Robert Adams: A Road Through Shore Pine

A Road Through Shore Pine focuses on a series of 18 photographs by Robert Adams (born 1937), taken in Nehalem Bay State Park, Oregon, in fall 2013. Adams documents a contemplative journey, made first by automobile, then by foot, along an isolated, tree-bordered road to the sea. 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. 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…."