Teja Cole reflects on Robert Adams’s legacy as a landscape photographer in his article, “Dispatches from a Ruined Paradise,” published by The New York Times. Cole discusses how Adams’s work sets up landscapes in an alluring, mysterious way, and he describes the open road in the picture above as something “full of promise,” that “suggests… something more is there.”

When I look at the picture, I feel like it almost represents the twentieth century’s version of the American Dream: An open road, a frontier that’s still rugged somehow even in its civilization, and a promise for potential. Its emptiness, however, is almost reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, which mourns, in a way, the death of the idealistic “dream” that may or may not have ever existed. The main character, a mediocre salesman named Willy Loman, works all his life to get there, and objectively, he does it. He gets married, he buys a house, and he has two kids. But his fixation on winning – something he is never able to achieve – makes his life devoid of true happiness. I think that an analysis included in the book I read said that when the play came out in 1949, the men in the audience had tears streaming down their faces. Loman’s struggle was their own – working down an endless, empty road to a dream that only exists when their eyes are closed.

In turn, along with the death of the American dream, the picture seems to represent the death of the American West, the two of which are near synonymous in Americana mythology, and the death of a way of living that people still struggle to adhere to. Cole touches on this seemingly symbolic death of the West, something he wrote is a common theme in Adams’s work, and he points out that Adams’s work fails to acknowledge who the West really belonged to – European settlers, or dispossessed Native Americans?

“Roads, whether we like it or not, are reminders. Can there be any escape from the feeling that we have squandered our responsibilities?” Cole wrote. “I’m reminded of lines from ‘Where,’ a poem by Wendell Berry, that think so: ‘that abundance might/have lasted. It did not./One lifetime of our history/ruined it.’ But I’m also mindful that it’s not quite accurate to say that the commonweal is grievously fractured: It never cohered in the first place. The work of a superb artist like Adams can’t solve anything for us, but it can give us a chance to see what we have done. It contains what supports hope but also lays out the evidence against hope.”

I chose to focus on hemispatial neglect for my altered perception project. It’s a disorder that sometimes appears after a stroke. Part of the brain is damaged in such a way that the sufferer can only perceive one side of their vision. They can still see like normal, but for whatever reason, they can’t acknowledge the other side. If a person approached someone with hemispatial neglect from their “blind” side, they might act as though they couldn’t see the person, while if that person approached from their other side, they’d be greeted as usual. In one experiment, patients were shown a drawing of a house and asked if they’d like to live in it. They said yes. In the next trial, patients were shown a picture of a house that’s caught fire on their “blind” side. When asked if they’d like to live in that house, patients said no and insisted that the house was bad, although they couldn’t say why. Although they couldn’t acknowledge that the house was on fire, their brain registered the threat. I wanted to show what it might be like to see only one side of the “story,” if you will, so I used pictures of books. I altered each of them in different ways to represent how a person with the disorder might perceive the pages.

My narrative sequence is meant to draw on elements of both “Phantom of the Opera” and Little Red Riding Hood, as the protagonist “veers from the path” and walks into the woods. The lyrics in “Masquerade” – “Masquerade! Paper faces on parade . . . Masquerade! Hide your face, so the world will never find you” – serve as a backdrop to the story.

The two elements combine to represent a coming-of-age story, or bildungsroman, as the protagonist needs to find her way out of the metaphoric woods. She leaves the path, like Red Riding Hood, and might be a little lost, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale is often interpreted as a coming-of-age story, symbolized by the girl’s “rebirth” when she’s cut out of the wolf’s stomach by the huntsman.

The “Phantom of the Opera ” lyrics represent her need to find her way on her own – she doesn’t want the world to find her, she doesn’t want people to see her face. She can’t present herself to the world if she doesn’t know herself yet. She’s hiding her face in part to add an air of mystery – you never see her full face unobstructed because she’s composing it for herself too.

The final image, with her standing in front of the building, presents the clearest view of her face. She’s not completely out of the woods, because is anyone? But she’s found her way for the most part.

 

A girl walks into a forest she’s not familiar with.

As she walks further into the woods, she starts to get nervous.

She’s lost.

But then she sees a path she knows she’s walked before.

She finds her way out.