Robert Adams (born May 8, 1937) is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.

Robert Adams is a photographer who has documented the extent and the limits of our damage to the American West, recording there, in over fifty books of pictures, both reasons to despair and to hope.

“The goal,” he has said, “is to face facts but to find a basis for hope. To try for alchemy.”

His work, especially from the 1960s through the 1970s, focuses on the suburban sprawl and the environmental degradation in Colorado, reflecting the broader changes taking place across the American West. Adams’ photographs are not just images but narratives of the time, capturing the transformation of natural landscapes into urban and suburban developments. They serve as a record of the sacrifice of natural beauty for consumer culture’s demands, characterized by housing developments and shopping malls (Sandeen, E., 2009).

looking beyond the mere physicality of landscapes to understand their deeper significance and the stories they tell.

Rather than offering escape, Adams inspires new ways of seeing by asking viewers to acknowledge and care for the world in all its imperfection. 

Ansel Adams’ photographs celebrate the untouched beauty of American wilderness. Robert Adams’ work, in contrast, shows the impacts of development and urbanization. including human-altered landscapes as subjects worthy of artistic consideration. This contrast underscores a broader debate in environmental photography about the role of the artist in documenting nature and human impacts on it.

Reflecting on the duality of beauty and desolation found in the landscapes he photographs, Adams has pointed out the complexity of finding aesthetic value in places marked by environmental degradation. His work is a testament to the persistent beauty of the natural world, even in the face of human interference, and serves as a reminder of what is at stake (Sandeen, E., 2009).

Miguel Guitart Vilches, for example, discusses Adams’ deliberate choice to document the transformation of Colorado’s landscape by human activity, rather than its untouched beauty. This decision highlights Adams’ intent to reveal the ordered chaos created by human intervention and to explore the potential connections between the original landscape and its altered state (Vilches, M. G., 2013).

‘More people currently know the appearance of Yosemite Valley and the Grand Canyon from looking at photographic books than from looking at the places themselves; conservation publishing has defined for most of us the outstanding features of the wilderness aesthetic. Unfortunately…the same spectacular pictures have also been widely accepted as a definition of nature, and the implication has been circulated that what is wild is not natural.’

‘Attention only to perfection…invites…for urban viewers – which means most of us – a crippling disgust; our world is in most places far from clean…This leaves photography with a new but not less important job: to reconcile us to half wilderness’

Dunaway p22

Robert Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937, and moved to Colorado as a teenager, in each place enjoying the out-of-­doors, often in company with his father. At age twenty-five, as a college English teacher with summers off, he learned photography, choosing as his first subjects early prairie churches and early Hispanic art, subjects of unalloyed beauty. After spending time in Scandinavia with his Swedish wife, Kerstin, however, he realized that there were complexities in the American geography that merited exploration.

Robert Adams’s Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981) presents a series of essays that articulate Adams’s philosophy on photography, aesthetics, and the value of beauty in art.

• conviction that beauty remains an essential, though often overlooked, criterion for evaluating photographs and their significance both as art and as a reflection of the world.
• the pursuit of beauty in photography is not merely about capturing pleasant or traditionally attractive subjects. Instead, he suggests that beauty encompasses a sense of rightness or harmony in the relationship between the subject, the photographer, and the viewer.
• the photographer’s role is one of reverence and humility before the world, rather than domination over it.
• art does not need to be revolutionary or overtly political to be meaningful. Instead, he advocates for a view of art that embraces subtlety and the contemplation of the ordinary.
• photography should be deeply attentive to the world as it is, finding beauty and significance in everyday scenes and landscapes.
• an appreciation of beauty does not ignore the world’s suffering but rather affirms the value of life in the face of it.

“At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are”

Adams, 1981

“To be an artist is not to be a member of a secret society; it is not to be endowed with a capacity for high moral outrage; it is to see what is there” .

Adams, 1981

“No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film”

Adams, 1981