A muted sadness hangs over the photographs of Robert Adams, who chronicles the unstoppable debasement of the American West, as tract housing and strip malls devour land and block once-uncorrupted views.
He is the quiet subversive of contemporary art, confronting issues like humankind vs. nature and progress vs. sustainability with nothing more than modest black-and-white images.
While artists have traditionally sought beauty in the sublime, Adams finds it in the mundane — a mall parking lot, mobile-home court or featureless field.
Indeed, this paradox of beauty in the banal lies at the crux of his art and forms the core of a new traveling retrospective of his career accomplishments that opens today at the Denver Art Museum.
“I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated,” the photographer once said. “But there was something about these pictures. They were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious.”
And so they are.
Adams, 74, who moved with his family to Wheat Ridge at age 15 and lived most of his life along the Front Range before settling in Astoria, Ore., in 1997, has to be counted among the most important artists to ever live and work in Colorado.
And, indeed, some two-thirds of the 244 photographs in the exhibition (all printed by Adams) depict parts of the state, with many of them taken in and around Denver, Boulder and Longmont and confronting the evolving — or perhaps devolving essence — of these familiar locales.
From the panoramic paintings of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole to the pristine photographs of Ansel Adams, depictions of the American West traditionally celebrated the majestic beauty of snowy peaks, expansive valleys and pine forests.
But in the 1960s and ’70s, Adams saw the formerly untouched landscape along the Front Range give way at alarming speed to tract housing, shopping malls and parking lots. Not only did no one object: Almost no one took notice.
Teacher turns photographer
After securing a job in 1962 teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Adams took up photography. He began to use his camera lens to capture the transformation, perfecting his technique as he went along.
Among the first people in the art world to recognize the importance of Adams’ groundbreaking vision was John Szarkowski, the legendary director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
After meeting Adams in 1969, he bought four of the then-unknown artist’s works for the museum’s collection, and, just as important, he agreed to pen a foreword for a book of his images, a key impetus to getting it published.
In 1974, Adams published “The New West,” which as its straightforward title suggests, brought together 56 photos all shot in 1968-70 along the Front Range. They captured this new Western reality in simple, economical and unblinking fashion.
A classic example is “Pikes Peak.” Though the title suggests the mountain would be front and center in this late sunset shot, it is simply silhouetted, almost as an afterthought, in the background. Instead, the focus is on a generic Frontier gas station, with the bold letters of its sign suggesting a new development-driven take on manifest destiny.
Unlike the crisp tonal contrasts that are a hallmark of the work of Ansel Adams and others, Robert Adams deliberately printed many of these photographs in a way that gives them a slightly washed-out, almost wan look that subtly accentuates their banality.
It is quiet subversion at its best, one image building on the next to create a damning denunciation of the development engulfing the environs of Denver and, by extension, those of cities across the United States.
The book and its images were ignored at first. Many viewers did not understand why anyone would take photographs of subject matter so nondescript. It is also likely that some Coloradans, used to a more romantic view of their state, perceived these images as blasphemous.
Photographic visionary
But if these photographs were once overlooked and misunderstood, they are now rightly seen as revolutionary, changing the face of American photography and the way artists of all kinds perceive the physical world around them.
In a major acknowledgment of Adams’ pivotal role in late-20th and early-21st century art, the Yale University Art Gallery announced in January 2005 its purchase of 1,465 master prints of Adams’ photographs and an agreement to acquire similar prints of all his future work.
That acquisition, which assured the museum a complete holding of his life’s work, was the impetus for its organization of this large-scale, internationally touring retrospective, which opened last year at the Vancouver (British Columbia) Art Gallery.
Denver is the second stop for the show, and an essential one, because of Adams’ longtime residency in Colorado and his indelible artistic connection to the ever-changing land and people of this state.
“Obviously, I hope it happens,” Adams told The Post in 2008, when the museum was in discussions with Yale, “because I deeply care about Denver and the region, and, as my wife will testify, I’m periodically swept by intense homesickness, so I’m hoping that it works.”
It is the largest presentation ever of the artist’s works not just at the museum, which owns 146 of his images, but anywhere in Colorado.
Eric Paddock, Denver’s curator of photography, has presented the more or less chronological exhibition in a straightforward, non-fussy way that nicely mirrors the spare aesthetic that Adams employs in his books and photographs.
While the photographer’s 1960s and ’70s images of development encroaching on the landscape form the heart and soul of this show, significant examples of his other bodies of work are included.
These range from a group of eerie, unexpected 1978-83 views of smog- shrouded Los Angeles to five 1995 shots of the Pacific Ocean that are, without hyperbole, as breathtaking and dramatic as any photographs of the sea ever taken.
Adams remains active as a photographer, and as a 1999-2003 series of gut-wrenching images of the clear- cutting of forests in Clatsop County, Ore., makes clear, his critical eye has lost none of its laser-sharp focus.
“I began making pictures because I wanted to record what supports hope: the untranslatable mystery and beauty of the world,” writes Adams in a foreword to a new book of his images published in conjunction with this show.
“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.”
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
“Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs.”
Art. Denver Art Museum, West 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock Street. Denver is the second stop for an internationally traveling retrospective devoted to Adams, 74, one of the most important artists ever to live and work in Colorado. On view are 244 black-and-white photographs spanning his 45-year career. Today through Jan. 1. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Free with regular museum admission. 720-865-5000 or denverartmuseum.org.
