Robert Adams, Part II

yesterday i had a good cry.  not a sobbing, chest heaving type of cry, but the kind of crying where tears well up in your eyes and there's a gentle ache in your chest.  that is the power of Robert Adams' photography for me. 

The Place We Live, an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, is a massive career retrospective of the prolific writer and photographer's work over the past 40+ years.  definitely image overload.  there are two floors of small, exquisite black and white photographs, documenting man's changing, and challenging relationship with the land.

what stuns me about Adams' work is its magical ability to transport me to the places he has photographed.  i look at a tiny piece of paper hanging on the gallery wall and i am there.  i taste the air.  i feel the sun.  i touch the child.  i shiver in the breeze from the ocean.  i sit under the tree.  i don't understand why this happens with his work, and not with others, but it does. 

go see this exhibition, if you can.  you can bet your bottom dollar i will be writing about Mr. Adams again and again, once i have had the time to digest all that i saw and felt as i roamed the gallery yesterday.

Robert Adams