Favorite Photo Reviews 9: Robert Hass's "Robert Adams and Los Angeles"

Robert Adams, Redlands Looking Toward Los Angeles (1978)

This is the second post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Robert Hass’s wonderful “Robert Adams and Los Angeles” (included in his superb 2012 essay collection What Light Can Do).

It’s a review of a collection of Robert Adams’ pictures of the Los Angeles Basin, 1978-1983. I savor this piece for its classic tw0-step approach to critical writing: (1) describe; (2) analyze. Hass writes,

Consider “Redlands Looking Toward Los Angeles.” We are looking upward at a fan palm with a cropped top, somewhat asymmetrical - it seems to have more branches on the right side than the left. Near it - nearer, one would think, than makes sense - a slender pine with odd sprigs of bunched needles sprouting directly from the trunk, perhaps through some genetic peculiarity. Next to it and behind it - the distances are hard to judge - a profoundly asymmetrical and leafless tree of indistinct species, dead, or perhaps it’s winter. To the right of the picture a bushy, leaved tree much smaller or farther away, making a kind of lyric messiness as it spindles five or six trunks or trunkless toward the light. The light itself has caught in the edge of the of the palm’s trunk in a way that seems almost tender. Beyond and below this strange botanical collection, in the left half of the picture, there is a carved-up valley, a freeway perhaps and a dry aqueduct, next to which are a few more trees, possibly cottonwoods or Fremont willows, which suggest that the aqueduct and freeway had once been a riverbed that encouraged these natural configurations. On the embankment above the ribbon of freeway, what is possibly a train - it looks like a long dark caterpillar - and beyond that, little serpentine curves of white roads probably, though it looks like the glint of light on water. For the far background, two or three ridges of bare hills, and that L.A. sky, almost entirely effaced by something in the atmosphere, smoke or smog, which seems also to give everything else in the picture, except perhaps the edges of the palm, a hazy, softened, slightly out-of-focus look.

That’s one of the best descriptions of a photo I’ve ever read. And Hass isn’t done. He follows it with this brilliant analysis:

What emotion does it evoke, and what thoughts? The palm tree stands for Southern California; so do the freeways and the aqueduct. The first thing we notice, looking at it, is where we are. For me the second was some mix in the composition between the stark darkness of the tree silhouettes and the gentle and hazy light. Then, looking more closely, the slightly grotesque aspect of the trees. And the sense of space, and the dissolving distances. By then we have absorbed the fact that this image is in a wild, odd way very beautiful. And then, as if it were an almost comic afterthought, we might notice how much our responses depend on the way in which what we are looking at is an almost classical composition. Foreground and distance, a rivery space winding through the middle. It could be John Constable or, for that matter, Ansel Adams. The question that came to me was whether or not the composition was ironic. It doesn’t feel ironic, but it has a way of evoking an ideal of beauty that holds us responsible for what we are seeing. 

Near the end of this superb piece, Hass says of Adams’ work, it shows us “image after image of things we have seen but not noticed, or noticed and not seen, or don’t remember having seen or noticed, while recognizing that we’ve been seeing them all our lives.” This is well put. It reminds me of D. H. Lawrence’s definition of poetry: “an effort of attention.” Great photography shows us things we have seen but not noticed. It’s an effort of attention. 

January 23, 2023 Issue

Merve Emre, in her "Everyone's a Critic," in this week’s issue, bashes literary scholars. She calls them deformed. She quotes John Guillory’s new book, Professing Criticism: “If there is a thesis that unites the essays in Professing Criticism, it is that professional formation entails a corresponding ‘déformation professionnelle.’ ” She argues that academia has ruined literary criticism. She says that in university, criticism is "more interested in its own protocols than in what Guillory calls 'the verbal work of art.' "  

Well, all I can say in response is that, in a lifetime of reading, some of the best criticism I’ve read is by university scholars. Examples:

Sandra M. Gilbert’s Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1972 (Gilbert taught at Queens College of the City University of New York, at Sacramento State College, at California State College, Hayward, and at St. Mary’s College of California);

Bonnie Costello’s Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 1991 (Costello is Associate Professor of English at Boston University);

Roland Barthes’ New Critical Essays, 1980 (Barthes was professor at the Collège de France);

James Wood’s Serious Noticing, 2019 (Wood is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University);

Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, 2015 (Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University);

B. J. Leggett’s Larkin’s Blues, 1999 (Leggett is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville);

Dan Chiasson's One Kind of Everything, 2007 (Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College);

Bożena Shallcross’s Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky, 2002 (Shallcross is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago);

Eleanor Cook’s Elizabeth Bishop at Work, 2016 (Cook is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Toronto);

Robert Hass's What Light Can Do, 2012 (Hass teaches at the University of California);

Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, 1994 (Wood is Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University).

I'm just scratching the surface here. These literary scholars are interested in the verbal work of art, deeply so. I enjoy their writing immensely. 

Acts of Attention

Alec Soth, "Tim and Vanessa's, Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania"

Vince Aletti, in his absorbing “Alec Soth’s Obsessive Ode to Image-Making” (newyorker.com, February 1, 2022), quotes Soth on his creative process: “Soth said in the course of a recent walk-through at Sean Kelly, he felt that he could ‘liberate’ himself simply by ‘paying attention to what I see.’ ” I love this comment. “Paying attention to what I see” is, for me, the essence of photography – the essence of art, for that matter. Robert Hass, in his What Light Can Do (2012), writes, 

One of the things I love about the essay as a form – both as a reader and as a writer – is that it is an act of attention. An essay, like a photograph, is an inquiry, a search. It implies attention to and sustained concentration on some subject.

One more corroborative quote – my favourite in all of art writing – Peter Schjeldahl on Vermeer: “Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look” (Let’s See, 2008).