'THE PLACE WE LIVE'
11.02.2014 - 18.05.2014
Robert Adams was born in Orange (New Jersey) in 1937 and grew up first in Wisconsin, then Colorado, where he lived for over three decades before moving to Oregon. Since the mid-1960s, Adams has been considered one of the most important and influential chroniclers of the American West. The exhibition “Robert Adams: The Place We Live“ reflects Adams’ longstanding interest in tragic relationship between man and nature and his quest to find redeeming light and beauty in a deteriorating landscape. His photographs are distinguished not only by their economy and lucidity, but also by their mixture of grief and hope.
© Robert Adams, ‘Edge of San Timoteo Canyon, looking toward Los Angeles, Redlands, California’, 1978
With more than two hundred and fifty pictures chosen from twenty–one distinct series, this retrospective presents for the very first time the diverse aspects of his epic body of work. Edited and sequenced with input from the photographer himself, the exhibition offers not only an intimate and coherent narrative of the development of the Western United States in the late 20th and early 21st century, but also a challenging view of the complexity and contradictions of our contemporary, global society.
© Robert Adams, ‘Quarried Mesa Top, Pueblo County, Colorado’, 1978
In his work, Robert Adams shows how the grand landscapes of the American West, documented in the 19th century by such photographers as Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, have been altered by human activity. Adams has attempted to remain apparently neutral in his approach; even the titles of his works convey a documentary feel. Above all, Adams renowned for his nuanced and austere photos of urban development in the state of Colorado at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s: images that came to the public eye for the first time in the groundbreaking book, The New West (1974). In 1975, Adams’ work was included in the influential “New Topographics” exhibition.
© Robert Adams, ‘Santa Ana Wash, Redlands, California’, 1983
Each of Roberts Adams’ major projects is present in the exhibition, from his first images of quiet buildings and monuments erected by the early settlers of his native Colorado, to his most recent photos of forests and migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to The New West, other major projects featured in the exhibition are: From the Missouri West, a series of distant views of majestic landscapes that evidence the hand of man; Our Lives and Our Children, disarmingly tender portraits of ordinary people going about their everyday business in the shadow of a nuclear power plant; Los Angeles Spring, the portrayal of a former luxuriant garden of Eden that has suffered from violence and pollution; Listening to the River, fragmented, lyrical views of rural and suburban locations in Colorado which evoke the sensory pleasures of walking; and West from the Columbia and Turning Back, two series devoted to documenting what remains of the region’s natural heritage to the Pacific Northwest, where Adams now lives.