Joshua Chuang and Robert Adams: Boats, Books, Birds

Description

In the summer and fall of 2017, the photographer Robert Adams invited Joshua Chuang, his frequent collaborator, to document the objects that Adams has made over the years for his own consolation and pleasure. The resulting color pictures-of half-model ships and boats, a miscellany of open books and cherished species of birds, all formed by hand from wood-have been brought together with views from the home Adams shares with his wife Kerstin to reveal a little-known aspect of his search for coherence in a fractured world. Strange to have come through the whole [twentieth] century and find that the most interesting thing is the birds. John Hay

Robert Adams was born in 1937 in Orange, New Jersey. After earning a PhD in English literature and teaching the subject for several years at Colorado College, he became a photographer in the mid-1960s. Adams has published more than 40 books of photographs, with the changing landscape of the American West as his primary subject; his books with Steidl include Gone? (2009), The Place We Live (2013) and From the Missouri West (2018). Adams lives and works with his wife in northwest Oregon. Joshua Chuang is a curator, writer and editor who currently serves as Associate Director of Art, Prints and Photographs and Senior Curator of Photography at The New York Public Library. He recently prepared an exhibition and book on the work of Anna Atkins.

The affinity between [Chuang's] sensibility and Adams's is unmistakeable.--Mark Feeney "Boston Globe"