The fallen frontier.

ON THE EDGE

BY ROBERT ADAMS

FONDATION CARTIER

PARIS

NOVEMBER 16, 2007-JANUARY 27, 2008

Robert Adams's first solo show in Paris, titled "On the Edge," presents about 150 black-and-white gelatin silver prints that collectively introduce the Pacific Northwest landscape as a problem ground rather than an idyllic retreat. Since the late nineteenth century, the Northwest has focused its economy around the logging industry, transforming all of its resident conifer and evergreen trees into hard currency. The Klondike Goldrush, for instance, drew many settlers to the West Coast, where San Francisco was flourishing as a major metropolitan destination, while the small cities and towns of Oregon and Washington states remained sheepishly backwater.

By the late 1950s, the West Coast was immortalized in Jack Kerouac's On The Road (1957) and once again became known as the final frontier, the key of freedom. However, in 1964, another Beat writer, Ken Kesey, explored the contradictory notions of independence in a much larger novel titled Sometimes a Great Notion that focused upon the lives of striking lumber workers and the land owners within a small Oregon town. On a similar note, Adams renders a visual critique of the landscape that moves past all romantic notions of the West, presenting a vision that concentrates on the physical transformation of the coastline, a result of forested clear-cutting.

Located within the basement level of the Fondation Cartier, Adams's photographs appeared in a single line that stretched across six walls, bearing neither titles nor dates. Furthermore, each work hung at eye level under dim lighting and appeared to be of similar height and width. Viewers rolled past the ocean, fields of brush, a wall of rocks stacked to hold back the ocean, white caps, low fog cover, and an empty grass field. Initially, the camera's eye appears as if it was neutral, revealing nothing extraordinary. However, Adams's arrangement of these images, taken throughout the course of the 1990s, suggests that the contemporary Northwest landscape is more of a man-made rendering than a natural one.

Waves crest and fall in Southwest from the South Jetty (1990-91), for example, whereas the rock wall that frames the wild moving ocean seen on the far left in Winter, Northwest Across Dunes and Tidal Marsh Inside the South Jetty (1990) contrasts sharply with the vast, empty field of grass that extends off to the right. With old, dry dock posts standing stoically, Adams conveys that deforested land and ocean floor are synonymous with each other. An old-growth log in the dunes on the Clatsop Spit (1991) from the series titled "West from the Columbia" captures a large piece of lumber lying beneath thickets of tall grass. (As much as Adams would like one to believe that this image is part of a rapid degenerative process, it should be noted that the Clatsop Spit was formed by the Columbia River. By the middle of the twentieth century, sand dunes such as the one depicted were kept in place with shrubs and grass.)

Oregon (1999-2002) features a heroically fallen tree, resting partially above ground among a series of tree trunks. Framed by a dense forest in the distant background, the photographer captures the process of clear-cutting as a gradual but environmentally harmful procedure. Adams states in the show's press release, "The practice of industrial forestry has been and continues to be to strip the land almost bare.... Historical evidence from around the world suggests that clear-cutting will eventually result in the exhaustion of the soil, in deforestation, and in climate change." Another image captures a field of grass standing in shallow water, suggesting the gradual erosion of either ocean or river water onto land.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Many of these images appear to be slightly out of context, such as the image that depicts a vast, empty beach lining the back of the Seaside Resort, located about an hour south of the Columbia River. Since Seaside is also very close to densely forested lands, Adams's visual association of beach with forest does not present a firm match. Moreover, the forested lands owned by lumber companies appear on hillsides away from the low-lying strands of beach.

Like other documentary photographers, Adams uses this genre to raise social awareness regarding the land in which they live, as well as its need for continued preservation. While this exhibition appears to be a subtle follow-up to Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the photographer reveals the complexities of landscape photography, creating various angles from a specific site and then making each one visually significant. Similar to documentary portraits, Adams's work is a true tale of survival that could easily be improved. (1)

JILL CONNER is an art critic based in New York City.

NOTE 1. In conjunction with this exhibition, Adams published the book Time Passes, which contains a fraction of the photographs that were presented.