The River’s Edge 2015

Curator: Robert Adams’ 2015 gelatin-silver print, "The River's Edge", presents us with a seemingly simple monochrome landscape. What are your first thoughts? Editor: It feels…stark. The starkness emphasizes the rough, weathered textures. Look at that enormous fallen log in the foreground, the dense foliage. It feels heavy, like a testament to endurance under pressure, reflecting material transformations and weathering processes. Curator: I find that very insightful. Adams' work, especially his landscape photography, often deals with the fraught relationship between humanity and the natural world. His photographs serve as quiet protests, highlighting ecological damage. Here, in 'The River's Edge,' the black and white aesthetic underscores themes of environmental neglect and abandonment. Editor: Absolutely, the means of production are part of the conversation here; the choice of black and white enhances the sense of rawness, the very granular nature of this piece emphasizes the decay and weathering, like this gelatin-silver medium underscores a pre-digital age that was still concerned with human-made things over technology and screen. Curator: He is keen to show what society values and disvalues. Considering his broader work, and the cultural landscape around him, what specific statements are being made? This riverbank becomes a document, a place bearing the marks of societal choices and environmental consequences, highlighting themes around extraction and material usage that are relevant in intersectional dialogues that tie to class and accessibility. Editor: I agree. In this landscape, we aren’t seeing untamed nature, we are seeing what remains when humanity has taken and taken. These logs, driftwood, everything speaks to an alteration by material consumption that directly speaks of production value, but it's also valuable by the end product being photography. Curator: Precisely. I appreciate the somber, yet resolute mood of the piece. The artist encourages a quiet consideration for what has occurred and may be coming. Editor: And the value in remembering how human production methods impacts spaces, whether this gelatin-silver print, or simply this landscape, these remains exist as a historical context, of materials at hand to reflect upon.