Rialto, California 1982

Robert Adams made this gelatin silver print, ‘Rialto, California’. The eye skims the surface here: it’s flat, literally a photograph, but also metaphorically, in that Adams doesn’t give us anywhere obvious to land. I find myself studying the textures of the broken ground in the foreground, it’s full of dark marks that could be anything, any kind of detritus. This picture is all about tone; it's full of soft greys and subtle shifts in light. The plane in the upper-right feels like a dark mark, like a compositional element, almost like a bird on a branch. It gives you a little jolt, and then you realize it's a machine, a symbol of modernity intruding on this landscape. There's a kind of melancholic beauty to this image, like something lost, and I think of the quiet, contemplative landscapes of the Dutch Masters. But, where they found the divine in nature, Adams seems to be showing us something more ambiguous, a world where nature and industry are uneasily coexisting.