Reverence & Unreverence Photography | Adam Williams

Reverence: Portraits of Natures Mortes is a photographic series that highlights the details of the natural world, primarily from the mountains and wild that surround where I live in Colorado, with the occasional piece from travels elsewhere.

This work is a creative and spiritual practice of noticing the often overlooked, of spending time with it. It is a practice of seeing with intention, openness and curiosity.

In each of these natures mortes (still life artworks) there is a silent story. How did they come to bear the textures and weathered marks, the hints of life and death? Ancient stones. Sun-bleached bones. Remnants of a being that has come to rest. What are in these silent stories? What do you see, feel and come to understand within them?

Reverence is the challenging work of being present, noticing and revering the simple that surrounds us.

It’s work that started as long ago as 2004, when I started collecting pieces of nature, feeling connected to the pieces but with no “project” in mind. Those pieces eventually would lead to Reverence. I started photographing and intentionally putting together the series in 2018.

{Un}Reverence is an extension of the Reverence series. With this companion series, I’ve collected and photographed human-made objects left in the natural world.

{Un}Reverence, effectively, is the anti-Reverence. It examines these objects and their potential stories, as pulled from forests and mountains, creek banks and sea shores. 

It considers what it means for humans to live as part of the natural world. And, maybe more specifically, what it means to be Americans doing so. Given the objects I often have encountered, there seemed to be a non-glossy vision of Americana that emerged.

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Note: Some of the below photographs already are printed and framed at 16×20″ or 30×40″. For example, “A.muscaria,” “Feathers,” “Brass & Hulls,” and “Pottery (Cairn)” all are ready to hang at 30×40″. Examples of existing work framed at 16×20″ are “Cactus,” “Horsetail Reeds,” “Leaf” and “Leaf (Fossil).” 

Also, the digital color representation of many of the images as shown in gallery format below are notably off-target [e.g. “A.muscaria,” “Baseball” and “Three Stones (Stacked)].” Something seems to have been “lost in translation” in WordPress. All photographs are created and printed within the sepia-tone family. Click on individual images below to enlarge, and to see more accurate color representation.