Robert Adams @ the Getty

A woman sits on a sofa in a suburban tract house, her back to her home's front window. She is staring across her living room at a wall of wood-paneling, perhaps a dark-finished knotty pine.

It's a typical Robert Adams image, and it's on view now in the first gallery of Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance at the Getty. The Getty show, curated by Weston Naef, is not a retrospective. Instead it's an airing of 100+ Adams photos from the Getty's permanent collection. It's a wonderful show, a tip of the hat from a curator to a photographer, shared with us.  

Back to the photograph: Adams' best pictures capture the dichotomy of how Americans were drawn to dramatic Western lands in the 1960s and 1970s, and how they changed them -- often ruining them -- with mindless development. Longmont, Colorado, 1985 brilliantly captures this indifference. The woman in the photograph has placed her sofa right in front of her home's largest window. But instead of looking out toward the topographic drama of the Rocky Mountain Front Range, the sofa faces in toward the house, toward a wall of what was once a tree.

Adams was not the first photographer to zero in on the dissonance between America's love of the land and our post-war obsession with dumb development that changed it. (The underrated William Garnett, who started photographing the development of California's beautiful places in the early 1950s, was probably the first.) While there are traditional seascapes and landscapes in this show, Adams' best photographs embrace the suburban frontier and the beauty in dichotomy.

In Palos Verdes, Calif., man's razor wire meets nature's sea. Next to I-25 near Longmont, Colorado, the empty earth is lit by a fluourescent glow from above. The light source appears to be a giant gas station sign; the glow it gives off is extra-solar. This photo was taken in 1977 and recalls the 1975 Bruce Springsteen single-song operettea Jungleland: "They'll meet 'neath that giant Exxon sign that brings this fair city light."

Adams also captures our nonchalance about the land we have overrun. In Abandoned Windbreak West of Fontana, California (1985), Adams photographs four trees, each one taller than the one to its left, that have obviously been planted by a farmer or a homeowner. Once in place, they apparently failed to be as effective a windbreak as what was there before man cleared it for farmland. So the trees were left alone to die.

Adams' photos, along with those of his contemporaries Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Garnett and others, were part of a post-war reconsideration of the Western landscape in American art. Painters such as Clyfford Still (born in North Dakota, raised in southern Canada and eastern Washington), Agnes Martin (born in southern Canada) and Jackson Pollock (a Wyoming boy) chose to be inspired by open spaces as they pushed past realistic representations and into abstraction. Emmet Gowin's photographs of military bombing test sites also meld into abstraction. Over it, they said. 

That woman in the house in Longmont, Colo. was over it too.

Related: The Getty's exhibition website features a dozen images and video clips with the artist. Naef thinks Adams' book Why People Photograph is so important it's in the exhibition twice. SFMOMA has 47 Adamses from its permanent collection online.