Yale University Art Gallery Series (YUP)
6 total works
denver and What We Bought, together with The New West, form a loose trilogy of Robert Adams’s work exploring the rapidly developing landscape of the Denver metropolitan area from 1968 through 1974. In the former two books, Adams created a comprehensive document that was resolute in its avoidance of romantic notions of the American West and dispassionately honest about man’s despoliation of the land. Both books demonstrate the artist at the height of his powers as a documentary photographer and a poetic sequencer of images.
The photographs featured in denver and What We Bought show tract housing with mountain ranges in the distance, trailer lots devoid of people, suburban streets through generic windows, shopping mall interiors, and parking lots: subjects distinctly unspectacular, familiar, and banal. Adams’s compositions are straightforward and democratic, and it is this precise turn from sentimentality that has made Adams one of the most influential figures in the history of American photography.
These exquisite new editions, printed in rich tritones, celebrate this landmark work. denver also includes new and previously unpublished photographs from the project, chosen and sequenced by Adams himself.
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In This Day, Robert Adams (b. 1937) observes two kinds of landscapes—that inside his home, including arrangements of nasturtium leaves and apples on the kitchen table, as well as the views outside his window and beyond. The windswept headlands, beach grasses, and felled trees seen by the photographer on his walks are animated by an atmospheric light. Together, these pictures reveal the undeniable presence of the sublime in everyday life.
Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery
Since taking up photography in the mid-1960s, Robert Adams (born 1937) has quietly become one of the most influential chroniclers of the evolving American landscape. Carefully edited by Adams from a remarkable body of work that spans over four decades, What Can We Believe Where? Photographs of the American West, 1965–2005 presents a narrative sequence of more than 100 tritone images that reveals a steadfast concern for mankind’s increasingly tragic relationship with the natural world. Adams’s understated yet arresting pictures of the vast Colorado plains, the rapid suburbanization of the Denver and Colorado Springs areas, and the ecological devastation of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States register with subtle precision the complex and often fragile beauty of the scenes they depict.
The most accessible collection of Adams’s work to date, this compact and thought-provoking volume is an essential addition to the bookshelves of students, photographers, and anyone interested in the recent history of the American West and its wider implications.
Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery
Exhibition Schedule:
Vancouver Art Gallery (September 2010, dates TBD)
Denver Art Museum (2011, dates TBD)
Yale University Art Gallery(2012, dates TBD)
Over the past decade the renowned photographer Robert Adams (b. 1937) has turned his attention to the woods and shores near his home on the Oregon coast. Sea Stories is a sequence of three visual narratives that follow Adams and his wife, Kerstin, as they walk among alder and maple trees, along the beach to observe the annual migration of shorebirds, and back eastward through meadows and what remains of the inland forest. Featuring many previously unpublished photographs, this book describes the cycles of nature with a new naturalism.
Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery
Skogen is the Swedish word for forest, and while the dense woods featured in Robert Adams's most recent series of photographs grow near his home in Oregon, the pictures evoke a wild utopia, and convey a hushed, primeval awe. In this volume, the latest to document Adams's ongoing quest to find form amid the chaos of nature, shadows predominate, tempered by an ambiguous light that is unique to the Pacific Northwest. Skogen features forty-six previously unpublished images, a body of work that is among the most pictorially complex of Adams's distinguished career. Also included are an introduction by the artist and a poem by the acclaimed poet Denise Levertov. This pairing is meaningful; as Michael Fried wrote in Bookforum, "Adams's artistic ideal...has much in common with that of a certain sort of lyric poem, one that similarly has not the slightest room for carelessness of any sort."
Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery