Brian Adams: “Home”

I make a lot of pictures at home of my kids playing outside, the kettle on the stove, and the bunny graveyard on the side of our house. I have a poor short-term memory and am a visual thinker, so I make photographs of these scenes as often as possible. It’s okay if the pictures are not perfect, because our memories are also not perfect. My kids appreciate it; they have inherited a penchant for nostalgia from both their mother and myself.

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Bruce standing outside of a houseboat he built with a friend, Anchorage, Alaska, October 2023; © Brian Adams

Alaska, in the bigger sense, is my home, and I try to bring a similar sensitivity and work ethic to my fieldwork by valuing what is in front of me as the work of documenting for the sake of the historical record and collective memory.

Whether I am at the top of the world in Utqiagvik, Alaska, documenting the butchering of a whale, or birdwatching on the Aleutian Islands (which extend off mainland Alaska, separating the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean), I feel at home. I want to preserve these moments in time in some way. Home, to me, is not about ownership, but about stewardship and continuing the work of the generations before me who respected the land they lived on. I’m contributing to the collective photo album of a place I love and want to remember.

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)

Biography

BRIAN ADAMS is an editorial and commercial photographer based in Anchorage, Alaska, specializing in environmental portraiture. His work has been featured in both national and international publications, and his work documenting Alaskan Native villages has been showcased in galleries across the United States and Europe. He is the author of the photography books I Am Alaskan (2013) and I Am Inuit (2017). In 2018, he received a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and he was awarded a Project Award from the Rasmuson Foundation in 2023 to continue his work on documenting Inuit life in Alaska and the circumpolar region.

Yellow or green-tinged exterior lights and a neon “open” sign hanging in a window reflect on piles of twilight-blue snow. One snowdrift reaches to the roof of one side of the business. Two people walk toward four-wheelers parked closer to us.

KIVALINA, ALASKA – APRIL, 2021: The “56 Store,” as locals call it, at night, facing the Kivalina lagoon and the new road leading to a new school being build eight miles inland. Nina Swan, the owner of the store, said that her business was not affected by COVID-19, because “everyone was still getting their checks.”

Six widely spaced people are inky silhouettes standing hip-deep in gently rippling water. They hold nets on the end of long sticks out in front of them. The coral-peach sky and slate-blue clouds are reflected in the water.

Dipnetters fishing for salmon at the mouth of the Kasilof River, Alaska, 2023; © Brian Adams

The hide of a white polar bear hangs on a line outside a one-story, weathered green house with white trim. Planks of wood and tires are collected near one corner of the structure, and one opening is boarded over.

Polar bear fur drying outside a home, Point Hope, Alaska, 2013; © Brian Adams

Two children stand next to a four-wheeler driven by another. Another pair of young people stand on a snowdrift so with their hips are even with the gutter on the roof of a house. They all have medium-toned skin and wear heavy-duty winter clothing.

Children watching others play baseball in the street, Kivalina, Alaska, March 2021; © Brian Adams

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Brian Adams