Adams, Robert - A road through shore pine new in plastic!

In A Road Through Shore Pine, Adams traces a contemplative journey, first by automobile, then by foot, along an isolated, tree-bordered road to the sea. As presented through Adams’s 11 × 14-inch prints, the passage takes on the quality of metaphor, suggestive of life’s most meaningful journeys, especially its final ones. For this group of photographs, all of which were printed by Adams himself, the artist returned to the use of a medium-format camera, allowing the depiction of an intense amount of detail. Through experience gathered over more than four decades, Adams’s trees, especially the tips of their leaves, are etched with singular sensitivity to the subtleties and meanings of light.

Adams writes of these photographs, “The road is one that my family traveled often and fondly. Many of its members are gone now, and Kerstin and I visit the road for the example of the trees.” Adams had stored this work in an archival print box on which he inscribed in pencil a line from the journal of the Greek poet George Seferis, “A marvelous road, enough to make you weep; pine trees, pine trees…”