Robert Adams
1937–
Robert Adams is often identified as a preeminent member of the New Topographics, a label used to describe the work of a group of photographers featured in a 1975 exhibition of that name with the subtitle Photographs of a Man- Altered Landscape. These photographers eschewed the picturesque, heroicized aspects of traditional landscape photography for a more sober approach, frequently documenting the transformation— and often, the destruction—of natural environments in the wake of urbanization and industrialization. For the past four decades, Adams’s focus has been the changing landscape of the American West. His virtuoso black-and-white images are generally devoid of people but capture the traces and effects of human intervention, implicitly contrasting wilderness with aspects of development and technology. Adams’s photographs give the lie to the romance of the West as a frontier of endless promise even as they glorify the natural beauty that endures there, however precariously.
Like much of Adams’s early work picturing suburban areas in Colorado, Outdoor Theater, Colorado Springs, Colorado records the incursion of contemporary society—in the form of a section of a fence around a drive-in movie theater—on otherwise unspoiled territory. The spare, striking image exemplifies the artist’s feel for compositional harmony: a horizontal band of pavement on the lower edge of the image offsets the vertical fencing, and the diagonal created by a stretch of clouds counterpoises the incline of the top edge of the fence.
Introduction
Adams began working as a photographer and a freelance writer in 1967. He's best known for black-and-white photographs of the American West.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, author, photographer, teacher, writer
ULAN identifier
500037036
Names
Robert Adams, Robert Hickman Adams, Robert ii Adams
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 3, 2025.
