Robert Adams. Summer Nights, Walking

Pictures made at night, when – with silence – what is marginal can emerge. Summer nights, in which the passage of time is not important anymore, and our stare can be fixed and vacuous, pointing at something inside our minds, cradled by oscillating grass and lights.
This black-and-white work by Robert Adams comes in square-format, delicate-shaded photographs of night scenes, right where the american suburb merges into nature. Dim-lit houses, half-deserted parking lots, green pathways, rocks and trees are borderline scenaries linking the expected to contemplative drifts of the mind. The enjoyment of these quiet signs of life and of the ever-changing stillness of time raises powerful contrasting feelings of longing, loneliness and happiness of being alive.

«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