and hills behind where the mountain looks strong and bold unlike the homes that look poor quality and strategically placed whereas the mountains natural curves and soft corners don’t match with the man-made structures.

What does Topographic mean?

New Topographic can be represented as a radical shift by reanalysing the subject that surrounded landscape photography as a fabricated environment.

It is Technique in which a scene, usually a landscape, is photographed as if it were being observed from afar. this was practiced most known by the 1970s ‘New Topographic’ photographers which included Robert Adams, Nicholas Nixon, Lewis Baltz, and Hilla Becher.

What is Topographic a response to?

The images that were beautifully printed of the mundane but strangely fascinating topography showed both the reflection of the world that was becoming massively suburbanised and also a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the element.

America struggled with a lot post-war.

Things like,

• Inflation and labour unrest. The main economic concern the country had was the immediate post-war years was inflation.
• The baby boom and suburbia. Because of the millions of people that died, returning veterans made up for lost time and got married and started a family.
• Isolation and splitting of the family unit, pharmaceuticals and mental health problems
• Vast distances, road networks and mobility

More

Many photographers associated with the topic ‘New Topographic’ were artists like Robert Adams, Nicholas Nixon, Hiller Becher etc…

New Topographic was inspired by the likes of Albert Renger Patszch and the notion of New objectivity.

Places like Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all portrayed with a beautiful distinct strictness, almost in the same way that early photographers documented natural landscape. An exhibition in the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York features these photographers that revealed the growing apprehension about how natural landscape were being engulfed by industrial development.

The New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) was constructed as a style in Germany in the 1920s as a challenge to Expressionism. As seen on the name , it offered a return to unsentimental reality and a focus on world that was objective, instead of the more romantic and abstract, or idealistic likelihood of Expressionism.

Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West and his participation in the exhibition New Topographic: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.He looked at aesthetically pleasing photos. He was an environmentalist and usually photographed landscapes and natural enjoinment – similar to Ansel Adams, however they have no relation to each other. Robert Adams is an American photographer best known for his images of the American West. Offering solemn meditations on the landscapes of California, Colorado, and Oregon, Adams’s black-and-white photos document the changes wrought by humans upon nature.

Adams quotes- “I think if you placed me almost anywhere and gave me a camera you could return the next day to find me photographing. It helps me, more than anything I know, to find home.” This shows us his passion of taking photograph’s and his passion for it.

Typologies

 A system used for putting things into groups according to how they are similar : the study of how things can be divided into different types. Eg photographing farm houses- multiple of them as a collective group.

Robert Adams uses Typologies’.

The making of Typologies – Robert Adams

Robert Adams is a photographer who has documented the extent and the limits of our damage to the American West, recording there, in over fifty books of pictures Adams grew up in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Colorado, in each place enjoying the out-of-­doors, often in company with his father. He was a very successful photographer and had many different exhibitions , making good money and becoming a very well known photographer , he was best known for his images of the American West. Adams’s black-and-white photos document the changes wrought by humans upon nature. Adams began to take photography seriously, learning techniques from professional photographer Myron Wood. In the 1970s, he was released the book The New West (1974), and a year later was included in the seminal exhibition “New Topographic”. Therefore making this a new big thing, still used today. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Adams has become one of the most profound photographer’s in history and he did make history within his photographer’s.

What is Typologies?

A photographic typology is a study of “types”. That is, a photographic series that prioritizes “collecting” rather than stand-alone images. It’s a powerful method of photography that can be used to reshape the way we perceive the world around us, such as photographing buildings and certain types of windows as a collective and done in a group.

Typologies

 A system used for putting things into groups according to how they are similar : the study of how things can be divided into different types. Eg photographing farm houses- multiple of them as a collective group, many of which Adams did use.

What was the new topographic a reaction to?

The stark, beautifully printed images of the mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.

What is the meaning of New Topographic?

New topographic was a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers (such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz) whose pictures had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape.

Robert Adams

Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West and his participation in the exhibition New Topographic: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.

