Robert Adams

Robert Adams (born 1937) has been photographing the American West for more than 40 years. Adams's photographs emphasize the redemptive beauty of nature in the face of humans' widespread and unremitting use of the land and focus on the frontier between the human and natural worlds. He wrote, early in his career, "The job of the photographer is not to record indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope."

In 1989 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Adams's work, and his photographs were included in Documenta X, in 1997. The Yale Art Gallery, which holds Adams's complete body of work to date, has organized a new retrospective exhibition of his work that originated at the Vancouver Art Gallery and will travel to several North American and European venues, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Reina Sofia in Spain. Adams was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1994 and received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 2009. He is working on several new book projects, which will join more than twenty volumes of his photographs and writings, including the recently reprinted classics Denver, What We Bought, and Summer Nights, Walking. Adams lives and works in Astoria, Oregon.