Clatsop Beach, Oregon 1999

This is an image made by Robert Adams, of a beach in Oregon. It’s gray. Sort of like an Agnes Martin but… not. There’s a figure there, but they’re facing away from us, looking out to sea, like Caspar David Friedrich’s *Wanderer*. I wonder what it was like for Adams to stand on that beach? Did he consider what it meant to point his lens there and then, at the end of the land? Was he also thinking of those Romantic painters? Or maybe even the photographers who came before him? The surface looks smooth, like glass, but I can imagine the sand gritty under my feet. And that sea looks cold, and vast. Adams is in conversation with so many artists through this image. It's a conversation that moves across the centuries, each artist responding to those who came before, each adding their own little bit of beauty to the world.