Adams is a member of the New Topographics. His photos may initially suggest development overpowering its surroundings, or at least a disharmonious relationship, but that is not the whole story. This photograph of a cemetery, with the Rockies looming over it, comes from his book The New West. In its introduction, he writes, “all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.”¹ Given his preoccupation with the industrial and (sub)urban, its subject may not seem representative of his concerns. Taken in context, however, it points to a keen awareness of a landscape in flux that is irreducible to mere fatalism: through all the change, death and the mountains are immutable.
-Ethan Spielman
1 Robert Adams, The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range (New York: Aperture, 1974), p.xiv.
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