Robert Adams

The subject of Robert Adams's latest book, An Old Forest Road, is the privilege of walking through a little-visited reserve of forest near the photographer's home in the American Northwest

Robert Adams’s latest work, An Old Forest Road, is a pensive register of the photographer’s walks along a former logging road near his home in Oregon, made between 2012 and 2013. ‘Light’, Adams wrote in The New West, is ‘the source of all Form’, and in this sequence of pictures it again assumes a predominant role. Piercing through a loose canopy of branches and leaves, it reveals the luscious shapes and structures of the forest, while illuminating the time-worn pathway: the forest road. Sometimes the sunlight is so intense, it appears to set the path ablaze. Shadows, too, are prominent in the images, confronting the mystery and depth of the natural world: they occlude the way forward, rendering it as a tunnel to a destination unknown.