Santa Ana Wash, San Bernardino County, California 1982

Robert Adams made this photograph in San Bernardino County, California. It’s all about shades of gray, like a symphony in monochrome. Imagine Adams, out there in the dirt with his camera, composing this scene. The image is a landscape, but not the kind you put on a postcard. It's a slice of everyday reality, a kind of human-made mess but with a very round boulder bang in the middle. I wonder what he was thinking when he snapped the shutter? It makes me think about other photographers of the American West, and how they captured something both beautiful and, in a way, kind of sad about the whole situation. It’s like he’s saying, "Hey, look at this. This is us. This is what we’ve done." Artists are always in conversation, you know, building on each other's ideas, challenging them, pushing them further. And, in the end, it's all about how we see the world and what we choose to say about it. Adams asks us to see beauty where we might not expect it, in the overlooked corners of our world.