North Table Mountain, Jefferson County, Colorado 1977

Curator: Robert Adams’ 1977 photograph, "North Table Mountain, Jefferson County, Colorado," presents us with a seemingly simple, yet structurally complex, landscape. Editor: I'll say. Bleak is the first word that springs to mind, like the last scene in some post-apocalyptic Western. It's…desolate. Curator: The starkness certainly speaks. Observe how Adams meticulously frames the composition. The subdued palette accentuates the lines and forms: the horizontal emphasis of the plains meeting the rounded mass of the table mountain, bisected vertically by the stark fence posts. Editor: Those "fence posts"…they are strange. They rise so randomly out of the landscape. Natural, or humanmade? They add to the slightly unsettling atmosphere, I think. They’re like musical notations—on some silent, haunting stave. Curator: Interesting metaphor. These linear intrusions, punctuating the organic scene, establish a critical tension. They underscore themes pervasive in Adams' work: the encroachment of man on the natural world, and the elegiac beauty within that alteration. Note the subtleties of light and shadow across the scene; the careful rendering of depth. Editor: Yes, but look, the emotional register is all wrong for ‘elegiac.’ I agree there’s beauty here, of a kind. But its muted tones are drained. It's not so much about what man *adds*, but about what he has, in a deeper sense, already taken away. The sense of infinite expansion – flattened. Curator: One might argue that this flattening itself embodies a type of sublime, capturing both scale and limit…Adams isn’t simply photographing a landscape; he’s critiquing our very perception of it. Editor: Precisely! But if the sublime registers *at all* it registers on its way to its vanishing point. This feels utterly unsentimental, almost aggressively so. An anti-pastoral. Curator: I find myself reconsidering its mood given our conversation. A successful work continues to challenge the viewer long after their first impression. Editor: Agreed. A powerful silence permeates the frame. Makes one think about perspective—both the photograph’s, and our own— in a whole new light. Or lack thereof, given this grayscale vista!