Species of Places
Near the beginning of the third volume of photographer Robert Adams’s The Place We Live, a compilation containing nearly four hundred tritone plates (about half reproduced at full size), published to accompany a major traveling exhibition of Adams’s work (currently in Los Angeles), there are two images on facing pages, plus a brief caption signed “R. A.” The first photograph is of a cottonwood tree in a weedy field with a few buildings and another, different kind of tree further back toward the right-hand edge (the cottonwood itself is attended by two much smaller trees of another species);