WASHINGTON, DC.- Over the course of his career, Robert Adams (b. 1937) has photographed a wide variety of subjects but rarely included still-lifes, until early in the 21st century. In 2004 and 2005, soon after he had completed a physically and emotionally draining project documenting the destruction of Oregon’s once pristine forests through clear-cutting, he vacationed in Manzanita, a small beach community on the Oregon coast. While there, he made several still-life pictures. A series of 16 of these photographs, entitled Still Lives at Manzanita, has been given to the National Gallery of Art by Jeffrey Fraenkel and Alan Mark.

The artist’s recently deceased parents had lived in Manzanita, and he and his wife, Kerstin, had often visited them, collecting wild strawberries in the dunes and taking long walks on the beach. When they returned in 2004 and 2005, they stayed in a modest motel where he made this suite of still-life photographs. Using fruit (probably from a local grocery store), a feather, a rock, a shell, and a few wildflowers picked on one of their walks, as well as a glass of water and two simple bowls, he created this stunning array of pictures. As he had done throughout his career, he used light to transform commonplace objects into things of simple beauty and wonder. Infused with his admiration for Paul Cézanne, these photographs reward quiet contemplation, allowing us to revel in the elegance of the natural forms, the delicacy of the shadows, and the dazzling quality of the light—even the stickers on the fruit become things of grace, firmly locating these objects in our everyday world. When he sequenced the photographs for publication, he began with a picture made at the base of the Neahkahnie Mountain where his parent’s house once stood, looking down on the empty beach. He concluded with one view looking out a window at a modest backyard and another of Kerstin and their dog Sally walking on the beach. He published them in a book, also titled Still Lives at Manzanita, acknowledging the importance of that spot on the Oregon coast while simultaneously suggesting the special quality that life assumes there—stilled, contemplative, and timeless.

Acquisition: Richard Misrach

Throughout his career, Richard Misrach (b. 1949) has made haunting landscape photographs to address some of the most pressing issues facing contemporary society—environmental pollution, poor land management, misogyny, racism—for his ongoing Desert Cantos project. Together, these pictures explore the southwest American desert landscape and humanity’s impact on it. As the artist explains, “You look at landscape, but it’s not really landscape, it’s a symbol for our country, it’s a metaphor for our country.” As part of this ongoing project, since 2004 Misrach has also been making photographs along the United States–Mexico border that he calls Border Cantos. The National Gallery of Art has acquired a work in this series, Wall, East of Nogales, Arizona (2014), a gift from Bruce and Sharyn Charnas.

Misrach has worked along the 2,000-mile border that separates Mexico and the United States to bear witness to its tragic human impact. He has photographed both the wall, which intermittently divides the two countries, and the poignant artifacts—shoes, children’s backpacks, and empty water bottles, as well as shooting targets and spent shotgun shells—that the migrants, the US military, and others have left behind.

Wall, East of Nogales, Arizona depicts a wall undulating through a vast empty landscape. Deeply moving, it suggests the arbitrariness of the border while questioning our efforts to stem the flow of either people or nature.