A meditative portrayal of land and sea along an Oregon trail, from the leading figure of the New Topographics

For more than 50 years, ever since his landmark photobook The New West, Robert Adams (born 1937) has numbered among America’s foremost modern photographers and chroniclers. Here, he returns to the landscape near his home on the Oregon coast, presenting photographs largely made on Nehalem Spit, a four-mile stretch of sand, seagrass and pines that divides the Pacific Ocean from Nehalem Bay. Recording changing light on the land and the sea, the black-and-white photographs, made between 2008 and 2019, and beautifully reproduced in this large-format volume, suggest questions to which Adams has often returned, about the meaning of our relationship to nature, and the precarity and brevity of our place in it.