ADAMS, Robert - The New West

Background information

"The open American West is nearly gone. The out-of-print photo volume 'The New West' by Robert ADAMS is a photographic essay about what came to fill it—freeways, tract homes, low-rise business buildings and signs. Originally published in 1974, 'The New West' is now regarded as a classic, standing alongside Walker EVANS’s 'American Photographs' and Robert FRANK’s 'The Americans' in the pantheon of landmark volumes of photography exploring American culture and society.

Content

In five sequences of pictures in the photo volume 'The New West' by Robert ADAMS taken along the front wall of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Robert ADAMS has documented a representative sampling of the whole suburban Southwest. These views have a double power. At first they shock; normally we try to forget the commercial squalor they depict. Slowly, however, they reveal aspects of the geography—the shape of the land itself, for example—that are beyond man’s harm. Robert ADAMS has written that 'all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty,' and his photographs show this." (© Steidl, 2016)

About the American photographer, Robert ADAMS (b.1937)

Photo books by and with participation of Robert ADAMS