You might look at some of Robert Adams' photographs and turn away in disgust. He won't mind. He wasn't going for pretty.
An exhibit of 164 black and white photos by Adams — currently on display at The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona — takes a grim look at what Adams calls the "catastrophic destruction" of Northwestern rain forests.
The culprit, as viewed through Adams' lens, is the timber industry and its practice of clear-cutting vast expanses of forest.
In photo after photo of mangled stumps, ripped-up roots, snapped limbs, broken branches and flattened forests, Adams presents a visual indictment of industrial logging.
"It's reckless violence against the creation," Adams says in a telephone interview from his home in Astoria, Ore.
The free exhibit — titled "Robert Adams: Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration" — will be at the Center for Creative Photography through Aug. 6.
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Adams, 69, whose pictures appear in books, major exhibitions and museums throughout the world, says photos in the show were taken during a "re-exploration" of some of the terrain covered by the Lewis and Clark expedition two centuries ago.
In the once-lush rain forests of the Northwest, Adams says, "there were now vast landscapes of stumps."
Photographed in an almost monotonous style, the images of clear-cut forests become tedious as you take in the exhibit.
"It's a tough show," says Britt Salvesen, curator at the Center for Creative Photography. "That's obviously quite deliberate.
"You get not just one challenging picture, but three or four quite similar ones together," Salvesen says. "You're forced to just stand there, as he did, and take it in. . . . We'd like to walk away to a sunnier place, but he's encouraging us to stay there in that reality."
Adams acknowledges that viewing some of the photos is "wearying, absolutely wearying."
"The reason the grim pictures went on as long as they did is to make a grim point about a landscape of destruction," he says.
Adams is quick to add — and viewers of the show will notice — that he tempers the catastrophic mood with photos celebrating the beauty of living trees and idyllic scenes in a small community.
"As a photographer, I'm old-fashioned and think art should ultimately be affirmative," Adams says. "In the center part of the show, I addressed what's wrong. At the beginning and end, I tried to suggest that there is a beauty, a mysterious beauty, that will outlast this disaster and outlast us.
"The pictures of trees and the town pictures are meant to rescue your spirit."
What: A photo exhibit titled "Robert Adams: Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration"
Where: Center for Creative Photography on the University of Arizona campus, 1030 N. Olive Road. It's near East Speedway and North Park Avenue.
When: Gallery hours at the center are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. The exhibit continues through Aug. 6.
Cost: Free
Information: 621-7968
