34. Sitka spruce, Klootchy Creek Park, Clatsop County, Oregon. This 750-year-old tree, which is 206 feet tall and 56 feet in circumference, is the largest tree now standing in Oregon, though it is characteristic of many that used to stand in the original forest. In its presence we find stillness. And perhaps some anxiety: the attack on the tree that Julia Butterfly Hill risked her life to save is representative of a pathology now quite common in the Northwest. From Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration

Artist Robert Adams (American, born 1937)

Date1999–2003

Period20th-21st century

MediumGelatin silver print on paper

DimensionsMat Size: 14 x 18 inches

Credit LinePurchase with funds provided by Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr.

Object number2006.026.034

Curatorial DepartmentModern & Contemporary Art

_Place of OriginUnited States

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103. Saddle Mountain (3,257 feet) as seen from the side of Humbug Mountain (2,452 feet), Clatsop County, Oregon. Saddle Mountain is the highest point in the Coastal Range in northwestern Oregon. The sorrow one feels here today is not new. Sam Churchill (1911–1991), a well-known newspaperman who was raised in a logging camp near Saddle Mountain, remembered experiencing it as a young child walking with his mother: “I knew that already donkey engines of the Saddle Mountain Logging Company were gnawing at the vast belt of timber almost at the mountain’s foot. A great panic and sadness suddenly welled up within me. I clutched at on of Mother’s blackberry-picking hands. ‘I don’t want all the trees to be gone,’ I sobbed in boyish agony. There, in the sullen loneliness of a logged-off ridge top, and surrounded by blackberry vines and with Saddle

Robert Adams

1999–2003

Object number: 2006.026.103

104. Saddle Mountain (3,257 feet) as seen from the side of Humbug Mountain (2,452 feet), Clatsop County, Oregon. Saddle Mountain is the highest point in the Coastal Range in northwestern Oregon. The sorrow one feels here today is not new. Sam Churchill (1911–1991), a well-known newspaperman who was raised in a logging camp near Saddle Mountain, remembered experiencing it as a young child walking with his mother: “I knew that already donkey engines of the Saddle Mountain Logging Company were gnawing at the vast belt of timber almost at the mountain’s foot. A great panic and sadness suddenly welled up within me. I clutched at on of Mother’s blackberry-picking hands. ‘I don’t want all the trees to be gone,’ I sobbed in boyish agony. There, in the sullen loneliness of a logged-off ridge top, and surrounded by blackberry vines and with Saddle

Robert Adams

1999–2003

Object number: 2006.026.104

82. Coos County, Oregon. Occasionally a tree will grow on top of an early stump. Here the second tree has itself been cut. From Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration

Robert Adams

1999–2003

Object number: 2006.026.082

93. Curry County, Oregon. . . . the poor joiner, working at his wood, Knew not the tree from which the planks were taken, Knew not the glade from which the trunk was brought, Knew not the soil in which the roots were fast, Nor by what centuries of gales the boughs were shaken, But holds them all beneath his hands at last V. Sackville-West How much more difficult it is to imagine the origin of a sheet of chip board. As John Hay has written, we are “destroyers who are incapable of identifying our victims.”From Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration

Robert Adams

1999–2003

Object number: 2006.026.093

11. Tree lines at the edge of crop land, the Coquille River valley, Coos County, Oregon. From Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration

Robert Adams

1999–2003

Object number: 2006.026.011

12. Tree lines at the edge of crop land, the Coquille River valley, Coos County, Oregon. From Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration

Robert Adams

1999–2003

Object number: 2006.026.012

13. Tree lines at the edge of crop land, the Coquille River valley, Coos County, Oregon. From Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration

Robert Adams

1999–2003

Object number: 2006.026.013

14. Tree lines at the edge of crop land, the Coquille River valley, Coos County, Oregon. From Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration

Robert Adams

1999–2003

Object number: 2006.026.014

85. A clearcut as seen from within the edge of a “beauty screen,” Clatsop County, Oregon. Timber companies now leave thin strips of woodland along public roads to mask clearcuts. When these deceptions cannot obscure the facts, corporations sometimes employ landscape architects to design clearcuts so that they will mimic the appearance of naturally open areas like meadows and rock slides. To further disguise their work, the forest products industry generates voluminous propaganda. Not many wars, even, have been justified by so much lying. From Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration

Robert Adams

1999–2003

Object number: 2006.026.085

86. A clearcut as seen from within the edge of a “beauty screen,” Clatsop County, Oregon. Timber companies now leave thin strips of woodland along public roads to mask clearcuts. When these deceptions cannot obscure the facts, corporations sometimes employ landscape architects to design clearcuts so that they will mimic the appearance of naturally open areas like meadows and rock slides. To further disguise their work, the forest products industry generates voluminous propaganda. Not many wars, even, have been justified by so much lying. From Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration

Robert Adams

1999–2003

Object number: 2006.026.086

35. Along Floras Creek, Curry County, Oregon. Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center . . . released photos . . . from 700 miles above the earth, show[ing] a pattern of clearcutting throughout the entire rain forest of the Northwest that is so extensive that the land looks perforated by a giant blast of buck-shot. . . . Ninety percent of the original Northwest forest is gone. Timothy Egan The New York Times, June 1992 From Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration

Robert Adams

1999–2003

Object number: 2006.026.035

Image Not Available

Mary Magdalene Washing the Feet of Christ

Sadao Watanabe

1960

Object number: 2012.042