Peter Piller: Unheimlich As Above…

“A good number of the images allegedly had annotations written on the images such as “not interested in pictures”, “Deceased”, and “Looks better from the ground” written on them”

Robert Adams on Working at Home and Photography as Metaphor (2009)

“By definition art is not propaganda; the goal is not to excite people to action but to help them find a sense of wholeness and thereby a sense of calm.”   Excerpt from a 2014 Hasselblad Award chat transcript Question: Congratulations! You have been taking pictures of the American West for four decades now. Why […]

Robert Adams – “Jeu de Paume” (2014)

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 […]

Robert Adams on John Gossage’s ‘The Pond’ (1986)

 One is grateful for The Pond because we are in trouble, and because irony which focuses on the ugliness of man-made juxtapositions does not at this point, by itself, help.   By Robert Adams, excerpt from Creative Camera: 30 Years of Writing (Manchester University Press, 2000) Irony, defined as unrecognized incongruity, take many forms as […]

Robert Adams – “Turning Back” (2012)

In conjunction with the museum’s spring 2007 exhibit “Robert Adams: Turning Back” we sent Daniel Houghton ’06 to Oregon to interview photographer Robert Adams. 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 […]

Robert Adams on Books, Shows and Survival in Photography (Excerpt) (2011)

 “Having a book allows you to prove that you’re not just a one or two picture photographer.”   An Interview with Alexa Dilworth of the Center for Documentary Studies, April, 2011 (Excerpt) How is having a book of one’s own photographs published important to a photographer? RA: It allows you to respond effectively to your […]

Tod Papageorge on Robert Adams: ‘The Missing Criticism – What We Bought’

from The New West @ Robert Adams This pitiless light, virtually combusting in the thin Colorado air, was, I thought, an invention born in the certain glare of the place… By Tod Papageorge In April 2000, The Yale University Art Gallery purchased the 193 prints that compose Robert Adams’s What We Bought: The New World, […]

An Interview with John Gossage on ‘There and Gone'” (2000)

“One of the things that helps me with doing a book is getting a title at some point that lets me understand its content. I mean basically, that [points to the title of the book] is what’s in here. This [the first chapter] is ‘There,’ this [the second chapter] is the transition, ‘And,’ and this […]

One Life – Several Landscapes: An Appreciation of Robert Adams (1996)

As I have considered it over the years, the work has always seemed a sustaining and challenging mix of beauty, hope, despair, anger and love.   By Peter Brown, Originally published in SPOT, Spring 1996 “Over the years I have come to believe… that we live in several landscapes at once, among them the landscape […]