Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection Of Photographs

(Los Angeles, February 8, 2012)—The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs, an exhibition that showcases the artistic legacy of American photographer Robert Adams (b. 1937) and his longstanding engagement with the contemporary Western landscape. Featuring nearly three hundred photographs and a key selection of the artist’s publications, the retrospective weaves together four decades of Adams’s work into an epic narrative of American experience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Adams’s work reflects his dedication to describing the changing Western landscape—the growth of its built environment and the lives of its inhabitants—contemplating the presence of trees, the open plains, the Pacific Ocean, and the deforestation of the Pacific Northwest. At LACMA, the exhibition highlights Adams’s extraordinary portrayal of the terrain of the Los Angeles region. “It is hard to envision the American West without the extraordinary achievements of Robert Adams. Adams conveys the often sharp luminosity and inky shadows of western geography like no other. Yet it is in his reckoning with man’s fraught presence that Adams’s spare and terribly beautiful photographs continue to challenge us,” said Edward Robinson, associate curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, who organized LACMA’s presentation.

Image credits:

Robert Adams, Interstate 25, Eden Colorado, 1968, Yale University Art Gallery. Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.  © Robert Adams, courtesty Fraenket Gallery, San Francisco and Mathew Marks Gallery, New York

Robert Adams, Longmont, Colorado, 1979. Yale University Art Gallery. Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.  © Robert Adams, courtesty Fraenket Gallery, San Francisco and Mathew Marks Gallery, New York

Robert Adams, New development on a former citrus-growing estate, Highland, California, 1983, Yale University Art Gallery. Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.  © Robert Adams, courtesty Fraenket Gallery, San Francisco and Mathew Marks Gallery, New York

Robert Adams, Sitka spruce, Cape Blanco State Park, Curry County, Oregon, 1999-2003, Yale University Art Gallery. Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.  © Robert Adams, courtesty Fraenket Gallery, San Francisco and Mathew Marks Gallery, New York

Exhibition: Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection Of Photographs On view: March 11–June 3, 2012 Location: BCAM, level 2