The 9 best robert adams for 2022
Finding the best robert adams suitable for your needs isnt easy. With hundreds of choices can distract you. Knowing whats bad and whats good can be something of a minefield. In this article, weve done the hard work for you.
1. Robert Adams: The New West
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Robert Adams The New WestDescription
The open American West is nearly gone. A longstanding classic of photobook publishing, The New West is a photographic essay about what came to fill itfreeways, tract homes, low-rise business buildings and signs. In five sequences of pictures taken along the front wall of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Robert Adams has documented a representative sampling of the whole suburban Southwest. The 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 geographythe shape of the land itself, for examplethat are beyond man's harm. Adams has written that "all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty," and the photographs show this. Originally published in 1974, The New West is now regarded as a classic, standing alongside Walker Evans' American Photographs and Robert Frank's The Americans in the pantheon of landmark volumes of photography exploring American culture and society. This beautiful new edition marks the iconic book's fortieth anniversary and includes new scans.Robert Adams (born 1937) has photographed the geography of the American West for over 40 years. His work has been widely exhibited both in Europe and the United States, including in the seminal 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. He has over 40 publications and is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Spectrum International Prize for Photography, the Hasselblad Award, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and the Deutsche Brse Photography Prize.
2. Art Can Help
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In Art Can Help, the internationally acclaimed American photographer Robert Adams offers over two dozen meditations on the purpose of art and the responsibility of the artist. In particular, Adams advocates art that evokes beauty without irony or sentimentality, art that encourages us to gratitude and engagement, and is of both personal and civic consequence. Following an introduction, the book begins with two short essays on the works of the American painter Edward Hopper, an artist venerated by Adams. The rest of this compilation contains textsmore than half of which have never before been publishedthat contemplate one or two works by an individual artist. The pictures discussed are by noted photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Emmet Gowin, Dorothea Lange, Abelardo Morell, Edward Ranney, Judith Joy Ross, John Szarkowski, and Garry Winogrand. Several essays summon the words of literary figures, including Virginia Woolf and Czeslaw Milosz. Adamss voice is at once intimate and accessible, and is imbued with the accumulated wisdom of a long career devoted to making and viewing art. This eloquent and moving book champions art that fights against disillusionment and despair.
3. Robert Adams: 27 Roads
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The road has been a central motif in the work of Robert Adams (born 1937) since the beginnings of his life as a photographer in the late 1960s. 27 Roads is the first publication to focus on this important aspect of his work, and is comprised of the artist's concise, poetic selection of images spanning almost five decades. Whether fast concrete highways, quiet cuts through dark forests, paved commercial strips or dusty tracks on a clear-cut mountainside, Adams' roads function as metaphors for solitude, connection or freedom. Adams writes, "Roads can still be beautiful. Occasionally they appear like a perfect knife slicing through a perfect apple, the better to show that two halves are one."
Robert Adams has been the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships, the Deutsche Brse Photography Prize and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award. His work was the subject of a major retrospective organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, which toured internationally from 2011 to 2014.
4. Robert Adams: Tenancy
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A major new work, Tenancy is comprised of 42 photographs by Robert Adams (born 1937) made in Nehalem Bay State Park, Oregon, between 2013 and 2015, with short texts by the artist.
The books theme of tenancy expresses the idea of temporary possession of what belongs to anotherspecifically, the natural environment. Adams recent photographs of the landscape reference the current and imminent threats of clearcutting, environmental degradation and natural disasters along the Northwestern coast of the US.
The black-and-white photographs include poignant images of massive tree stumps on the beacha product of the cutting of first and early second growthas well as shimmering stretches of coastline protected for endangered birds previously thought to have abandoned northern Oregon.
5. Robert Adams: Perfect Places, Perfect Company
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Robert Adams: Perfect Places, Perfect Company is a two-volume reworking of a series of photographs that Robert Adams (born 1937) made in the mid-1980s at Colorados Pawnee National Grassland. First published in 1988 under the title Perfect Times, Perfect Places, these photographs powerfully convey the deep sensory pleasure of walking in vast, open spaces. With Kerstin, his wife, and Sally, their dog, Robert Adams would drive out to the reserve to experience silence, stillness and affection; his walking companions occasionally appear in the frame, set against the Grasslands scrubby ground and infinite horizons.Although he is perhaps best known for picturing a damaged or modified American geography in publications such as The New West (1974) and From the Missouri West (1980), here Adams has recorded scenes that are flawless, efficiently implying the necessity of maintaining and fighting for these spaces. A New York Times article about the photographer published in 1989 immediately comprehended the stakes of Adams project: Robert Adams pictures are not designed to be overtly political, but like any deeply felt images they are capable of reorganizing the way we perceive the world. With Perfect Places, Perfect Company, Adams shows us what we stand to lose.
6. Robert Adams: Gone
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Used Book in Good ConditionDescription
Robert Adams began by photographing suburban landscapes along the edge of the Rocky Mountains. His goal was to record the erasure of the American wilderness, while attempting to affirm what survives of it. For Adams, photography at this juncture in history presents a melancholy vocation: "It seems to me that we are now compelled to recognize that we have no place to go but where we've been," he judges. "We've got to go look at what we've done, which is oftentimes pretty awful, and see if we can't make of this place a civilized home." In Gone?, his most personal work to date, Adams lives out the implications of these words. In the 1980s, he revisited semi-rural areas he had known as a boy-landscapes that were no longer pristine, but which still retained their own particular qualities of light.7. Robert Adams: Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews
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Used Book in Good ConditionDescription
A now classic text on the art, Why People Photograph gathers a selection of essays by the great master photographer Robert Adams, tackling such diverse subjects as collectors, humor, teaching, money and dogs. Adams also writes brilliantly on Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Laura Gilpin, Judith Joy Ross, Susan Meiselas, Michael Schmidt, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Eugne Atget. The book closes with two essays on "working conditions" in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American West, and the essay "Two Landscapes." Adams writes:At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are.
8. Robert Adams: Cottonwoods
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Trees have been a subject of lifelong engagement for acclaimed American photographer Robert Adams (born 1937), and no species has enthralled him more than the cottonwood. Revered by the Plains Indians, native cottonwoods animate the landscape unforgettably but their thirst for water and lack of commercial value have made them common targets for removal by agricultural business and housing developers. Some of Adams earliest pictures were of cottonwoods, and he photographed them throughout the 35 years that he lived in Colorado, beginning in 1975. Each of the black-and-white photos in the series was taken within a 50-mile radius of his home in Colorado. Originally published by the Smithsonian in 1994, this new edition of Cottonwoods has been expanded and enlarged to include an interview with Adams by Constance Sullivan.
9. Robert Adams: Our Lives and Our Children: Photographs Taken Near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant 19791983
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One day in the early 1970s, Robert Adams (born 1937) and his wife saw from their home a column of smoke rise above the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, near Denver, Colorado. For an hour they watched the plume grow and experienced a sense of helplessness before what appeared to be a nuclear accident in progress. Ultimately it was announced that the fire was burning outside the plant, but Adams decided to try to picture what stood to be lost in a nuclear catastrophe. He photographed in Denver and its suburbs; the individuals shown were within hazardous proximity to the Rocky Flats Plant. The new Steidl edition of Our Lives and Our Children presents an expanded sequence that retains the potent compactness of the first edition (out of print for nearly three decades).
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