Standing Still

From ‘An Old Forest Road’ by Robert Adams, courtesy the artist and Thomas Zander Galerie

Garden Time is a late collection of poems by W. S. Merwin, American poet laureate and planter of trees, which are about living in the present and how to see life, love, and nature as both ephemeral and eternal, simultaneously still and always changing. It is unsurprising, perhaps, that the photographer Robert Adams, who has a similar sensibility, should end his luminous book of photographs, An Old Forest Road, first published in 2017, with brief quotations from two of Merwin’s verses.

Taking as its subject a walk in woods near his home in Oregon, beyond which there are miles of ‘clearcut’ forests, the images in the book are united by the light that pierces the darkness and plays on branches, leaves, and the path ahead. There are shadows too, though, which frame the way forward and help to suggest that the path leads to somewhere unknown. ‘The only hope is to be the daylight’, Merwin once wrote, and this is the essence of An Old Forest Road.

The emphasis on stability in Adams’ later Standing Still, published in 2020, creates a subtle contrast to the implied movement of An Old Forest Road, but they have in common an awareness of change and the passing of time. Its monochrome photographs, reproduced, as in An Old Forest Road, in tritone, depict the front yard and garden at his house in Astoria, where he has lived with his wife, Kerstin, for almost a quarter of a century. They show the lawn, a fence, a border of shrubs and small trees, a stone bird bath, and a deer, as well as Kerstin. The garden itself, modest and unexceptional, is portrayed in all four seasons, variously enshrouded in mist, covered with snow, or enlivened by sunlight. Adam’s steady gaze is attentive and appreciative; his subject-matter unremarkable but beautiful. ‘In this quiet place’, he writes, ‘each day can be the first day’. Everything flows; everything remains the same.

Robert Adams’ photographs became well-known in the 1970s, mainly because of his book The New West, as well as his contribution to the celebrated exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. His early images conveyed Adams’ love of the open and empty prairies of the West, and also of the silence that pervades them, but they bore traces of ecological fragility. He showed the gradual transformation of the unspoiled Western landscape into Colorado suburbs, and documented the destruction caused by the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest, always with a single intention - to remind us of what has been lost, and to celebrate what remains.

Adams’ writings about photography and art are gently perceptive, their lucidity unusual in the contemporary art world. Like his photographs, they might easily be overlooked or disregarded, especially in a cultural context that accentuates different, and often opposing, values. In Art Can Help, published in 2017, a collection of essays on the purpose of art and the role of the artist in today’s society, he unfashionably dwells on the importance of images that evoke beauty without irony or sentimentality, proposing that ‘it is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it’. He also suggests that much contemporary work is ‘born of cynicism and predictive of nihilism’ and that beauty is the distinguishing quality of truly memorable art. ‘ It is never less than a mystery,’ he writes, ‘carrying within itself a promise, the reinforcement of meaning in life, although not necessarily a belief in a particular ideology’. ‘In this way,’ he continues, ‘art encourages us to gratitude and engagement, and is of both personal and civic consequence. The subject of a painting or photograph does not by itself make it art, but if there is no important subject matter at all - no clarifying reference out to significant life beyond the frame - then the term increasingly seems to me unearned’. The book’s epigraph, a quotation from Keats, adds a characteristic note of humility: ’Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject’.

The quietism of Adams’ recent work may be most effectively considered in relation to his earlier photographs, which are often sensitively confrontational, and much the same might be said of Speaking For Trees, the wonderfully understated film of Cat Power’s music, released in 2004, which echoes the meditative tranquility of Standing Still, its calming tone very different from the unease of much of her preceding music.

In a woodlands clearing in the Catskill Mountains, Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power), wearing jeans and a torn t-shirt, plays an electric guitar and sings some of her own songs and old classics, including tunes by Bob Dylan, Otis Redding, and The Rolling Stones. Like the film itself, her performance is evocatively blurred; she stands in place, occasionally stretching and straying, accompanied only by the sounds of crickets and wind in the trees. The camera is steady and distant, and from time to time the exposure slips, flaring and bleaching the picture. As unhurried and relaxed as Marshall's music, Speaking For Trees lasts nearly two hours.

The film had little impact. Some found its bucolic informality inspiring and reminiscent of the counter-cultural 1960s; others thought it dull. At the time, Chan Marshall often suffered from stage-fright and anxiety; by asking her to play without an audience, the photographer and film-maker Mark Borthwick was able to show Marshall at her most natural and free. Speaking For Trees marked a still point between past troubles and a severe emotional crisis that was about to come; its mood of peaceful acceptance of the way things are, albeit unresolved and fragmented, accounts for its touching openness and vulnerability. Her music, which was soon to change style, has never been quite the same again.

For further exploration:

A short film about W.S.Merwin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNrOqO9O6jY

Robert Adams on ‘clearcuts’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqnOmh1EPhw

Robert Adams on ‘photographing a landscape of mistakes’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuhxlLv_f2k

Cat Power’s Speaking For Trees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB0GDcOrOrM

From ‘Turning Back’ by Robert Adams, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery