Gone? Robert Adams began by photographing suburban landscapes along the edge of the Rocky Mountains. His goal was to record the erasure of the American wilderness, while attempting to affirm what survives of it. For Adams, photography at this juncture in history presents a melancholy vocation: "It seems to me that we are now compelled to recognize that we have no place to go but where we've been," he judges. "We've got to go look at what we've done, which is oftentimes pretty awful, and see if we can't make of this place a civilized home." In Gone?, his most personal work to date, Adams lives out the implications of these words. In the 1980s, he revisited semi-rural areas he had known as a boy-landscapes that were no longer pristine, but which still retained their own particular qualities of light. California Since the 1960s, Robert Adams has used his camera lens to document the changing landscape of the United States. Covering the turbulent period from 1978 to 1983, Robert Adams’s photographs of the Los Angeles basin document a disintegration that is at once social and ecological. At the same time, however, they reveal a persistent verdancy and vitality in the landscape that contains a glimmer of hope. This hope that Adams shares with the viewer is much like the hope held out at the end of a classical tragedy—insistent, yet difficult to account for. In California we find a bird in a defoliated orchard, a suddenly clear day on a quiet road, the astonishing silhouette of a eucalyptus in smog—and we are left wondering how to explain these seemingly unreal moments.The images here constitute yet another chapter in the oeuvre of one of the most important landscape photographers of our time, building on and communicating with Adams’s continuing contribution to the national dialogue about America’s health and future—as well as his monumental contribution to contemporary photography. Printed in stunning tritones, this new monograph features a revelatory introduction by former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass. Listening to the River Through compositions made along creeks and riverbeds that meander through Denver suburbs, the artist invites the viewer to pause, look around, and celebrate the small fragments of nature’s beauty that can still be found in anonymous, everyday places.