Abandoned Windbreak West of Fontana, California

In the 1970s, concerned with the environmental effects of population growth, suburban and industrial development, landscape photographers emphasized the ways in which the American land was shaped, inhabited and scarred by humanity. Robert Adams, a photographer with passionate environmental interests, rejected the concept of the timeless, idealized landscape in favor of a deeper and more complex moral vision. His images unite a sense of promise and loss, transcendence and failure. This image of an abandoned windbreak in California suggests not only the loss of the farming community that once operated here but the environmental impact of the soil erosion which will surely result from the inadequate protection of the trees. And yet, scrawny and forgotten, the trees stand established and permanent, green sentinels to the past.