The Denver Art Museum is the first US venue for “Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs.” The exhibition will feature more than 200 black and white photos spanning Adams’s 45-year career, showcasing the artistic legacy of the American photographer and his longstanding engagement with the contemporary Western landscape. The exhibition, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, will be on view September 25⁊anuary 2 in the museum’s Gallagher Family Gallery.
Adams lived and worked in Colorado for nearly 30 years. Many of his most acclaimed images were taken in the Rocky Mountain region and will strike a familiar chord with visitors
Since becoming a photographer in the mid-1960s, Adams has been widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential chroniclers of the American West. His photographs and writing insist that the realities of everyday landscapes are as beautiful as idealized scenes from nature. They ask questions about the ways people change and interact with nature, and what it means to live simply and quietly in today’s world.
This commitment earned Adams prominence in photography’s “New Topographics” movement of the late Twentieth Century and lends authority to his ongoing work. His photographs of Colorado suburban growth and clear cut forests in the Pacific Northwest, for example, express shock at mainstream social and economic values.
Featuring more than 200 gelatin silver prints, “The Place We Live” weaves together four decades of Adam’s work into a cohesive, epic narrative of American experience in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries. Each of the photographer’s major projects is represented, from early pictures of quiet buildings and monuments erected by prior settlers of his native Colorado to his most recent images of forests and migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest.
Born in Orange, N.J., in 1937, Adams moved with his family from Madison, Wis., to Denver at the age of 15. He earned a doctorate degree from the University of Southern California and, intent on pursuing an academic career, returned to Colorado in 1962 as an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. Disturbed by the rapid transformation of the Colorado Springs and Denver areas, Adams began photographing a landscape transformed by tract housing, highways, strip malls and gas stations.
The Denver Art Museum is at 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock Streets. For information, www.denverartmuseum.org or 720-913-0169.
