Robert Adams

'Still photographs often differ from life more by their silence than by the immobility of their subjects. Landscape pictures tend to converge with life, however, on summer nights, when the sounds outside, after we call in children and close garage doors, are small - the whir of moths, the snap of a stick.'
Robert Adams

Robert Adams, born in Orange, New Jersey in 1937, is best known for his series of photographs that investigates urban encroachment into the landscape of the American West. In much of his work, Adams balances a sense of hope for Nature's persistence against despair with man's destruction of what was, until relatively recently, wilderness.

He took the Summer Nights series along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, where he lives. The series leads the viewer outward from urban centres towards the rural plains and mountains, suggesting a walk out of town as the light fades.

As the series title suggests, Adams took many of the photographs at night in summer, when twilight can extend into the whole night. Others, where electric lights are balanced - and even dwarfed - by the drama of darkening skies, were taken at actual twilight.

This text was originally written to accompany the exhibition Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour on display at the V&A South Kensington between 10 October and 17 December 2006..

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