Robert Adams : Standing Still: the Front Yard

The world in a front yard: Robert Adams records the seasonal shifts and transformations of the near and the intimate

For much of his long career, Robert Adams (born 1937) has photographed the regions where he has lived, recording the transformation of the Western landscape into suburbs in Colorado, or documenting the destruction left in the wake of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest. In recent years his focus has often turned to more intimate landscapes, as he has depicted the area around his home near the Oregon coast, where he has lived for more than 20 years.

Standing Still celebrates a small front yard―its verdancy, and the changing light and seasons throughout the year. The black-and-white photographs record a lawn and its border of shrubs and small trees; a stone bird bath, deer and Adams' wife, Kerstin. They show a landscape immersed in fog and dusted with snow, or bathed in warm sunlight. In this quiet place, “each day can be the first day,” writes Adams.