Photographer Robert Adams helped change the way we look at the West. His black-and-white images of Colorado in the late 1960s and early '70s weren’t your familiar photographs of mountains and rivers. Instead, Adams chronicled the unchecked suburban growth that was taking place along the Front Range. When his work was first exhibited, reaction was mixed.
"On the one hand, on the national and international scale, I think it was kind of admired and respected for its honestly, and for the very direct way it confronted some of the leading environmental issues of the day," says Eric Paddock, the Denver Art Museum's photography curator. "For the same reasons, I think it was not well understood, was not taken well, here in the area it was made because it was seen as being overly critical perhaps of something that a lot of people and a lot of money were invested in."
More than 200 of Adams’ photos are on display at the Denver Art Museum starting Sunday. The show is called, Robert Adams: The Place We Live. Adams, who now lives in Astoria, Ore., talks to Ryan Warner.
Photos:
[Robert Adams, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968. Gelatin silver print; 5-15/16 x 6 in. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund: Courtesy Denver Art Museum]
[Robert Adams, Frame for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969. Gelatin silver print; 6 x 6 in. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund: Courtesy Denver Art Museum]
[Robert Adams, Longmont, Colorado, 1979. Gelatin silver print; 5 x 5 in. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund: Courtesy Denver Art Museum]
