The New West
Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range
3rd edition, 2008, first published 1974
- The 'Old' American West has nearly gone
- The 'New' West is an essay, first published in 1974, on what came to fill it: freeways, tract homes, low rise buildings and signs
- Adams' monograph of the front wall of the Colorado Rocky Mountains focus on 5 themes: prairie, tracts and mobile homes, the foothills, the city and the mountains
- The images seek 2 opposing purposes: they shock and they uplift
- They shock for the commercial squalor which they depict
- They uplift because; 'all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty'
Foreword by John Szarkowski, otherwise text by Robert Adams himself.
Foreword
- Americans believe that the only truly beautiful landscape is natural wilderness, despite the difficulty in still finding some
- Acceptance of no remaining wilderness should lead to realisation that man must share the earth flora, fauna and other people
- One approach is to protect splendid land by fencing it off to keep people out or at least - as with national parks - allow them only to be transient visitors
- Yet, whatever the benefits of national parks, we must learn to use naturally the land outside their borders
- In communicating this, Robert Adams' pictures are 'civilised, temperate and exact'. They also avoid hyperbole, theatrical gestures and expressive effects (something which some viewers will find makes them dull).
- Yet this style fits the message. He describes some of the sins against nature. Yet his images show that these ugly settlements express human aspirations, and are therefore 'not uninteresting'. Land is the place where we live. We cannot despise it without belittling ourselves. Before we can proceed, we must learn to love it. Like Job, we must begin again by learning to love our ash pit.
Introduction
- 19th century pioneers thought the American West was sublime when they first encountered it
- Nevertheless, their intentions were mostly to alter and exploit this region
- So, why open our eyes anywhere but undamaged places like national parks? Why take images of tract home and billboards?
- One reason is that we do not live in national parks. We must improve things at home. To do that, we need to see the facts without blinking
- Paradoxically we need to see the whole landscape, natural and man-made. All land has 'over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty'
- In this sense, the subject of the New West is Light, the source of all form, not tract homes, etc. The subjects, which reflect the speculators' greed, are at certain times of day transformed to a cold, dry brilliance.
Prairie
- Outlying plains are still verdant and infrequent trees to measure space. Nearer the mountains and cities these give way
Grazing land near Falcon
Along Interstate 25
Tracts and mobile homes
- A strip city, largely suburban, is evolving from Wyoming to New Mexico. Anarchic and monotonous, life inside is frozen by anonymity and loneliness. Few will stand 50 years: badly built.
- Yet out of the windows fragments of open sky make radiant what frightens us
Frame for tract home
Tract house and outdoor theatre
The City
- No expediency is forbidden
- A new house is bulldozed to make room for a trailer agency, sidewalks lost when a street is widened, shrubs die in smog and are replaced by gravel, read the 'eschatological chaos of signs'
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| 68 Sheridan Boulevard, Lakewood |
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| 70 Sheridan Boulevard, Lakewood |
Foothills
- Windswept, stony and bright
- The last stop for travellers before they leave the plains
- As if to deepen reflection, we have scattered through mesas and ridges a thin clutter - an imitation cliff dwelling, an atomic bomb plant, monuments to Buffalo Bill and Will Rogers...
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| Outdoor Theater and Cheyenne Mountains |
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| Golden |
- The mountains are no longer wild, but they still dwarf us and so give us courage to look at our mistakes - expressways, Tyrolean villages and jeep roads.
- Such things shame us but they cannot outlast the rock. In sunlight they are even, for a moment, like trees.
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| Clear Creek Canyon, near Idaho Springs |
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| Clear Creek, near Idaho Springs |
Essays in defence of traditional values
Truth and landscape
- Landscape images offer 3 truths: geography, autobiography and metaphor
- Seen individually, geography is sometimes boring, autobiography
trivial and metaphor dubious
- Yet, taken as the sum of these parts, each reinforces the
others to achieve 'an affection for life'
Geography - the landscape image
- is a record of place, despite an awareness that the camera can lie
- shows us what is 'out there' as distinct from ourselves
- provides a certainty that offers relief from the shadow world of
romantic egoism
Autobiography - the landscape image
- tells us something about the person behind the camera
- shows us through composition the set of choices made, behind which
stand the photographer's memories and other thoughts of how s/he saw the
place
- cannot be taken as true without knowing the background to
it, because it may be either characteristic of the geography or
the photographer's experience of it
- has to be a personal matter, else - as with all image making - it
will fail to persuade because it will suggest that the image does not come
from human experience
Metaphor - the landscape image
- offers us help in discovering the meaning of place, at least
in its role as art whereby it gives the viewer more than s/he would
experience just by visiting the scene
- resonates with the viewer if it fits with our experience of life's
condition, enabling us to rediscover or re-evaluate ourselves
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