South of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, Jefferson County, Colorado 1976

Robert Adams made this gelatin silver print titled 'South of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, Jefferson County, Colorado'. What a mouthful! I wonder, when Adams was out there making this, was he thinking about the tradition of landscape painting? The sublime? The picturesque? I bet he was thinking about Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan and all those guys. I find myself wondering what it must have felt like to stand in that desolate, blasted space, the banality of it, the quiet hum of dread in the air. What’s so striking about the image is the contrast between the vast landscape and the evidence of human activity – the road, the telephone poles – a kind of uneasy coexistence of nature and industry. It has such an interesting relationship to Ed Ruscha's work, which I am really into. He used to drive around LA taking photos of every building on the strip. He created books of deadpan images. It's a bit conceptual, but it works, and it is beautiful.