The Modern Art Notes Podcast

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features a rare interview with Robert Adams.

Among the topics Adams and I discuss is the quality of light in Colorado and how Adams has tried to capture it in his work. Pictured here is a slight cropping of one of Adams’s best pictures, Sunday school class, Colorado Springs, Colorado (click to see the whole picture), from the 1968-71 series “The New West.” On this week’s show, Adams and I discuss the light in this picture — and the hidden-in-plain-sight secret embedded in it. (Hint: That mountain in the background is mighty famous…)

Adams may be the greatest living American photographer. In the 1960s and 1970s he brought a new sensibility to photographing the most classic subject in American art, the land. By emphasizing man’s impact on Colorado and its suburbs in series such as “The New West” and “What We Bought,” Adams helped pioneer art that addressed our impact on the landscape and on the Earth.

A major retrospective of his 46-year career is on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. Titled “The Place We Live,” it’s on view through October 28.

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Image: Robert Adams, Sunday school class, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.