Matthew Marks Gallery

For the series On Any Given Day in Spring, Robert Adams photographed seabirds, sand, ocean, and sky on Washington State’s North Beach. “There is no certainty, on any given day in spring, that the birds will be there,” he writes in the book’s foreword. These fleeting encounters provide “less an answer to our questions than a rephrasing of them as consolations.”

Adams made the photographs for Light Balances in a protected forest around the Columbia River estuary near the town of Astoria, Oregon, where he has lived since 1997. The dense black and white images capture light filtered through the leaves of the pristine forest.