John Petrenko Photography and Art Blog: Robert Adams

Robert Adams is a photographer, who was born in 1937 in the industrial town of Orange, New Jersey. His photography came to prominence in the "New Topographics" photographic movement. He's received many fellowships and awards including the Guggenheim fellowship (x2), MacArthur fellowship, and Hasselblad Award.

He became interested in the New North American Landscape by looking at Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henery Jackson. He became included in the New Topographics in the 1970s and "Adams approach to photographing these landscapes was to take a stance of apparent neutrality, refraining from any obvious judgements of the subject matter. His images are titled as documents, to establish his neutral position."

I find that his work is very good to look at in relation to my work. His works are of the American West, primarily of landscapes and cityscapes. Much of his work deals with the progressively changing landscapes of these places and people's influence on land. Much of my work deals with this idea, of how the landscape can represent a type of people, without the use of people.

From the New Topographics