Photographer Robert Adams discusses the mystery and contradictions involved in capturing the American West on film. He describes making pictures of Colorado and California, where he uncovered both the darkness and the beauty of humans’ impact on the land.
‘linoleum buckles on counter tops, and unseasoned lumber twists walls out of plumb before the first occupants arrive.’
“By definition art is not propaganda; the goal is not to excite people to action but to help them find a sense of wholeness and thereby a sense of calm.” Excerpt from a 2014 Hasselblad Award chat transcript Question: Congratulations! You have been taking pictures of the American West for four decades now. Why […]
from The New West @ Robert Adams This pitiless light, virtually combusting in the thin Colorado air, was, I thought, an invention born in the certain glare of the place… By Tod Papageorge In April 2000, The Yale University Art Gallery purchased the 193 prints that compose Robert Adams’s What We Bought: The New World, […]
As I have considered it over the years, the work has always seemed a sustaining and challenging mix of beauty, hope, despair, anger and love. By Peter Brown, Originally published in SPOT, Spring 1996 “Over the years I have come to believe… that we live in several landscapes at once, among them the landscape […]