Boats, Books, Birds

In the summer and fall of 2017, the photographer Robert Adams (born 1937) invited Joshua Chuang (born 1976)—writer, editor, Senior Curator of Photography at the New York Public Library and frequent collaborator of Adams’—to document the wooden objects that Adams has made over the years for his own consolation and pleasure.

The resulting color pictures—of half-model ships and boats, a miscellany of open books and cherished species of birds, all formed by hand from wood—have been brought together with views from the home that Adams shares with his wife Kerstin in Astoria, Oregon, to reveal a little-known aspect of his search for coherence in a fractured world.