Robert Adams

His first subjects of prairie churches and Hispanic art gave way to an environmental consciousness that led him to document the beauty and fragility of the American landscape in black and white. In the 1970s and 1980s, he published a series of major books (The New West, Denver, What We Bought, Summer Nights) on the theme of the expansion of Colorado’s suburbs, while more broadly exploring the relationship between humanity’s imprint and nature’s resilience (From the Missouri West, Los Angeles Spring, California). His intimate relationship with landscape is expressed in more personal works (Prayers in an American Church, Perfect Times, Perfect Places), and some topics are addressed in a more political vein, such as the series Our Lives, Our Children (1983), with photographs taken from nearby the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. Celebrated by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989, in 1994 he received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship which allowed him to move to Oregon to document, with his wife, the deforestation of the Coast Range. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, notably at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (2022).

Some of his photographs belong to the Fondation Cartier collection, who devoted a solo exhibition to him in 2007-2008.