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Robert Adams: The Place We Live, a Retrospective Selection of Photographs, 1964-2009

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Photographer Robert Adams (b. 1937) is widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential chroniclers of the American West, renowned for his austere views of a landscape profoundly changed by human development. This stunning three-volume set—printed with an unprecedented fidelity to the photographer's master prints—accompanies a major traveling exhibition and is the first publication to comprehensively survey Adams's 45-year career.

Presenting an epic sequence of nearly 400 tritone plates, Robert Adams: The Place We Live features selections from all of Adams's major projects, including his seminal work in the suburbs of Colorado Springs and Denver and his most recent, elegiac portrayals of trees in the Pacific Northwest. Also included is an anthology of texts by the photographer, a series of critical essays on Adams's life and work, and an illustrated bibliography and chronology that will shed new light on one of the central American artists of our time.

627 pages, Hardcover

First published July 18, 2011

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Robert Adams

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Robert Adams is an American photographer best known for his images of the American West. Offering solemn meditations on the landscapes of California, Colorado, and Oregon, Adams’s black-and-white photos document the changes wrought by humans upon nature. “By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet. Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil,” he wrote. “What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos.”

Born on May 8, 1937 in Orange, NJ, his family moved around the Midwest throughout his childhood, finally settling in Wheat Ridge, CO in 1952. Adams went on to study English at the University of Redlands and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California in 1965. It wasn’t until the near completion of his dissertation for USC that Adams began to take photography seriously, learning techniques from professional photographer Myron Wood and reading Aperture magazine. In the 1970s, he released the book The New West (1974), and a year later was included in the seminal exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Adams has twice been the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and once the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Adams lives and works in Astoria, OR. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

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March 2, 2013
"The Place We Live confirms not only the significance of Robert Adams’s contributions to photographic art but, more importantly, his singular commitment to his own vision." - Andrew L. Strout, University of Oklahoma

This book was reviewed in the March 2013 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/14diQD1
Displaying 1 of 1 review