Robert Adams

A collection of inspiring essays by the photographer Robert Adams, who advocates the meaningfulness of art in a disillusioned society. 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...

Robert Adams, one of America's foremost living photographers, has spent decades considering and documenting the landscape of the American West and the ways it has been altered, disturbed, or destroyed by the hand of man. A professor of English before turning to photography, Adams is also a skilled writer and acute thinker on aesthetic questions. Aperture's previous bestselling collections of...

In the summer and autumn of 2017, the photographer Robert Adams invited Joshua Chuang, his frequent collaborator, to document the objects that Adams has made over the years for his own consolation and pleasure. The resulting colour pictures—of half-model ships and boats, a miscellany of open books and cherished species of birds, all formed by hand from wood—have been brought...

The view from Lookout Mountain west of Denver is of natural forms and our imprint on them, of the timeless and the passing. Generations have made their way there to find perspective on the city and the plains beyond. Robert Adams photographed from the overlook in 1970, and again in 1984. For this volume, he has assembled a selection of...

In the spring of 2020, as he watched his country tested, Robert Adams discovered in his garage a small plank of wood that contained a landscape. This led to the creation, during a difficult time, of an unexpected series of works that drew upon memories of a stillness and a grandeur he had forgotten about. Over the next few months,...

A now classic text on the art, Why People Photograph. At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honour what is greater and more interesting than we are.

One day in the early 1970s, Robert Adams 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, tried without success to learn whether the fire involved the radioactive and extremely toxic plutonium, and experienced a sense of helplessness before...

In the autumn of 1968, Robert Adams, a college English teacher, found himself inexplicably drawn to photograph a nondescript area south of Colorado Springs, whose most notable feature was a truck stop off the interstate. Unflinching in their description yet embodying a mysteriously radiant peace, the pictures Adams made of the otherwise graceless site confirmed for him a vital new...

The eight essays in Beauty in Photography provide a critical appreciation of photography by one of its foremost proponents. The result is a rare book of criticism, alive to the pleasure and mysteries of true exploration.

In the mid-1970s, Robert Adams began recording nocturnal scenes near his former home in Longmont, Colorado. Illuminated by moonlight and streetlamp, suburban houses, roads, sidewalks and fields seemed transfigured. Twenty-five years after first publishing a sequence of these pictures in 1985 as Summer Nights, he revisited his project, amending its title and completely re-editing its contents to create a more...

These views of the American West, made by Robert Adams between 1975 and 1983, evoke a wide range of memories, myths and regrets associated with America's final frontier. In the nineteenth century, that frontier began at the Missouri River, beyond which lay a landscape of natural grandeur and purity, challenging the spirit and promising redemption. At the time the pictures...