ROBERT ADAMS
American
Photographer Robert Adams has documented the
changing American West since the late 1960s. His
black and white photographs, along with his sig-
nificant writings, have explored the complex rela-
tionship of humankind to the natural environment.
Adams’s photographs emphasize the tension that
lies between human expansion and nature. His
seemingly stark, documentary-style images capture
the need for home, the inescapable destruction of
the land in western expansion, and the resiliency of
nature. These photographs record suburban hous-
ing tracks, desolate prairie highways, mountain
overlooks, highway exchanges, beaches, and people
shopping. Adams seeks out the ordinary and often
overlooked, allowing the viewer to question their
own place and behavior within society and their
natural surroundings.
Adams has always had an interest and love of
the land. Some of his earliest and fondest memories
are of hiking with his family in the woods. In the
1940s, Adams began to suffer from asthma. This
propelled his family to move first to Madison, Wis-
consin, and then to Colorado, for his health. While
growing up in Colorado in the 1950s, Adams con-
tinued to be very active in the outdoors, becoming
an Eagle Scout, guide and camp counselor, and
working for the U.S. Forest Service. The many
natural areas Adams explored as a young man
would later become the areas he would see so dras-
tically changed and be compelled to document in
his photography.
At age 19 and before going to college, Adams’s
concern for societal issues led him to consider be-
coming a minister, as his great-grandfather had
been in the Midwest. Although he did not pursue
the ministry, his social concerns would be born out
through his photography. Adams went on to study
English at the University of Redlands in California,
graduating in 1959 and later, pursued his Ph.D. in
English from the University of Southern Califor-
nia, which he completed in 1965. In 1962, Adams
returned to Colorado to teach English at Colorado
College in Colorado Springs. He was troubled by
the changes that had occurred during his absence.
‘‘I came back to Colorado to discover that it had
become like California...The places where I had
worked, hunted, climbed and run rivers were all
being destroyed, and for me the desperate question
was, how do I survive?’’ (Di Grappa 1980).
During his time in Colorado Springs, Adams
began to find that through photography he could
‘‘say what he wanted to say—which approximated
what I felt’’ (Brooke 1998, 100). With little formal
training in photography, Adams would in the late
1960s begin to capture the rapidly changing Amer-
ican West and the people who inhabit it. He wrote
of his work in an essay ‘‘In the American West is
Hope Possible’’:
So, when I have the strength to be honest, I do not hope
to experience again the space I loved as a child. The loss
is the single hardest fact for me to acknowledge in the
American decline. How we depended on space, without
realizing it—space which made easier a civility with
each other, and which made plainer the beauty of light
and thus the world.
(Adams 1989, 159)
Adams taught at Colorado College until 1970,
when he turned to photography full-time. Important
to his early career, Adams met John Szarkowski,
director of the department of photography at the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in 1969. Szar-
kowski subsequently bought four of Adams’s prints
and supported Adams and his new approach to
documenting the Western landscape. Adams was
included in exhibitions at MoMA in 1970, 1971,
and 1973 and throughout his later career. In 1975,
he was one of several photographers featured in
the important exhibitionNew Topographics: Photo-
graphs of a Man-Altered Landscapeat the Inter-
national Museum of Photography at George
Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Through
this exhibit, he became associated with the ‘‘new
topographic’’ photographers, including Lewis Baltz,
Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, and Stephen Shore. These
photographers all acknowledged the human exis-
tence in nature through their work, in contrast with
other ‘‘western’’ photographers such as Ansel Adams
(no relation), Imogen Cunningham, and Edward and
Brett Weston of Group f/64, whose photographs
often reflected a mythical and pristine natural land-
scape. Robert Adams and others were utilizing theADAMS, ROBERT