Since taking up photography in the mid-1960s as a response to the rapidly changing landscape of his native Colorado, Robert Adams has been widely regarded as one of the leading chroniclers of the American West. Edited and sequenced by Adams himself, The Place We Live surveys a career spanning four decades. This unprecedented retrospective features nearly 300 black-and-white photographic prints as well as a selection of the artist's many important photo books. Adams’s work reflects his extended dedication to describing the changing Western landscape, the growth of its built environment and the lives of its inhabitants. The Los Angeles presentation highlights Adams’s extraordinary portrayal of the terrain of the Los Angeles region. The exhibition opens at LACMA today and runs until June 3.
Since his early years as a photographer, books have occupied a central place in Robert Adams’s artistic practice. Following his belief that “photography is editing - start to finish,” he and his wife, Kerstin, have worked together, sometimes over many years, to arrange groups of pictures into expansive sequences expressly conceived for the printed page.
The over thirty monographs that Adams has published to date harness the unique narrative and poetic potential of the book format, allowing individual images to relate to and build upon each other in order to form larger visual statements capable of addressing complex questions. Not only do these volumes trace the evolution of the photographer’s vision, they also afford the richest view of his lifelong endeavor to faithfully describe “a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit perfectly.
The Yale Art Gallery site offers a comprehensive overview of all Adams' bookworks each with a full description including date of publication and number of plates.
It is well worth a look, HERE.
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