Robert Adams (American, born 1937)

Robert Adams (American, b.1937) is a photographer best known for documenting both the beauty and commercialization of the American West. Born in Orange, NJ, he grew up in Colorado, and earned a PhD in English from the University of Southern California. While Adams was teaching English at Colorado College, he began taking pictures of nature and architecture with a 35 mm reflex camera, and learned photographic technique from the professional photographer Myron Wood. His earliest series The New West (1968–1971) depicts the uniform housing tracts that were part of suburban development in Colorado. The series Los Angeles Spring (1978–1983) focuses on the remains of citrus estates, which were transformed into housing developments during the 1950s. Although Adams seems to criticize the degradation of the natural landscape, he emphasizes that his work is primarily a study of light. The series of nocturnal landscapes Summer Nights Walking (1976–1982) depicts sidewalks, trees, and fields lit by moonlight and street lamps. Throughout his work, Adams challenges romanticized and idealized landscape photography, and seeks to create a new vision of landscape that encompasses untouched nature and human presence. Adams received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1973 and 1980, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1994, and the Hasselblad Award in 2009. In May of 2014, Adams was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. He lives and works in Astoria, OR.