Adams, Robert (b. 1937), American photographer. Adams was born in New Jersey but grew up in Colorado and studied at the University of Redlands in California. After finishing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Southern California in 1965, he returned to Colorado College to teach, write, and photograph. He was one of the ten photographers included in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975 at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House. Subsequently he documented the impact of the human presence on primarily urban landscapes in lengthy compilations of characteristically dispassionate, non-judgemental images of everything from tract housing to supermarket aisles. His many books include The New West: Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range (1974), Los Angeles Spring (1986), and What We Bought: Scenes from the New World (1995). As with most of the New Topographics photographers, and those who have continued in a comparable vein (Richard Misrach, Mark Klett, and others), Adam's photographs seldom include people. Rather, they suggest that what humans have wrought constitutes our species' most tellingly enigmatic portrait.
— Tim Troy
Bibliography
- Phillips, S., Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present (1996)
