Robert Adams
Motel, Colorado Springs
1969, printed c. 1970
On view
Floor 6
Date
1969, printed c. 1970
Classification
Photographs
Medium
Gelatin silver print mounted on paperboard
Dimensions
Mount: 13 × 11in. (33 × 27.9 cm) Overall: 5 7/8 × 5 15/16in. (14.9 × 15.1 cm)
Accession number
96.12
Series
The New West
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee
Rights and reproductions
© Robert Adams
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco & Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
With Motel, Robert Adams achieves what he once described as “that perfectly balanced frame where everything fits.” Adams has captured the Colorado Springs motel in such a way that the building forms a precise horizontal bar across the photograph, while the tail ends of unmistakably American-made automobiles edge into the foreground, and a distant mountain range fades into the silvery mist. The contrast between the majestic grandeur of the mountains and the banality of the motel and cars—those familiar icons of American suburbia—is presented neutrally; the natural and the manmade simply coexist.
