Episode No. 41 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Robert Adams.
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. While Adams is best known for his work looking at America’s consumption of Western land, he has also photographed the land he loves in ways that remind us why he loves it.
A major retrospective of his 46-year career, the first such exhibition since 1989, is on view at the Yale University Art Gallery through October 28. Titled “The Place We Live,” the show was curated by YUAG’s Joshua Chuang and Jock Reynolds. (The show has already visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Denver Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.) Virtually the entire show, images of and from Adams’s books and a detailed chronology are on YUAG’s superb exhibition website. The three-volume exhibition catalogue is particularly beautiful.
Air date: Aug. 16, 2012.
Members of the Hickman family on the South Dakota prairie, ca. 1900. Photograph by Robert Adams’s grandfather, Charles Hickman.
Robert Adams, Methodist church, Bowen, Colorado, from the series “The Plains,” 1965-73.
Robert Adams, Sunday school class, Colorado Springs, Colorado, from the series “The New West,” 1968-71.
Robert Adams, Burning oil sludge north of Denver, Colorado, from the series, “What We Bought,” 1970-74.
Robert Adams, Nehalem Spit, Tillamook County, Oregon, from the series “Sea Stories, This Day,” 1999-2009.
Robert Adams, Longmont, Colorado from the series “Summer Nights,” 1976-82.
Robert Adams, Longmont, Colorado, from the series “Summer Nights,” 1976-82.
Robert Adams, Baker County, Oregon, from the series “Pine Valley,” 2000-2003.
Robert Adams, Clear-cut and Burned, East of Arch Cape, Oregon, 1976. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Robert Adams, Clear-cut and Burned, East of Arch Cape, Oregon, 1976. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Robert Adams, Clatsop County, Oregon, from the series “Turning Back,” 1999-2003.
Robert Adams, Coos County, Oregon, from the series “Turning Back,” 1999-2003.
Robert Adams, Clatsop County, Oregon, from the series “Turning Back,” 1999-2003.
Robert Adams, Harney County, Oregon, from “Poplars,” 1999.
Dorothea Lange, J.R. Butler, President of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Memphis, Tennessee, 1938. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Dorothea Lange, Woman of the High Plains, “If You Die, You’re Dead–That’s All.” Texas Panhandle, 1938. Collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Tex.
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