Robert Adams (B. 1937) is an American photographer best known for his images of the American West. From ferris wheels to roadside landscapes of California, Colorado, and Oregon, Adams’s photos express and note the impact humans have had on the land, to nature. From his “Why People Photograph: Essays and Reivews” Adams references: “By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet. Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil,” he wrote. “What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos.”
From New Jersey, his childhood included family relocations throughout the midwest. By 1952, Colorado and specifically Wheatridge became home. Adams went on to study English at the University of Redlands and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California in 1965. It wasn’t until the near completion of his dissertation for USC that Adams began to take photography seriously, learning techniques from professional photographer Myron Wood and reading Aperture magazine. In the 1970s, he released his first book The New West (1974), which ultimately led to the seminal exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Adams to date has published over 40 books in addition to receiving significant awards and fellowships, including:
- Guggenheim Fellowships
- MacArthur Fellowship
- Deutsche Börse Photography Prize
- Hasselblad Award
Today, his works can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
View a select grouping of Robert Adams works online here or speak with a GALLERY M specialist today.
