内容

Description
Originally published in 1974, Robert Adams’s The New West signaled a significant shift in photographic representation of the American landscape. Eschewing photography’s role in romanticizing the Western landscape, Adams focused instead on the construction of tract and mobile homes, subdivisions, shopping centers, and urban sprawl in the suburbs of Colorado Springs and the Denver area. Objective and direct, Adams’s photographs, rendered in his signature middle-gray scale, unsentimentally depict a despoiled landscape washed in the intense Colorado sunlight.

The New West stands alongside Walker Evans’s American Photographs, Robert Frank’s The Americans, and Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places in the pantheon of landmark projects on American culture and society. This second reissue of the classic publication has been recreated from Adams’s original prints, and will be released ahead of a major traveling exhibition that will launch in 2010.

This project was made possible, in part, through the generosity of Lynne and Harold Honickman and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.



Robert Adams
Born in Orange, New Jersey in 1937, Robert Adams earned a doctorate degree in English from the University of Southern California. Before becoming a photographer he worked for eight years as a college English professor. His photographs, most of which record the development of the modern American West, have been widely collected, exhibited, reproduced, and honored, earning him two awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Charles Pratt Memorial Award in 1987. Among Robert Adams's many writings and monographs are those published by Aperture: From the Missouri West (1980), Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981), Our Lives and Our Children (1983), Summer Nights (1985), Los Angeles Spring (1986), and Perfect Times, Perfect Places (1988). Adams's work has been exhibited by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, and the Colorado History Museum, Denver.