Photography
Another image from Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance, a current exhibition at the Getty museum.
Robert Adams
West Edge of Denver, Colorado 1968 -1970
© 2009 The J. Paul Getty Trust. All rights reserved.
Adams, in the audio accompanying the image on the Getty site, says:
Two things, I think, brought me to make the picture: one, the loneliness of the figure, and two, the remarkable high altitude light which bathes the entire scene.
The traditional view of art, and I subscribe to it, is that art should delight and instruct. It’s in that sense inevitably political I think. The woman as she is isolated in that window suggests to me indirectly that there is something inhumane about the way our housing is conceived. The delight, if there is such, comes in the panoply of light that bathes rather mysteriously this frightening, dark isolation that is at the centre of the picture.
This is a powerful image from 40 years ago, one that strikes me all the more so after my recent Bali experience, where housing is conceived in quite another way. Partly this is due to climate, but also due to a collective view of housing (so there’s no homelessness), to arrangements of communal living that weave the need for housing into the overall ensouled process of everyday living.
Coming back to Sydney, our clean city streets seem in one sense empty (expunged of soul) and in another cluttered with traffic and (in the inner Eastern Suburbs at least) peopled by, to a greater or lesser extent, the homeless (in both an outer and inner sense).
