Nature’s persistence

The biographer of an artist ought to assume, Robert Adams once wrote, that “art begins in unhappiness.” Looking at the photographs Adams has made over the past 40 years, it’s clear what distresses him: pollution, unchecked urban sprawl, clear-cutting of old-growth forests, overpopulation and every other abuse of the natural landscape.

But those pictures also exude an undeniable joy. Adams revels in the rich variability of land and light, sea and sky. His images advocate for an expanded definition of beauty that allows for litter, smog and the artifacts of greed. “All land, no matter what has happened to it,” he has also written, “has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.”

Ambivalence courses through the selection of Adams’ work now at the Getty Center with an insistence not usually attributed to that quality, which is commonly mistaken for apathy.

Apathy is not the problem here. Adams is passionate about the landscape of the American West (and prolific, with 25 books to his credit). He has a deep understanding of the land and its multiple histories -- political, economic, industrial, social, demographic, botanical. His work is steeped in intelligence, and ambivalence is the natural outgrowth of his knowledge.

In the encounter between nature and culture, few developments are either all good or all bad. It’s a subtle, gray world, and Adams makes subtle, gray pictures. Smart, nuanced and well informed, but shy of charisma. Consider him the John Kerry or perhaps the Al Gore of the photographic canon.

“Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance” begins with a dozen pictures of the American West -- the old West by other photographers. Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson and others photographed on government survey expeditions in the late 19th century, depicting a landscape more pristine than the one we occupy but equally seized upon for commercial purposes such as logging and railroad expansion.

Adams photographs the new West. His 1974 book by that name (subtitled “Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range”) laid out much of the territory he continues to cover: cities, tract homes and the incursion of the human on mountains, foothills and prairies. His attention to the stark and soulless side of the social landscape aligned him with a number of his peers (Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke and Joe Deal among them), who practiced what a landmark 1975 exhibition dubbed “New Topographics.”

Although the earliest pictures in the Getty show date from 1968-69 and the latest was made in 1999, most of the 90 prints date from the ‘70s and ‘80s. They’re grouped by theme or formal resonance rather than chronology, so the show doesn’t track Adams’ career as much as sample it. What the exhibition reveals is a photographer whose work conveys meaning through nuance and highly deliberate structure. Whatever drama his pictures possess is more often implicit than obvious.

Adams’ 1985 image of a Colorado tract home (“Longmont, Colorado”) is a good example of the understatement and ambivalence that characterize his work. The home’s illuminated interior appears as a light square within the larger dark square of the picture. The vertical curtain pleats and patterned exterior trim reiterate the shape of the window. Vertical wood paneling inside seems anchored in place by a narrow band of ceiling above and a thin horizontal strip of couch below. The composition is as beautifully precise as a Mondrian abstraction, but in the context of the suburban housing tract, such order is a symptom of uniformity and sterile efficiency.

Sometimes Adams introduces low-key disjunctions within a picture’s four walls. In a 1978 picture made in Utah, he places us in direct confrontation with a tree, ebullient with fresh white blossoms. The branches and flowers stretch from edge to edge and beyond the top of the frame, but an officious, waist-high barbed-wire fence stands between us and the tree, barrier to a more complete communion. A photograph of a graceful bend in the Missouri river (“Missouri River, Clay County, South Dakota,” 1977) is marred only by the presence of a beer can left on the near shore, as if at our feet. In a 1983 picture made in Palos Verdes, Adams has us looking out toward the sea through a tangle of concertina wire.

A good portion of Adams’ photographs are plain-spoken views of the familiar: scrappy roadsides, common streets. Even the silvery seascapes taken at the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon, where Adams now lives, are only modestly romantic. The intellectual potency of his work typically overrides the visual. Conditions beyond the frame that inform what Adams encloses within it -- histories of places and their exploitation, their violation -- are implied but not always evident. Adams aspires to evoke layers of time in his pictures, to build a density of meaning, but more often than not, only the outermost image is accessible.

The landscape photographer traditionally tries to show, according to Adams, “what is past, present, and future at once. You want ghosts, and the daily news and prophecy.” A PhD in literature (USC, 1965) and author of two eloquent books about the practice of his art, Adams is a pleasure to quote. His words are juicy, memorable, vivid. They wrap flesh around the photographs’ brittle bones.

*

‘Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance’

Where: The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays to Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, closed Mondays

Ends: May 28

Price: Free; parking $7

Contact: (310) 440-7300, www.getty.edu