Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Summer Nights from May 1 through June 28, 2003.
Since the late 1960s, Robert Adams has photographed the changing American landscape. Free from distortion or moral posture, Adams’s pictures are poised, earnest portraits of the land as we have come to inhabit it. Adams’s images present an undiminished geography including both the natural and man-made and testify that an absolute beauty endures despite humanity’s intrusion.
Made primarily in the late 1970s, the thirty-nine black and white images that comprise Summer Nights lead outward from population centers, specifically Denver, to the rural plains and Rocky mountains of Colorado, linking what remains of nature in the cities to a larger natural context. Photographing at night in the available artificial and lunar luminescence, Adams has asked the viewer to consider with fresh vision that which might otherwise be overlooked.
This series of night pictures is illustrated in the Aperture publication, Summer Nights, first published in 1985 and recently re-issued. Other books of Adams’s work include The New West, From the Missouri West, Los Angeles Spring, To Make It Home, Listening to the River, West From the Columbia, What We Bought, Notes for Friends, and California.
Summer Nights is presented concurrently with the exhibition Eugène Atget: Trees.
