New West

Originally published in 1974, Robert Adams’ The New West signaled a significant shift in photographic representation of the American landscape. Eschewing photography’s role in romanticizing the Western landscape, Adams focused instead on the construction of tract and mobile homes, subdivisions, shopping centers, and urban sprawl in the suburbs of Colorado Springs and the Denver area. Objective and direct, Adams’ photographs, rendered in his signature middle-gray scale, unsentimentally depict a despoiled landscape washed in the intense Colorado sunlight. The New West stands alongside Walker Evans’ American Photographs , Robert Frank’s The Americans , and Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places in the pantheon of landmark projects on American culture and society. This second reissue of the classic publication has been recreated from Adams’ original prints, and will be released ahead of a major traveling exhibition that will launch in 2010.