Landscape with Path

Robert Adams, Nebraska State Highway 2, Box Butte County
August 1, 2011 - August 31, 2011
Installed on a billboard east of the High Line at West 18th Street

Robert Adams' Nebraska State Highway 2, Box Butte County is the second work in Landscape with Path, the second installment in a series of images selected by photographer Joel Sternfeld.

Installed on a 25-by-75 foot billboard, Adams’ photograph stands in direct contrast to the pedestrians, bikes, and vehicles traveling along 10th Avenue. The image shows a quiet country road--devoid of cars or any other human presence--where the gathering of cottonwood leaves in the foreground is the sole activity. “I have never looked at a Robert Adams photograph without being deeply stirred,” says Joel Sternfeld. “But the image that has an ineluctable hold on me is Nebraska State Highway 2, Box Butte County, Nebraska.” Adams made this image in 1978 as part of a survey to discover how the grand landscapes of the western United States had been shaped, in ways both subtle and dramatic, by human development. A sequence of pictures from this series was published in his 1980 book, "From the Missouri West."

Nebraska State Highway 2, Box Butte County is the second installment in Landscape with Path. The photography series celebrates the High Line's dual nature as an urban walkway and landscape promenade, and brings the work of three eminent photographers to park visitors on a grand scale. Joel Sternfeld was invited by Friends of the High Line to serve as the guest curator of the series, and kick it off with one of his own images of the High Line, A Railroad Artifact, 30th St, May 2000, which helped raise public awareness about the High Line.

Nebraska State Highway 2, Box Butte County will remain on view for one month. The last installment of Landscape with Path will be an image by Darren Almond, on view starting in October, 2011.

About Robert Adams

Robert Adams (b. 1937) has been photographing the changing American West for more than 40 years. Adams's photographs emphasize the redemptive beauty of nature in the face of humans' widespread and unremitting use of the land and focus on the intersection between the human and natural worlds. Early in his career he wrote, "The job of the photographer is not to record indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope." In 1989 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Adams's work, and his photographs were included in Documenta X in 1997. The Yale University Art Gallery, which holds Adams's master sets, has organized a new retrospective exhibition of his work that was recently shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery and will travel to several North American and European venues, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Spain. Adams was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1994 and received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 2009. He is working on several new book projects, which will join the nearly forty volumes of his photographs and writings, including the recently reprinted classics "Denver," "What We Bought," and "Summer Nights, Walking." Adams lives and works in Astoria, Oregon.

About Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld (b. 1944) is known for his photographs of people and the American landscape. He has had solo exhibitions of his work in New York, Rome, Berlin, Lisbon, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, among other cities. He is the recipient of many honors, including the Citigroup Photography Prize; the Prix de Rome; Shifting Foundation Fellowship; Grand Prize Winner, Higashikawa Festival of Photography, Japan; Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Photographers Fellowship. He lives in New York City, and has taught photography at Sarah Lawrence College since 1985, guiding the next generation of accomplished artists.

Support

This High Line Art Commissions are presented by Friends of the High Line and the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. High Line Art Commissions are made possible by Donald R. Mullen, Jr. This program is supported, in part, with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and from the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State's 62 counties. In-kind sponsorship for this series is provided by Edison Properties.