Robert Adams Book Review: The New West

A pretty popular book included on the list we all received in January. I felt a really strong attachment to it, mostly because I have similar interests in Adams' views of development, deforestation, and man's (often forced) harmony with nature.

Robert Adams’ book The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range caught my interest from the first few photographs. By the time I had finished his work, it was clear to me what Adams was expressing: his viewpoint in regards to the turmoil we have put the once “wild west” through. Adams divides his book, which contains fifty or so black and white photographs, into five sections labeled Prairie, Tracts and Mobile Homes, The City, Foothills, and Mountains. Each section guides his journey through the Pikes Peak region of the Colorado Wilderness. Each photograph occupies the right page, while a complementing word or two about the photo and its respective location lie on the left. It was obvious to me that these simple, at first innocuous captions were something more. They very, very subtly contrasted man’s creations with the natural landscape they are effectively destroying.

Prairie seemed at first as a romantic tribute to rural transportation. Here, man is not seen. His creations seem to compliment the landscape, or at minimum, seem unobtrusive. Some roads are unpaved, others are rolling landscapes with telephone wires running conspicuously through the sky. Then suddenly, more telephone poles -- a For Sale sign. The next image is a dead rabbit on hot asphalt, its innards graphically spilling from its sides. It is noticeable that the greenery is growing sparse -- a lone shrub grows painfully out of a rocky roadbed. Man has clearly claimed the land by the end of this chapter. The descriptions at left seem to mock this “description-of-my-vacation-pictures” type set up.

Man moves in. The opening image of Tracts and Mobile Homes makes this clear. Barren, level plains are for their exploit. They begin to create these homes. Even as they near completion, as Adams suggests in his captions, the restoration of wildlife and shrubbery is vacant. The dirt remains instead. One image contains a STOP sign, at the center of the composition -- deliberately chosen by Adams. Adams uses words sparsely yet powerfully in his photographs, so that they convey a powerful message without becoming convoluted. Interesting in this section is Adams’ use of two images from almost identical locations of a “subdivision in Arvada.” The latter of the photographs is ridden with dark, ominous clouds overhead. The chapter ends with Adams’ caption, “dusk,” with the image of what appears to be a real estate sign alongside the road.

The City is where it all grows cold and dead, as far as wildlife is concerned. Adams remarks at the opening of the title how nothing is forbidden. One image even shows people shopping within a drugstore, a sign ironically hung over them that reads, “CAMPING NEEDS.” Camping needs. In order to flee the poured concrete and destruction that their fellow man has laid, yes, maybe one needs camping. Miles and miles of concrete, parking lots, and gas stations flood Adams’ most important chapter.

Foothills finds the reader retreating from the inner city, back into the city limits. Here, man is still at work, but in a different setting. It appears that the reader is seeing man interact from a bit further back. He builds long fences to keep his few cattle from roaming (which, as the title suggests, are for sale), his highways are guided and formed by the natural terrain. A house sits in a field of plains, his homes, gas stations and motels all contrasted by the ominous landscape -- giant, silhouetted mountains behind them. His creations are small when viewed from this perspective. Perhaps the most interesting image in this chapter is one of a darkening sky, a lit gas station with the bold words FRONTIER on top of it, and a barely noticeable mountain silhouetted behind it. The caption only reads, “Pikes Peak.” It is clear at this image that Adams is using his labeling scheme to somehow mock man’s creations and his relationship with nature.

Mountains is brief, and closes the narrative through the Colorado landscape. The first image shows a curve in a highway, and signs for the purpose of guiding automobiles and creating a sense of order. Next comes “vacation homes,” scattered arbitrarily amongst heavy boulders that heave seemingly toppled down the mountainside. How have they not crushed flat these homes? Nature is starting to reclaim its domain -- a small billboard and telephone wires are found consumed by heavy foliage along a creek. The final image in this short, four-image chapter is that of a mountaintop on a clear day, with a cemetery in the foreground covered by a dark shadow. This image can be inferred as man’s inevitable decline; nature will always reclaim the land man takes, as man will inevitably die, leaving his land and possessions for the immortal landscape to consume.