Robert Adams

American, born 1937

Birth placeOrange, New Jersey, United States

BiographyAmerican, born May 8, 1937

Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937, Robert Adams moved with his family from
Madison, Wisconsin, to Denver, Colorado, at the age of fifteen, and has since lived in the western United States. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and, intent upon an academic career, returned to Colorado in 1962 as an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. Shocked and dismayed by the rapid transformation of the landscape in the Denver region-an area that, less than a decade before, Jack Kerouac had described as "like the Promised Land"-Adams began photographing what had become banal suburbia, replete with hastily conceived tract housing, strip malls, and gas stations. "In a few years," Adams wrote, "the area's ruin would be a testament to a bargain we had tried to strike. The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy. They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love."

In an essay accompanying the catalogue for Adams's series What We Bought: the New World (2002), the photographer Tod Papageorge, the Walker Evans Professor of Photography at the Yale School of Art, wrote, "While Adams's pictures likely owed a part of their effect to his thinking about nineteenth century
photography, they also provided an emphatic demonstration of how conclusively he had rejected the twentieth-century photographic convention that identified the
American West with its national parks. Unlike Ansel Adams," Papageorge asserts, "this new Adams, by portraying a West made up of a seemingly endless series of ill-made structures embodying the tangles of easy compromise and unremarkable venality that saw them built . . . proposed a radically different, and for photographers, revolutionary frontier. In his view, even the immemorial land itself was implicated in a general disaster, exhausted, as he revealed it, by human busyness."

Since the late 1960s, many of Adams's photographic surveys have been published, as have volumes of his insightful and eloquent essays, most notably Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1989) and Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews (1996). He was a major participant in such memorable and groundbreaking exhibitions as The New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, at the International
Museum of Photography, Rochester, New York, in 1975, which defined the movement pioneered by Adams, and Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960, organized by John Szarkowski at The Museum of Modern Art in 1978. Most recently, an entire room was devoted to Adams's work in Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph, a major
survey that opened at Tate Modern, London, in 2003, and traveled to the Ludwig Museum, Cologne. In 2002, What We Bought: The New World was exhibited at the Yale University Art Gallery concurrently with Lewis Baltz's Park City and Emmet Gowin's Changing the Earth.

Adams's work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions throughout the United States as well as Europe and Asia, and is in the permanent collections of leading museums throughout the world. Among the artist's many awards are two Guggenheim Fellowships (1973 and 1980), two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1973 and 1978), the Colorado Governor's Award in the Arts (1979), the Peer Award from the Friends of Photography (1982), a MacArthur Foundation Award (1994), and the Spectrum International Prize for Photography (1995).

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