"You’re always struggling to open your own eyes as well as other people’s eyes… I think it happened here." Robert Adams

Robert Adams’s black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West, revealing the impact of human activity on the last vestiges of wilderness and open space. An underlying tension in Adams’s body of work is the contradiction between landscapes visibly transformed or scarred by human presence and the inherent beauty of light and land rendered by the camera.

In 2005 Adams collaborated with Paul Taylor of Renaissance Press to produce, for the first time for Adams, a photogravure series of his work. Referring to the process, Adams said, As all photographers know one good picture next to another good picture and you have a third something. It may be better it may be worse but putting pictures next to each other inevitably influences the nature of both pictures… These pictures were of a poplar which Kerstin and I discovered all by itself, really a clump of poplar trunks… Ultimately this [photogravure] was a new thing for me. We enlisted the help of a plate maker to make four photogravures. I’ve always wanted to try that medium – an old-time process that lays down an ink picture on a sheet. It just seemed like a thing that I wanted to have to try once in one’s life. it’s gratifying. I also love the plates which are glorious when you look at them especially at a proper angle. You’re always struggling to open your own eyes as well as other people’s eyes… I think it happened here. [1]

This is to date the only series of photogravures that Adams produced.