On Any Given Day in Spring / Light Balances

A quiet two-volume set of late photographs by Robert Adams (b. 1937), the central chronicler of the American West's transformation, published as paired paperbacks in a plain cardboard slipcase by Matthew Marks Gallery and Fraenkel Gallery in 2012.

On Any Given Day in Spring (32 pages, 30 plates) follows seabirds, sand, ocean, and sky at North Beach on Washington's coast — encounters Adams describes as "less an answer to our questions than a rephrasing of them," adding that "there is no certainty, on any given day in spring, that the birds will be there." Light Balances (48 pages, 57 plates) records light filtering through the foliage of a protected forest near the Columbia River estuary in Astoria, Oregon, where Adams has lived since 1997. Both books hold to his spare black-and-white attentiveness, here turned from the developed landscapes of his New Topographics years toward what remains intact.

Adams came to prominence in the 1975 New Topographics exhibition and received the Hasselblad Award in 2009 his retrospective The Place We Live toured internationally from Yale University Art Gallery. He is represented by Fraenkel Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery. The library also holds his Gone? (Steidl, 2010).