Robert Adams

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Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937, Robert Adams moved with his family from Madison, Wisconsin, to Denver, Colorado, at the age of 15. He earned a ph.d. from the University of Southern California and, intent on pursuing an academic career, returned to Colorado in 1962 as an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. Disturbed by the rapid transformation of the Colorado Springs and Denver areas—which Jack Kerouac had likened to “the Promised Land” less than a decade earlier—Adams began photographing a glorious landscape newly replete with tract housing, highways, strip malls, and gas stations. “The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy,” Adams wrote. “They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.” Adams has also written insightful and eloquent essays on the practice and goals of art, which have been collected in the volumes Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981) and Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews (1994). Since 1997, he has lived in Oregon, the landscape of which has been the setting of his last 20 years of work. Adams’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles—as well as a major midcareer retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989.
Adams was also a key participant in such landmark exhibitions as New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975), organized by the International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York, and Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 (1978), curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. An entire room was devoted to Adams’s work in Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph, a major survey organized by the Tate Modern, London, in 2003. In 2002 What We Bought: The New World was exhibited in its entirety at the Yale University Art Gallery. Among the artist’s many awards are two Guggenheim Fellowships (1973 and 1980), two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1973 and 1978), a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1994), the Spectrum International Prize for Photography (1995), the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2006), and the Hasselblad Award (2009).