On Lookout Mountain, Jefferson County, Colorado Possibly 1970 - 1988

Robert Adams made this photograph, On Lookout Mountain, Jefferson County, Colorado, using a camera. There’s a beautiful tension in this picture between the vast, open landscape and the very human act of marking territory, like that graffiti on the rocks in the foreground. The eye travels out and back, from the scrawled names to the distant horizon. It’s a really physical scene, you can almost feel the dryness of the rocks, the scrubby plants, and the immense weight of the sky. What I love here is how Adams shows us the world. It is a world touched by human hands, not always in a good way, but it's a real world. That single mark of graffiti reminds us that we’re always changing the things that we see. Like the work of the New Topographics photographers, people like Lewis Baltz, Adams manages to show us the unexpected beauty in the mundane, revealing a world that's both familiar and deeply strange.