Just read this recent Jacket interview – Noel King of Macquarie University Sydney, interviewing Frish Brandt of the Fraenkel Gallery about the work of Robert Adams. Reading and enjoying the images there, it got me thinking of a link I bookmarked earlier this year, Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance, an exhibition at the Getty museum.
Listening to the audio tracks on the Getty site, some fragments (from interviews with Adams) stayed in my mind. Here are those fragments accompanying his image Ontario Canada.
Robert Adams
Ontario Canada, 1983
© 2009 The J. Paul Getty Trust. All rights reserved.
… after I took the picture, as I was packing up the camera, a person in the house in the background loosed a pack of dogs on me, which I managed to repel with some rocks – it was a very hostile area …
… if you’d say “are those two crossed palms, which seem to be an cross on a death certificate, beautiful?” – certainly the object itself is not beautiful, but I suppose at some extreme end of things I would hope that finding a kind of order in the viewfinder of the camera does imply a measure of coherence in life.
… to offer a positive outlook in the face of despair …
… the operating principle that seems to work best is to go to the landscape that frightens you the most and take pictures until you’re not scared any more.
In these quotes I was struck with how there’s menace; how picture making for Adams is not necessarily a comfortable nor academic experience – it’s a complex process involving challenge, determination, an overriding ethic (the positive outlook), and also the expectation and experience of despair. Which in turn makes me wonder about the qualities I bring to my own picture making – who’s actually there when out in the world I make my images, and what my own relationship is to the world. An ongoing inquiry …
I’m also struck writing this now how the “backstory” of the image, for me, adds greatly to that image – an idea I guess I’m tussling with in my vispoems. And “backstory” can be thought of in different ways – from a description of the events relating to the picture taking, on up to the poetic and even mythic implications of those events.
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In psychological terms, photos without the commentary become hooks for projections, a way to see into one’s self rather than anything else. Of course, this is more than useful. But, it is limiting. I want more from others, more from my own photos as well. Thanks for this post.