On Signal Hill, Overlooking Long Beach, California
Robert Adams American
Not on view
In this photograph, and in many of the pictures from Adams's series Los Angeles Spring, trees symbolize nature as a whole. Photographed along highways, against cityscapes, and on the fringes of suburbia, they appear out of place, puny, strangled by smog, and yet, as in this work, possess a wiry strength and vitality. Exquisitely printed in rich tonalities, this photograph ironically (and intentionally) harks back to nineteenth-century photography of the American West, which captured the California landscape when it was wild, untouched, and Edenic. Combining tragedy and hope in an object of certain beauty, this poetic work is a compelling expression of the artist's preoccupation with the progressive disappearance of nature.
