Adams, Robert. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture, 1994.

Last summer, on the way to Colorado, I drove U.S. 50 across Nevada. Friends had murmured sounds of disdain and warned me. “What a lonely road.” But it wasn’t until I was well past Fernley that I came upon the official-looking highway sign, “The Loneliest Road in America.” Was that a boast or a threat? I happen to like the rhythm of Nevada’s basin and range country and I don’t mind driving long distances without passing or being passed by another vehicle, so I ended up becoming fond of Highway 50. The emptiness, the stillness, seemed to reach into my bones.

I spent the night in a small town that had somehow escaped the last fifty years. The only drugstore had a soda fountain, the best place in town to get ice cream. In my motel room I pulled a book out of my backpack: Why People Photograph. The title intrigued me, so I had tossed it in my luggage. I thought I knew why I used my camera—to “keep” happy events, to set people and places in time, to play with color, line, and form. But perhaps I was acting out an unconscious impulse or instinct—I longed to know.

However, that wasn’t to be revealed to me in this desert night. Instead, the book asked me to do something I had not considered before.

Since he grew up and still lives in the West, author Robert Adams is especially fascinated by photographs of the frontier. He loves the way the quiet of Western space is “suggested metaphorically by the pictures’ visual stillness (a matter both of their subject and composition).” He suggested that I compare landscape photographs from the 1800s with oil paintings from the same period. Photographers and painters of the West tackled identical subjects, but Adams believes the photographs “come off better.” They are truer than the paintings, which often depict sky and atmospheric effects derived from English moors. I thought back to my visits to the Oakland Museum and its collection of Western paintings, with their misty horizons and diffused light. Then I recalled all those lovely, lonely miles I had covered that day. Not a nineteenth-century oil painting to be seen. I realized that our most popular artists of the frontier had created a mythological West—as if the plains and mountains weren’t grand enough in themselves.

The old photographs show us not only how the West really was, but also what we have destroyed. They remind us about space, which on many rabbitbrushed plains still appears to be wide and open, but is increasingly diminished in ways more subtle than fences and roads. The miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles appear to be forgotten tracts of wasteland, but computers at the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Defense know all about them. Biologists and geologists compile thick dossiers on them. Zoning laws set limits on them. Even a desolate plain lies under a flight path.

My return from Colorado took me through Utah, Montana, and Idaho. I photographed petroglyphs and dinosaur bones, cottonwood trees and red buttes. I turned my camera toward mountains rising behind mountains. I framed space, but hoped to capture stillness.

(This review appeared in the Redwood Coast Review.)