Gone?

Robert Adams began by photographing suburban landscapes along the edge of the Rocky Mountains. His goal was to record the erasure of the American wilderness, while attempting to affirm what survives of it. For Adams, photography at this juncture in history presents a melancholy vocation: «It seems to me that we are now compelled to recognize that we have no place to go but where we’ve been,» he judges. «We’ve got to go look at what we’ve done, which is oftentimes pretty awful, and see if we can’t make of this place a civilized home.» In Gone?, his most personal work to date, Adams lives out the implications of these words. In the 1980s, he revisited semi-rural areas he had known as a boy-landscapes that were no longer pristine, but which still retained their own particular qualities of light.