Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937, Robert Adams grew up in Wisconsin and Colorado, where he lived for more than three decades before settling in Oregon. Since his beginnings in photography in the mid-1960s, Adams is considered by many to be one of the most important and influential chroniclers of the American West.
Through his work, Adams engages in advocacy grasping for a humanist approach to photography while urging his fellow citizens to wake up to the damage done to our collective habitat. It shows how great landscapes of the American West, already surveyed the nineteenth century by photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, have been transformed by human activity. Adams tried to offer a seemingly neutral approach. Even the titles of his pictures related to the documentary record. He is best known for his austere photographs and nuanced suburban development in Colorado in the late 1960s and early 1970s, noted for the first time thanks to a seminal book, The New West 1974 images.