Robert Adams - Photography

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 the book The New West (1974) and the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). He was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in photography in 1973 and 1980, and he received the MacArthur Foundation's MacArthur Fellowship in 1994. In 2009, he received the Hasselblad Award for his achievements in photography.[1] He is represented by the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.

Adams is the son of Lois Hickman Adams and Ross Adams. He was born on May 8, 1937 in Orange, New Jersey, and lived in Madison, Wisconsin briefly before moving to Wheat Ridge, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, in 1952. As a child he developed chronic bronchial problems, and part of the reason his family moved to Colorado was to help alleviate those problems. At age 15 he began to experience chronic bronchial problems, and at age 12 he contracted polio in his back, left arm, and hand but was able to recover. He continued to suffer from asthma and allergy problems. He has one younger sister, named Carolyn.[2]

During his childhood, Adams often accompanied his father on walks and hikes through the woods. Adams was a Boy Scout and worked in the summers of his adolescence boys' camps in the Rocky Mountains. In 1955, he hunted for the last time.

During high school, he studied architectural drawing for a year.

In 1959, Adams enrolled in the University of Colorado, Boulder for his freshman year, but decided to transfer the next year to the University of Redlands in California. He received his B.A. in English from Redlands in 1959, and then went on to USC for his postgraduate study in English, from which he received his Ph.D. in English in 1965. In 1960, he married Kerstin Mornestam, originally from Sweden, whom he had met at Redlands. In 1962 they moved back to Colorado, and Adams began teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. In 1963, Adams bought a 35mm reflex 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. In 1967, he began to teach only part-time in order to have more time to photograph.. He met John Szarkowski on a trip to New York City in 1969. The museum later bought four of his prints.[2]

The Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibited a mid-career retrospective of his work in 1989.

Adams and his wife moved to Astoria, Oregon in September 1997.

Adams became interested in documenting how the western landscapes of North America, once captured by the likes of Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, had been shaped by human influence. Adams's approach to photographing these landscapes was to take a stance of apparent neutrality, refraining from any obvious judgments of the subject matter. His images are titled as documents, to establish his neutral position. In the words of John Szarkowski, Adams... "has, without actually lying, discovered in these dumb and artless agglomerations of boring buildings the suggestion of redeeming virtue." Adams's essays in Why People Photograph and Beauty in Photography make strong arguments for conservative and human approaches to making photography, writing clear criticism about photography, and the importance of encouraging responsible stewardship of the land.

Adams's master sets are held at the Yale University Art Gallery, which organized "The Place We Live," the definitive retrospective exhibition and publication of his work.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Robert Adams photographer
• American Photography
• fotografia

[miliziametallica]

Tramite queste foto sembra di vedere i villaggi western..in chiave moderna..