Robert Adams

Robert Adams grew up in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Colorado, in each place enjoying the out-of-­doors, often in company with his father. At age twenty-five, as a college English teacher with summers off, he learned photography, choosing as his first subjects early prairie churches and early Hispanic art, subjects of unalloyed beauty. After spending time in Scandinavia with his Swedish wife, Kerstin, however, he realized that there were complexities in the American geography that merited exploration.

In the 1970s and ’80s Adams produced a series of books—The New West, Denver, What We Bought, Summer Nights—that focused on expanding suburbs along Colorado’s Front Range, books that pictured heedless development but also the surviving light, scale, form, and silence of the natural world. He also examined this mixture of humanity’s imprint and nature’s resilience in the wider western landscape (From the Missouri West) and in the Los Angeles basin (Los Angeles Spring, California).

As counterpoint, Adams has occasionally published smaller, sometimes more personal volumes. These have included a prayer book set in the forest (Prayers in an American Church), a memoir of days walking on the Pawnee National Grassland with his wife (Perfect Times, Perfect Places), and a portrait of their dog, Sally, and her contentment in the backyard (I Hear the Leaves and Love the Light).

He has sometimes directly engaged civic and political issues as well. A series of photographs at the Ludlow memorial, for example, speaks for organized labor, and another at a protest against the second Iraq war records the suffering that accompanies empire. Most notably, Our Lives and Our Children pictures individuals who lived at risk downwind from the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, where Adams himself once lived.