Peter Adams

Photographic landscape magic



They lie there in crepuscular light, mystical landscapes of softly rolling hills encased in wafts of mist. Colors meld into one another in tones of blue, green, and red. Other elements stand in contrast to this: the light violet of a distant chain of hills, a glowing apricot of the last beams of a sunset, the sharp contours of luscious green treetops in the foreground. Everything harmonizes in travel photographer Peters Adams’s landscape photographs taken in Tuscany since 2009: light, color, composition. The results are painterly landscapes full of atmosphere.



Peter Adams is a travel photographer by profession, and he has visited nearly one hundred countries. For a long time, however, the native Londoner’s interest focused more on the people he met during his travels than on the landscape. They revealed their countries to him, and he preferred to move around with them to better under a place’s character. Following in the footsteps of his major role model, Steve McCurry, he captured moving, brightly colored pictures of the people of all the continents of the world: camel herders before the Taj Mahal, fishermen in Myanmar, and indigenous people on stilts and in traditional dress on a wall in Mali.



Adams believes that a strong will, something unusual to discover, and avoiding clichés are crucial to good images. Only patience – and experience – can help. Sometimes he spends multiple days in one location in order to study the atmosphere and then waits for the right moment before finally, like a hunter stalking prey, making a catch. The loot is wonderful photographs of elegant compositions and the perfect interplay of light, color, and form, just as in the Tuscany panoramas, in which light and color break in the gentle rise and fall of the hills.