 Today's video is sponsored by Aura. There are at least two kinds of silence that define us. One is the eloquent silence of the world as we were given it. The silence of light and beauty. The silence that holds a promise. There is also sometimes a dark silence within us. One that results from willful blindness and deafness. We struggle against it. What will America be? How's it? How's it? Robert Adams, landscape photographer, is one of my favorite photographers. Not just in landscape, but any genre. I remember the first time that I saw one of his images. It was captivating in a way that very few first encounters with the photographer is. It was this silhouette of a lady outlined against a blank window in a nondescript house. So simple yet so evocative. I had to find out more about this photographer. I was just obsessed with him and I discovered that he was part of a group called the New Topographics who were a selection of landscape photographers in the late 50s, 60s, 70s, around that middle of the century period who were thinking about man's effect on the landscape. And the New Topographics is very interesting, but it also is one of those areas in photography where we can get a little bit academic. You know, drifting away from what really is, certainly for me, the motivating thing with photographs is how they make you feel. It's fine that they have a purpose, but surely if they don't make you feel anything then they kind of miss their purpose. So rather than dwelling upon, you know, the New Topographics and their impact upon photography and modern consciousness and all that kind of stuff, I just want to concentrate on the title of this wonderful book that I got recently called American Silence, which is cutting straight through to what I find so intriguing about Robert Adams' photography, which is this feeling of silence, the quietness about them. The fact that, yes, they do have a lot to say, but they say it so softly. I was really excited when this book arrived in the post because, first of all, it's a lovely book. I mean, it's printed beautifully. It's heavy, but it's not too heavy. It's got some wonderful photographs in here that I hadn't seen before. And as I was flicking through it, it dawned on me that this wasn't simply just a retrospective, but it is a catalogue for an exhibition. And I was, oh, this is kind of interesting. And then it dawned on me that this exhibition would be showing when I was in DC at the National Gallery of Art. I was like, oh, this is so awesome. We must go to see this immediately, if not forthwith. So that's how I came to be in DC on like the 7th of July or something like that on a Sunday afternoon and walking through this wonderful exhibition of Robert Adams' photographs. They covered his entire career, obviously with it, because it's a retrospective. They were so once again quiet. I think this is always the thing that we tend to miss when we're looking at photographs, especially on screen, is the size that the artist wants them reproduced at. There are some photographers who reproduce their images in huge scale. So they are overbearing and you're really dominant. But what I found intriguing about Robert Adams' prints were that they were modest in size, that they were not in your face, brash things, but more, almost like a set of many statements in, well, if they'd been any smaller, they would have been like a postcard size, you know. But these ones, you know, 8 by 10s, that sort of thing. And I found them all the more powerful for this modesty. As I was walking around the exhibition with a friend of mine who had gone to visit, you know, I was trying to explain to about the new topographics and all this kind of stuff and, you know, and why these photographs are actually really good. And that's always a tricky thing, isn't it? You sort of say, well, here's some photographs of what are actually fairly nondescript environments, you know, tract housing being built in, you know, in the desert and signs just, you know, randomly placed in places. There's nothing that you look at it from a technical standpoint and go, wow, that's an amazing trick they've done with the photography there or, you know, or that the scenes themselves are crazy, you know, major events much, you know, like the Pulitzer Prize gallery that I'd seen a couple of years previously in DC as well. These are just photographs that, well, they're silent. They're silent observations of a country, a time, a place, you know, a state of environment that was in flux, was changing. While this development must have been noisy that they brought all this stuff to, they are photographed then in this quietness that often they are kind of devoid of people. But man's mark is always in these images. I love that idea of just letting the landscape speak to you. Because I was in the U.S. and various boring reasons about, you know, cell phone companies and things like that, I was having to use public Wi-Fi, an awful lot when I was there, you know, just checking my emails and what I have, you know, I could see the horror that my friend was looking at me when I was happy, go lucky, you know, connecting to all these unsecured networks because identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in America. Apparently it's so rife that there is a new victim every 14 seconds. I mean, think about that. It's crazy. And that is why I'm very happy to be partnered with today's sponsor Aura. Aura is identity theft protection. It's fraud monitoring. It's a VPN and password management system plus antivirus all in one easy to use app. Now you might have one or two of these tools already, but if you don't have all of them, then it's like leaving your back door open when you've triple bolted the front door. No doubt you know somebody who has had their identity stolen and have been shocked about how easily this can actually happen. Using Aura's VPN, you can make sure that all of your personal information is safe and encrypted. Protect yourself and your family from identity theft by clicking on this link on screen. And it's also in the description box below. When you click on that link, you will get a two week free trial to Aura. And then you can see for yourself just how many times in the past your information has been compromised. My favorite period of Robert Adams' photography is from the New West. These images in Colorado and in the Denver when things were being built up, all this tracked housing was rising from this, I don't want to say barren earth, but it certainly looks barren in these photographs. And they remind me somewhat of my own childhood. I think this is what photographs can do so well is that they can be gateways to a place that you enjoy that reminds you of some event in your past. And I look at these images of families starting their new lives in these places and then contrast that against those self-same places today. Because in a lot of the photographs in this period, you can see street signs. So you can go onto Google Maps and go on street view and there it is. How different does the world look now compared to those images then? And perhaps this is now the power of these photographs is that we are reminded that what actually looks like it has always been thus, this built up suburban, commercialized landscape, didn't always look like this. And I did say that we wouldn't drift into the world of the new topographics and that kind of stuff. But it's almost impossible to not feel that power, that echo of an old advert that I remember seeing that the words have stuck with me, which says strong words, softly spoken. These images of Robert Adams and everything else that was contained in this exhibition of American silence were just a joy to behold. It was wonderful to see these images in person, to feel their quiet power. And I've mentioned that a lot today because his work is beautifully quiet. Like a lot of photographers, Robert Adams has some standout images that I think even, somebody with either the most passing interest in photography could look at that and go, yeah, I think that looks nice for want of a better word. But he also falls into this category that I think a lot of, let's loosely call them arty photographers falls into, which is you show a photograph that by itself is, well, it's fairly nondescript. It's not great. And, you know, when you're talking to a friend like I was at this exhibition, it's hard to point at an image and go, dad, this is so good, because it looks like something everybody else could do. Robert Adams creates some wonderful standalone photographs. But the real power of his images comes from the body of work that he has created over his whole career. And this is why when you talk to somebody and you show them what can be a fairly nondescript photograph from something, like I was, you know, with, with my friend at the, the exhibition, trying to explain, wow, this is so cool. And your wife Robert Adams is great. If you look at that image, it's kind of like, well, it doesn't really, what is it? It's just, it's a picture of a, of a tree trunk on a beach or some random thing. And you have to think about those images in conjunction with all the other photographs that Robert Adams, William Eggleston, Stephen Shaw, all of these photographs come together as a body of work. That's what we lack so much. That's why going to exhibitions is so important to see photographs, not just printed at the size that the artist intended, but in the way that they intended to work together as a body of photographs, not just individual photographs put passively on the screen. Go and see exhibitions, go and drink in photographs, in the flesh, to see the prints, to see the almost tangible fingerprints of the photographer in that image. A photographer who I would love to go and see their work in person is Desiree Dolrin. I know that you are going to love her photographs because they are also quite quiet. Click on the video on screen right now and enjoy her sumptuous images. Thank you ever so much for watching and I will see you again soon.