What Can We Believe Where? Photographs of the American West

Robert Adams
What Can We Believe Where? Photographs of the American West

Photographs: Robert Adams

Text: Robert Adams, Joshua Chang, Jock Reynolds

Publisher: Yale University Press

128 pages

Year: 2010

ISBN: 9780300162479

Price: 35 €

Comments: Softcover under illustrated dust jacket, 24,7 x 17,8 cm, b&w photographs. First edition. In very good condition !

Since taking up photography in the mid-1960s, Robert Adams (born 1937) has quietly become one of the most influential chroniclers of the evolving American landscape. Carefully edited by Adams from a remarkable body of work that spans over four decades, What Can We Believe Where? Photographs of the American West, 1965–2005 presents a narrative sequence of more than 100 tritone images that reveals a steadfast concern for mankind’s increasingly tragic relationship with the natural world. Adams’s understated yet arresting pictures of the vast Colorado plains, the rapid suburbanization of the Denver and Colorado Springs areas, and the ecological devastation of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States register with subtle precision the complex and often fragile beauty of the scenes they depict.

In common with many photographers, I began making pictures because I wanted to record what supports hope: the untranslatable mystery and beauty of the world. Along the way, however, the camera also caught evidence against hope, and I eventually concluded that this too belonged in pictures if they were to be truthful and thus useful.

The only people of whom I knew who had in some measure resolved the conflict were writers like Emily Dickinson and painters like Edward Hopper, individuals who searched the world so diligently that they occasionally caught glimpses of another. Theodore Roethke's notebook entry was the victory I wanted: "I see what I believe."

As much as I try to stay away from abstractions, I often find myself asking three questions, and I repeat them here as a point of entry into this book:

What does our geography compel us to believe? What does it allow us to believe? And what obligations, if any, follow from our beliefs?

- After Robert Adams' foreword