Robert Adams: Along the Canadian Border

A slender meditation on nature's ceaseless indifference to human affairs, as expressed through 10 gleaming photographs of the skies

For more than 50 years, the legendary American photographer Robert Adams (born 1937) has made black-and-white photographs documenting the imprint of human development on the landscape of the American West. His austere, rigorously composed photographs capture with unflinching precision both the beauty of nature and the exploitation and degradation man has subjected it to. In Along the Canadian Border, Adams obliquely addresses our fraught societal moment, alluding to the distance between brutal political forces and policies and the resilience of the natural world. Turning his camera to the sky, he presents 10 luminous photographs of clouds, each indifferent to human boundaries and conflicts. Adams borrows the title of the book from a poem by William Stafford, who writes that, in the face of strife and pomp, "the only heroic thing is the sky."