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  ©Joshua Chuang

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  ©Joshua Chuang

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  ©Joshua Chuang

PGI is pleased to present Boats, Books, Birds: Recorded in Wood by Robert Adams, photographs by Joshua Chuang.

Chuang, a photography curator, was named the inaugural photography curator at the Yale University Art Gallery, where he organized Robert Adams’s traveling retrospective, The Place We Live. Since then, he has deepened his relationship with Adams and has been involved in nearly 20 of his publications.

In addition to making pictures, photographer Robert Adams has been making wood carvings of boats, books and birds for decades.

This exhibition will feature the photographic work of Chuang, who photographed them in 2017 at Adams’s invitation.

It started in 2017 when Bob invited me to come to Astoria to document the wooden objects he’d made over the years. I’d seen them in and around the house during my many visits since getting to know him in 2006 and even included some examples in the retrospective I curated of his work several years later.

He wanted me to photograph these objects because was planning to pack many of them up to join his archive at Yale. He didn’t want me just to document them, but also to photograph them in situ, since he and his wife had lived with them on the walls and shelves of their house for decades, occasionally re-arranging them.

         I photographed over two sessions, once in the summer and later in the fall. One thing I was struck by is that he was still making things on his workbench in the garage. I knew they were important to him as a counterpart to his picture making, a different way of engaging with the lovely things of the world that was at once unexpected and unsurprising. I tried to show this in my photographs.

         I studied photography in college and even had a solo exhibition at a museum in NYC. But by then I’d traded these ambitions for the chance to channel my energies to collaborating with artists much greater than me.

         I had never really stopped taking pictures, but for the first time in years, I accepted a creative assignment. Neither Bob nor I wanted a high-production photo shoot with lots of lights on stands and reflectors taking over his modest living room. So I took the most unobtrusive equipment, a small digital camera, a tripod, and a handheld reflector. We went to the local art supply shop, where his wife bought calligraphy supplies, to buy light grey sheets of paper to use as the background. We used his bay window, with the curtains drawn, as a kind of soft box.

         It was very much an amateur production. No one would ever hire either one of us to photograph objects for a catalog―we were figuring out how to do things as we were doing them, improvising with whatever was around the house. (There is a humorous picture of Bob holding the tripod steady as the legs are propped up on stacks of photobooks from his library.)

But there is a plain-spokenness about the results that spoke to both of us, and seemed to match the subject.

Joshua Chuang

Joshua Chuang

Born 1976 in New York City with degrees from Dartmouth College and Yale University. In 2007 Chuang was named the inaugural photography curator at the Yale University Art Gallery, for which he organized The Place We Live, a touring retrospective of Robert Adams’s work, and led the acquisition of Lee Friedlander’s archive. In 2014 he was appointed chief curator at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and in 2016 he was hired to lead the art division of the New York Public Library, where he organized exhibitions on the work of Anna Atkins, Taryn Simon, and co-published a facsimile of the Kikuji Kawada’s maquette for Chizu (Mack, 2021). Since 2006, he has collaborated with Robert Adams on nearly twenty publications, including Boats, Books, Birds. This is his first exhibition of photographs since 2000.