Pikes Peak from the prairie, Colorado c. 1968

Robert Adams made this gelatin silver print, Pikes Peak from the prairie, Colorado, with his camera. You know, sometimes the starkest choices are the richest. This picture feels as dry as the cracked earth, doesn’t it? The light is almost uniformly bright, but somehow not warm. It’s a catalog of grays, from the bleached sky to the scrubby ground. At first, it looks empty, unremarkable almost. But then, your eye snags on the sign. Trespassing. A funny imposition of human order on a space that feels, at first glance, so untouched. The mountains in the distance feel like a taunt, something you can see but can’t reach, a beautiful backdrop to a boundary. Adams shares a sensibility with the New Topographics photographers, like Bernd and Hilla Becher, who found unexpected beauty in the mundane. It reminds us that art isn’t always about the spectacular, but about finding something to notice in the everyday. It’s a quiet kind of looking that pays off.