Robert Adams: Light Balances / On Any Given Day in Spring

With Light Balances, Robert Adams (born 1937) delves into the endless permutations of rhythm and contrast that take place between sunlight and trees. Photographing in a protected forest around the Columbia River estuary near the town of Astoria, Oregon, where he has lived since 1997, Adams undertook a study of the area that is Cézanne-like in its single-minded attention to nature’s minute shifts and variations. These 59 black-and-white photographs, made between 2005 and 2011, revel in the interplay of sunlight and leaves, branches, trunks, grass and the dirt of the forest floor, attaining a rich variety of texture and pattern that is at once filled with specificities and diffusely abstract. Published concurrently with Adams’ international touring retrospective, this beautifully produced volume shows a master photographer eliciting marvelous subtleties from the landscape of the Northwest.