Giving Robert Adams’ lonely figures some company

THERE is a compelling loneliness to the photographs of Robert Adams, currently on exhibit at the Getty Center.

Composed in somber black and white, they evoke the sadness of film noir, an uneasy walk through darkness and emptiness with fate as an only companion.

I was transfixed by the image of an abandoned intersection, illuminated by the isolated radiance of a street lamp, so haunting in its moodiness that I could almost hear a clarinet crying in the background.

I expected Humphrey Bogart to walk through the scene, leaving a shadow and a trail of cigarette smoke as evidence of his presence.

One can easily relate to the moments depicted in the Adams exhibit. They reveal the West as it was, when orchards and forests graced the land, and as it is, cluttered by housing tracts of uncompromising gracelessness.

Adams sees cultural erosion in the economics of time, the ravaging of wooded hillsides to accommodate the square footage of profit; he sees the endless rows of sameness that were once nature’s diversity.

A former college professor, he gave it up to begin photographing the West almost 30 years ago. Instances of beauty, as well as forlorn moments of isolation, are a part of his vast repertoire, but for me, it is the loneliness that emerges.

One is drawn to the nighttime image of a woman’s silhouette seen through a window as she stands in a dim light on the far side of a room. Her pose suggests confusion or sadness, even though no face is discernible, as though she has just received news of a disquieting nature.

I wondered as I studied the picture what that news might be: a telephone call from a husband who says he is never coming home again? Notice of foreclosure on her home? The cry of an infant from another room?

Great photography absorbs the viewer even as the viewer absorbs the photograph. When Adams gives us often depressing scenes of his boyhood neighborhood in Denver, I can project myself into the imagery, altering it to become my own boyhood in Oakland.

I went back there recently to a neighborhood that has endured three transitions. Once it was composed of vast fruit orchards. Elements of them remain in clusters of cherry and apricot trees. Then the orchards were replaced by houses, but they predated tracts, so there was individuality to the homes.

I grew up during that second phase of the landscape changes. It was at a time of the Great Depression, when anger and hopelessness were dominant emotions in the foodless houses on either side of East 14th Street. We were poor and we were hungry, and if you could have looked into a window of the homes back then, you’d have seen the same silhouettes of despair that Adams saw in Denver.

In my recent visit, I witnessed East Oakland, in its third phase: neighborhoods trashed by new inhabitants who cared little for the cosmetics of their surroundings. Homes were in various states of disrepair, weeds had replaced lawns, fences had flattened to the ground and windows were boarded and gated.

Time had changed the nature of the area to a new form of isolation. Fear had become an added factor to what had existed in my youth. We might have been hungry and we might have been sad, but we were never afraid of one another back then. Now East Oakland had assumed the appearance of a gangland war zone, and I never wanted to return.

The photographs of Adams’ are as varied as the landscapes he traveled. One views them through the stereoscope of one’s own experiences, framed in a critique that said of his work, “Nothing is lost, but it can never be the same again.” Like poetry, his images are the ones we fashion out of the airy surroundings of our own imagination.

I thought about all of this on a full moon night following my visit to the Getty. I could see the moon, all round and orange, through the window of my writing room. A soft breeze was moving the limbs of the trees just outside the window, altering the patterns of light that came into the room. It was late and I had just finished shutting off the computer and the overhead light when I was distracted by a noise in the hall.

It was our cat Ernie chasing after a spot of moonlight that kept moving to the motion of the tree limbs in the wind. He’s a cat that sizzles with kinetic energy, dancing to the rhythms in his head, to sounds only he can hear, and to moonlight on the amber tile of our floors. If the moment could have been captured on film, it might have been an Adams photograph as seen through a window, the silhouette of a cat, the wind and the transitory nature of natural light.

I left Ernie to his moonbeam and fell asleep thinking about the windows that Adams had opened for me, of time and change and the dynamics of a new vision.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.