Robert Adams (photographer)

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For other persons named Robert Adams, see Robert Adams (disambiguation)

Robert Adams (born May 8, 1937) is an American photographer who came to prominence as part of the photographic movement known as New Topographics. He was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in photography in 1973 and 1980, and he received the MacArthur Foundation's MacArthur Fellowship in 1994. He is currently represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York and the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.

Adams was born in the industrial town of Orange, New Jersey, relocating to Colorado as a teenager with his family. Adams became interested in documenting how the western landscapes of North America, once captured by the likes of Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, had been shaped by human influence. As part of the New Topographics in the 1970s, Adams approach to photographing these landscapes was to take a stance of apparent neutrality, refraining from any obvious judgements of the subject matter. His images are titled as documents, to establish his neutral position. However, in the words of John Szarkowski, Adams... "has, without actually lying, discovered in these dumb and artless agglomerations of boring buildings the suggestion of redeeming virtue." Adams's recent essays in Why People Photograph and Beauty in Photography make strong arguments for conservative and human approaches to making photography, writing clear criticism about photography, and the importance of encouraging responsible stewardship of the land.

Summer Nights
For about five years, beginning in 1974, Adams embarked on an experiment: he made a series of photographs at night—the opposite of the high-altitude daylight used in most of his previous photographs. The project brought an element of risk he had not experienced before. Passing motorists sometimes veered toward him on rural roadsides, and in urban centers police repeatedly questioned him about his activities.

Adams' archives are held at the Yale University Art Gallery, with which he is devising a large-scale retrospective of his work for touring around the USA.