Robert Adams: Along the Canadian Border

For more than 50 years, Robert Adams (born 1937) has made black and white photographs documenting the imprint of human development on the Western landscape. In Along the Canadian Border, Adams obliquely addresses our fraught current moment, alluding to the distance between brutal political forces and policies and the resilient beauty of the natural world. Turning his camera to the sky, he presents ten 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.”