Interstate 25, Denver, Colorado Possibly 1973 - 1991

Robert Adams made this photograph, Interstate 25, Denver, Colorado with film and camera, at an undetermined date. I wonder what it was like for him to stand there, with his camera, on that weedy patch of land near the highway? There's a tension in the image, with a view that is both near and far. I imagine that he, like me, might have been interested in what it means to be stuck in the middle; the in-between spaces that we often overlook or ignore. The tree in the foreground is scraggly and wild and hints at an earlier untouched landscape. It frames the more distant view of the highway, the road that leads somewhere else. His choice of black and white—I guess that was his colour palette—reduces the world to a series of contrasts. It flattens and complicates the space. It asks the viewer to consider what it means to be in a place, but also on the way to another. We artists keep having a conversation across time and space, and so now, here I am, looking back and being inspired.