Denver, Colorado 1981

Robert Adams made this gelatin silver print, Denver, Colorado, sometime around the seventies, and what strikes me is the light. It's that bleached-out, almost overexposed light that speaks to a certain time and place, but it also feels like an emotional register. Look at how the grey flattens everything, almost like a drawing. It's about the subtle shifts in tone, a process of building up atmosphere, the contrast between the figures and the sky. There is something so banal about this image, which somehow makes it beautiful. Those girls with their ice creams! The more I look, the more the mundane details pop out: the stop sign, the electrical wires cutting across the sky. It reminds me of some of the New Topographics photographers, artists who found beauty in the everyday landscape. Art is about seeing, right? It's about finding something interesting in the most ordinary things.