America, the (disappearing) beautiful

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/12/ [login to see] /robert-adams-photography-national-gallery
This photograph is good for your biceps. It's on the cover of a heavy, large, impressive catalogue for the National Gallery's exhibition "American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams." A perfect choice, this picture, to express Adams' obsession: the American landscape, and what's happened to it in the 85 years he's been looking at it.

Do you see the message in the photo? Notice that the word FRONTIER is missing its final R? The letter has disappeared just like the landscape itself: lost to over-development, clear-cutting, various human abuses.

"He's passionate about our relationship to the world around us," says National Gallery senior curator and head of the photography department (and friend) Sarah Greenough. I tell her I see Adams' pictures as doctrinaire — indictments of human avarice and neglect. "That's too harsh," Sarah says. He wants us to witness what has been, what's been lost, and the beauties that remain.