Summer Nights
When I was in Cape Cod a few weeks ago I found a dusty old copy of the somewhat rare photo book Summer Nights by Robert Adams. I consider Robert Adams to be the best "boring" photographer of all time. He will never knock you out of your seat with a single photo but he has consistently made really interesting work, challenging our ideas about landscape, both living in it and attempting to photograph it. He is best known for being part of the original "New Topographics" exhibit in the 70s with distant, kind of bleak photos of industrial expansion in the west. Summer Nights is a little bit lighter and more melancholy. The series is made up of photographs he took while walking around his neighborhood in suburban Colorado at night. When I first looked at the photos in college they struck me as really sad and kind of aimless. I don't know if I actually read this somewhere or if I'm making it up based on my own emotional reaction to the work but I think Adams may have just moved to a new house/neighborhood when he took the photos, at the very least this where my mind goes whenever I see the pictures. The feeling of being in a new place and walking around like "What the hell is all this? I will never get used to this." The work is supposed to be about the disconnected, insular world of suburban living, but maybe this broader reading and my personal take can and should coexist.
We moved into a new apartment this week and I'm having all of those melancholic feelings, even though we now live about a football field's length away from where we used to live, in a neighborhood I grew up in. It doesn't take much to feel unmoored I guess.
Anyway, I've been looking through Summer Nights all week between unpacking sessions so that's where my head is at and I felt compelled to go out and take some pictures of our new surroundings last night. I've really fallen in love with some of the trees.
This week is a little bit wild with a bunch of shoots between moving stuff. Wedding in York on Friday, sunrise engagement shoot at a sunflower festival, and a beach maternity shoot on Sunday.
Oh yeah, and the new house is probably haunted by a spooky ghost lady.