He looked at aesthetically pleasing photos. He was an environmentalist and usually photographed landscapes and natural enjoinment – similar to Ansel Adams, however they have no relation to each other.

Robert Adams is an American photographer best known for his images of the American West. Offering solemn meditations on the landscapes of California, Colorado, and Oregon, Adams’s black-and-white photos document the changes wrought by humans upon nature.

Features

The photographs, stark and documentary, are often devoid of human presence. Jenkins described the images as “neutral” in style, “reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion”.

On the one hand, New Topographics represented a radical shift by redefining the subject of landscape photography as the built (as opposed to the natural) environment. To comprehend the significance of this, it helps to consider the type of imagery that previously dominated the genre in the United States.

Photographers involved

 The New Topographics photographers were Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr.

Contact sheet:

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I edited these photos using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Classic, with inspiration from the storm as I thought I could take photos of the damage that has been caused to nature. I edited these photos to be black and white, as I think they create more emotion towards viewers. I think I could’ve improved this photoshoot by taking clearer photos that has one subject, instead of a few as they would’ve then looked neater and not as chaotic.

Origins of Romanticism

Romanticism is a movement which originated mainly in England as well as parts of Europe during the late 18th centaury, being sparked by the industrial revolution and the French revolution, and quickly spread to other parts of Europe and America.

The French Revolution began in 1789 and was caused by France being on the brink of bankruptcy and the growing dislike for the French monarchy. Before the revolution literature and also art was mainly made about high class people and religion, but after the revolution people were given more creative freedom to express themselves so started writing about nature and emotion instead. Romanticism was also used as an escape from reality which the French citizens needed after going through the revolution, further boosting romanticism and its popularity.

Industrialisation causes an increase in urbanisation (the increase of people living in towns and cities) and the increase in factories due to the demand for manufactured goods increased during the mid 18th centaury. This cased more people to live in cities and get factory jobs away from nature, which romanticists argued against and felt that this new industrial lifestyle was harsh and was supressing the natural human spirit. This caused romanticists to focus on nature again and natural human emotion as away to escape from this lifestyle.

The Romanticism movement mainly consists of an interest in nature and its beauty rather than the industrialisation which was going on at the time. Human emotion by expressing intense or true emotions, as well as the sublime. It also consisted of beautifying the past commonly the middle ages (medieval era) as ether a respect for the traditions and architecture or a sense of nostalgia. The movement was commonly displayed in the arts and forms of literature.

William Wordsworth

Wordsworth also had a hatred for anything industrial, which was happening at the time, saying at the start of one of his poems: “Is there no nook of English ground secure From rash assault?” And when a trainline was proposed to run through the lake district Wordsworth and his fans did everything the could to get the train rerouted away from the lake district.

Romanticism vs The Age of The Enlightenment

The Age of The Enlightenment which is also known as the age of reason was a movement that occurred mainly in western Europe during the 17th to early 19th century which focused on science instead of religion an rationality over beliefs. The romanticists were against this idea and felt that reason was overemphasised and believed in connections to nature and human emotions even if it was irrational.

The Sublime

Nowadays the word sublime means really good or excellent, however the sublime was actually a key part of romanticism and has a completely different meaning.

Edmund Burk was an Irish philosopher who moved to London in 1750 and served in parliament in 1766. Edmund also wrote books, in 1757 he wrote a book called A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In this book he would go on to explore the ideas of ‘the sublime’ with Edmund describing the Ruling principle for sublime as the awe and beauty of nature, but also elements of fear and terror because of how merciless it is.

I took a series of images focusing on the damages around the island from Storm Ciaran however I also took images that involved Romanticism and the Sublime.

My Inspiration from the Storm:

Photoshoot:

I focused on the area of St Clements for my photoshoot as it was one of the areas in Jersey that was affected the most severely therefore it would still have damage and debris around.

Photoshoot 1 best images:

For these images I focused on the surrounding areas of a row of fields as I felt that this would be an area where there would be not only a lot of damage from the storm but also many different locations and perspectives to find.

