Having lived in Southern California during his university years, Robert Adams returned to photograph the Los Angeles Basin in the late 1970s and early 1980s, concentrating on what was left of the citrus groves, eucalyptus and palm trees that once flourished in the area. The pictures, while foreboding, testify to a verdancy against the odds. Featuring sumptuous quadratone plates, this greatly expanded and revised edition of a title originally published in 1986 reinvigorates one of Adams's most influential and admired bodies of work. Whether those trees that stand are reassuring is a question for a lifetime. All that is clear is the perfection of what we were given, the unworthiness of our response, and the certainty, in view of our current deprivation, that we are judged. Robert Adams