Robert Adams

born Orange, New Jersey, 1937

BiographyRobert Adams earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Southern California in 1965. He embarked upon a teaching career and began taking photographs as a hobby to record the changing and vanishing landscapes of his adopted home in Colorado. He became a photographer full time in the mid-1970s.

Adams is self-taught and educated himself partly through studying the work of early landscape photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins as well as early modernists Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, among others. He has made a specialty of capturing the changing landscapes of the American West and the inroads of urbanization on wilderness.

Among many awards, Adams has received the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships and in 2006, the Deutsche Börse Prize. In 2009, he was awarded the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, and in 2014 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since the 1970s, more than twenty-five books of Adams's photographs have been published, as well as two collections of essays, Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1989) and Why People Photograph (1994).

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