For most of my images I created virtual copies of them and made them black & white to represent Ansel Adams’ work as his were also monochrome. I also feel that this shows the distinct and unique forms that the branches take on due to the strength of the wind. I really liked this area as there was a combination of natural and man-made resources, as well as many twisting branches varying in size. Many of them twisted forwards so I positioned the camera in certain angles the create depth in the image. For some of my images I used HDR to combine 3 images so that the exposure was suitable, this also resulted in the images looking more vibrant by saturating the green tones more. However, this wasn’t necessary for all images as I wanted some to have a more pastel shade such as in the sky as I feel that this creates a calming and tranquil tone for the viewer, representing ‘the calm after the storm’. As well as this, in the majority of my images I used the graduated filter to create a smoother gradient from the top of the image through to the middle, then increasing or decreasing the contrast.

Photoshoot 2 best images:

For these images I chose to go into a more public space. This was a pile of chopped wood from trees that had fallen down and been piled up on top of each other. I really liked the way they had been placed and all the details that would’ve been hidden within the tree have been exposed that wouldn’t normally be shown. I also liked the way some smaller pieces had rolled off as the position each of them have landed in makes it look intentional yet relaxed. I created some blank and white versions of these images too because I wanted to show aspects of Ansel Adams work in my own.

I created an idea using Photoshop, keeping the main part of the image in colour and the background in black and white. This adds more vibrancy to the orange/brown tones and makes each layer stand out more.

Romanticism art–

Romanticism art is a style of art which started in Europe towards the 19th century. Romanticism is said to be a way to express personal feelings, emotions and interest for the world. It gets its name due to the rise of popularity for medieval romance which heavily inspired this genre.

There are said to be 5 classifications of romanticism art individualism, nature, emotion, freedom and gothic/the unknown. Lots of romanticism art contains something like  “idealization of women; awe of nature; return to the past; critique of progress;  purity of childhood

Part of the romanticism art movement was about it being a revolt against the ideas of aristocratic social views and the political norms at the time. They wanted to draw attention to them and criticize their views which they did through their art.

The French revolution was a big contributing factor to the whole romanticism movement they would illustrate some of the of heroic acts which were taking place and should have gotten recognition. They also saw a spike in these aristocratic views and the the Enlightenment values so it was their response to that.

Sublime-

Sublime is said to be feeling when something is so amazing overwhelmingly so and its meant to be its the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling

The sublime is often described as a way to describe the feeling of greatness or awe and wonder to do with nature. When looking at the history behind it you can tell that it has taken inspiration from the baroque period is an elaborate style which gained popularity during the 1600’s and 1700’s in Europe. This philosopher Edmund Burke believed that the sublime can be beautiful but it also has this aspect of horror to it. He also spoke about the opposition of “beauty and sublimity” “He made the opposition of pleasure and pain the source of the two aesthetic categories, deriving beauty from pleasure and sublimity from pain”

John Constable the Haywain-

This painting was originally called “Noon” by John Constable which was later renamed to what we now know as The Haywain. The painting shows us this country side/rural area around the river Stour in England during the early 1820’s.

John Constable had a strange approach to his art compared To other artist at the time. This is because most artists were striving to have these perfect pieces of art with each stroke being calculated and “perfect”. However John Constable tried to do the opposite he didn’t feel like it had to look “perfect” his pieces were often more emotionally driven as he wasn’t planning it out as much and he did what felt right to him.

It’s said the concept behind this painting to show “an emotional reaction to a crisis beyond his control, and probably understanding”. At the time this paining was created they were in the middle of the industrial revolution. And World War 1 had only ended around 10 years ago so people were still heavily effect by those actions.

The enlightenment–

Enlightenment is the idea of  “individual liberty and religious tolerance” it kind of goes against the ideas of religion and the monarchy with the ideas of strict aspects of it and the values. The idea of enlightenment was created due to the rise of the intellectual movement during the 17th and 18th century where ideas such as God, reason, nature, and humanity were becoming more mainstream and enlightenment was a way of defying those views.