Robert Adams

Robert Adams (born 1937, Orange, New Jersey) is one of the most influential landscape photographers of the postwar era. His austere, unsentimental pictures reframed the American West, turning from heroic wilderness toward its altered, everyday terrain of tract housing, highways, and expanding suburbs. He came to the medium as a college English teacher, taking up the camera at the age of twenty-five, drawn first to the prairie churches and early Hispanic art of the West. He soon turned to the rapidly changing Front Range of Colorado.

Adams rose to prominence in the 1970s with the books Denver and The New West. His work anchored the landmark 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, which named a sensibility he had helped to define. Working almost entirely in black and white, and largely without figures, his photographs record the marks of human presence on the land with a documentary clarity that is also quietly moral. They hold the beauty of the West and its erosion within a single frame. Across a career spanning more than fifty books, he has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, the 2006 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, and the Hasselblad Award.

His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery.