BOOK:Robert Adams -A Parallel World,Fraenkel Gallery

Robert Adams, A Parallel World, Fraenkel GalleryRobert Adams, A Parallel World, Fraenkel GalleryInspired by a poem from Denise Levertov which finds solace in nature, Robert Adams in “A Parallel World” presents scenes of deep and unexpected beauty along the Oregon coast. The black and white photographs, made between 2015 and 2018, depict dunes and windswept trees, empty beaches and arresting skies, and views of a glittering Pacific seen through the windows of a home. Paying close attention to the qualities of light that falls on these places, Adams asks, by implication, what such beauty means. He writes, “The pictures establish that though we are not central, we share in a mystery”. Robert Adams is a photographer who has documented the extent and the limits of the human damage to the American West, recording there, in over fifty books of pictures, both reasons to despair and to hope. Adams grew up in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Colorado, in each place enjoying the out-of-­doors, often in company with his father. At age twenty-five, as a college English teacher with summers off, he learned photography, choosing as his first subjects early prairie churches and early Hispanic art, subjects of unalloyed beauty. After spending time in Scandinavia with his Swedish wife, Kerstin, however, he realized that there were complexities in the American geography that merited exploration.-Dimitris Lempesis