Writes an essay for the Whitney Museum of American Art about Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930), about which he states, “It is a picture upon which to depend. It is affirmative but does not promise happiness. It is calm but acknowledges our failures. It is beautiful but refers to a beauty beyond our making.” Kerstin retires, having served for twenty-five years as a public librarian.

His mother dies and two weeks later his father suffers a debilitating stroke. After more than thirty years of trying to do so, Adams and Kerstin move permanently to a small house in Astoria, close to his father.

Builds a new darkroom after cleaning the space of water damage and asbestos and begins to photograph more after several years of relative inactivity. He finds it difficult to do so, noting in his journal that “a landscape is always more remarkable than a picture of it. A picture is just an attempt to acknowledge the sufficiency of the place.” Works with Kerstin in support of Oregon's Measure 64 to restrict clearcutting in the state; the initiative is defeated. “After more than a century of ecocide, those who live here are so numb—over what their parents did, over what they have done and not done, over what they see each day—that they are unable to see a future, much less hope.” —From notes made in 1998