Robert Adams | |
---|---|
Born | 1937 (age 86–87) |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | |
Known for | Photography |
Movement | New Topographics |
Awards | Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2006 Turning Back Hasselblad Award 2009 |
Elected | American Academy of Arts and Letters |
Website | media |
Robert Adams (born 1937) is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. [1] [2] His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s [1] through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975. [1] He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Hasselblad Award.
Robert Hickman Adams was born on May 8, 1937, in Orange, New Jersey to Lois Hickman Adams and Ross Adams. [1] In 1940 the family moved to Madison, New Jersey where his younger sister Carolyn was born. Then in 1947 they moved to Madison, Wisconsin for five years, where he contracted polio at age 12 in 1949 in his back, left arm, and hand but was able to recover. They moved one last time, in 1952, to Wheat Ridge, Colorado, [1] a suburb of Denver, when his father secured a job in Denver. They moved to Colorado partly because of the chronic bronchial problems that he suffered from in Madison, New Jersey around age 5 as an attempt to help alleviate those problems. He continued to suffer from asthma and allergy problems. [3] [4]
During his childhood, Adams often accompanied his father on walks and hikes through the woods [1] on Sunday afternoons. He also enjoyed playing baseball in open fields and working with his father on carpentry projects. He was an active Boy Scout, [1] and was also active with the Methodist church that his family attended. He and his father made several raft trips through Dinosaur National Monument, and during his adolescent years he worked at boys' camps at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. He also took trips on pack horses and went mountain climbing. He and his sister began visiting Denver Art Museum. Adams also learned to like reading. In 1955, he hunted for the last time. [3]
Adams enrolled in the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1955, and attended it for his first year, but decided to transfer the next year to the University of Redlands in California where he received his B.A. in English in 1959. He continued his graduate studies at the University of Southern California and received his PhD in English Literature, in 1965. [3]
In 1960 while at Redlands, he met and married Kerstin Mornestam, a Swedish native, who shared the same interest in the arts and nature. Robert and Kerstin spent their first few summers together in Oregon along the coast, where they took long walks on the beach and spent their evenings reading. [3]
In 1963 they moved back to Colorado, and Adams began teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. In 1963, Adams bought a 35 mm camera and began to take pictures mostly of nature and architecture. He soon read complete sets of Camera Work and Aperture at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. He learned photographic technique from Myron Wood, a professional photographer who lived in Colorado. [3] While finishing his dissertation, he began to photograph in 1964. [5] In 1966, he began to teach only part-time to have more time to photograph. [3] He met John Szarkowski, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, on a trip to New York City in 1969. The museum later bought four of his prints. [3] In 1970, he began working as a full-time photographer. [5]
Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian , said "his subject has been the American west: its vastness, its sparse beauty and its ecological fragility. [. . .] What he has photographed constantly – in varying shades of grey – is what has been lost and what remains" and that "his work's other great subtext" is silence. [1]
Adams' work is held in the following public collections:
Jerry Norman Uelsmann was an American photographer.
Lee Friedlander is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 1970s, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of his photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street signs. His work is characterized by its innovative use of framing and reflection, often using the natural environment or architectural elements to frame his subjects. Over the course of his career, Friedlander has been the recipient of numerous awards and his work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries worldwide.
Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of scenes and objects of the banal, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.
John Gossage is an American photographer, noted for his artist's books and other publications using his photographs to explore under-recognised elements of the urban environment such as abandoned tracts of land, debris and garbage, and graffiti, and themes of surveillance, memory and the relationship between architecture and power.
Night photography is the capturing of images outdoors between dusk and dawn. Night photographers generally have a choice between using artificial lighting and using a long exposure, exposing the shot for seconds, minutes, or hours in order to capture enough light to record an image. With the progress of high-speed films, higher-sensitivity digital sensors, wide-aperture lenses, and the ever-greater power of urban lights, night photography is increasingly possible using available light.
Laura McPhee is an American photographer known for making detailed large-format photographs of the cultural landscape. Her images raise questions about human effects on the environment and the nature of humankind's complex and contested relationship to the earth.
Emmet Gowin is an American photographer. He first gained attention in the 1970s with his intimate portraits of his wife, Edith, and her family. Later he turned his attention to the landscapes of the American West, taking aerial photographs of places that had been changed by humans or nature, including the Hanford Site, Mount St. Helens, and the Nevada Test Site. Gowin taught at Princeton University for more than 35 years.
Linda Connor is an American photographer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for her landscape photography.
Jim Goldberg is an American artist and photographer, whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations.
Toshio Shibata is a Japanese photographer known for his large-format photographs of large-scale works of civil engineering in unpopulated landscapes.
Todd Hido is an American photographer. He has produced 17 books, had his work exhibited widely and included in various public collections. Hido is currently an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Andrea Modica is an American photographer and professor of photography at Drexel University. She is known for portrait photography and for her use of platinum printing, created using an 8"x10" large format camera. Modica is the author of many monographs, including Treadwell (1996) and Barbara (2002).
John Divola is an American contemporary visual artist and educator, living in Riverside, California. He works in photography, describing himself as exploring the landscape by looking for the edge between the abstract and the specific. He is a professor in the art department at University of California Riverside.
Bill Dane is a North American street photographer. Dane pioneered a way to subsidize his public by using photographic postcards. He has mailed over 50,000 of his pictures as photo-postcards since 1969. As of 2007, Dane's method for making his photographs available shifted from mailing photo-postcards to offering his entire body of work on the internet.
David Maisel is an American photographer and visual artist whose works explore vestiges and remnants of civilizations both past and present. His work has been the subject of five major monographs, published by Nazraeli Press, Chronicle Books, and Steidl.
Doug Rickard was an American artist and photographer. He used technologies such as Google Street View and YouTube to find images, which he then photographed on his computer monitor. His photography has been published in books, exhibited in galleries and held in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Rickard was best known for his book A New American Picture (2010). He was the founder and publisher of the website on contemporary photography, American Suburb X, and the website These Americans which published some of his collection of found photographs.
Dick Arentz is an American fine art photographer and author, known for his textbook on platinum-palladium printing. Arentz's text book, Platinum & Palladium Printing, Focal Press. 1st edition (1999), 2nd edition (2004) “is known in online forums and industry magazines as the most comprehensive book on the subject.” Other photography insiders such as Dr. Michael J. Ware and Bill Jay have commended the author as a master-craftsman in platinum-palladium printing. Arentz has mentored other photographers in the platinum-palladium printing process by conducting more than 40 workshops for organizations such as The Center for Creative Photography, The Friends of Photography and The Museum of Photographic Arts. His work was displayed at over fifty one-man exhibits in museums and private galleries in the US and Europe.
Gail Skoff is a photographer known for her handcolored prints. Much of her work focuses on landscapes and food. She was a 1976 recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and several of the prints resulting from fellowship are held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her works are also held at the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, and the Oakland Museum of California.
Lucas Foglia is an American photographer, living in San Francisco. "His work is concerned mainly with documenting people and their relationship to nature", for which he has travelled extensively making landscape photography and portraiture.
Terri Weifenbach is an American fine-art photographer, living in Paris. She has published a number of books of landscape photography, often of plants and animals, gardens and parks. Her work is held in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson and North Carolina Museum of Art. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.