Customer Reviews

Time Passes

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At first glance, "Time Passes" looks like a repeat of "West from the Columbia", a book Robert Adams published more than a decade ago--some of the pictures appear to be the same. However, opening the books side by side and attempting to match pictures reveals a surprise--even though the subject is the same (the place where the Columbia joins the Pacific, the ocean waves, light on the sea, trees on the shore), and while some of them appear like they may have been made on the same day, none of the images are actually the same.

Which still leaves the question open, why would a photographer, given the opportunity to make a new book, elect to make a new selection from a body of work already published in another form?

Given Robert Adam's well deserved reputation for the care with which he both creates and presents his work, it seems clear that he has returned to the same place and subject because he thinks there is more to be seen there. There are two clues as to what he may have intended. The first is a statement that this work was exhibited with images from both "West from the Columbia" and "Turning Back". The images from the latter project are especially difficult in places, as they document the ravaging of the forests of the Northwest. The second clue is found on the blurb on the dust jacket "Time Passes is a meditation on transience and on the promise inherent in beauty."

To stand by the sea and watch the waves, as Adams must have done on many days in order to make these photographs, is an act that seems to be full of both despair and hope. We know and he knows the damage he turns his back to, and the impossibility of stopping a wave. But each day, the light is different, the sky is different, the sea dances in a way both like it always was, and magically unique. What is the promise of beauty? The answer he gives is this--enough to justify setting up the camera, enough to hope.

First, it must be said, this is a beautiful book: beautifully made, beautifully printed on beautiful paper. Second, this is the work of Robert Adams who has written some of the most perceptive commentary on photography, but whose own work seems to elude classification.
There is a quality of light that one sees in much of the best photography from the West Coast, a kind of freshness that grows out of the effects of warm winds blowing across cool water. One of my favorite Edward Weston photographs, from the late forties, is a simple view of the Pacific taken into the afternoon light. When I opened this book it seemed that Adams had looked into the same light on the very next day. This is what you see when you tune out the media, stop talking, stop thinking even, and simply gaze at the ocean.
I found this book so moving that I closed it after the first viewing and didn't look again for a week. Perhaps that's an odd recommendation. But if you like late Weston and early Ansel Adams, or Josef Sudek or Emmet Gowin, you should look at Time Passes.