The Place We Live, a retrospective selection of photographs. Each of major projects will be represented, from early pictures of quiet buildings and monuments erected by settlers of his native Colorado, continuing with selections from his acclaimed series The New West and Summer Nights. Also, a wide range of texts taken from Adam's writings.
Curated by Joshua Chuang and Jock Reynolds
This is the first great retrospective in Europe on North American photographer Robert
Adams (Orange, New Jersey, 1937), widely regarded as one of the most significant
and influential chroniclers of the American West.
The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs will offer a unique
opportunity to see Adam’s most important works. Each of Adam’s major projects
will be represented, from his early pictures of quiet buildings and monuments erected by
settlers of his native Colorado, continuing with selections from his acclaimed series The
New West and Summer Nights, or his most recent images of beaches and migratory birds
in the Pacific Northwest.
Also, a wide range of texts taken from his writings, indispensable
to understand his creative practice, will be included. The exhibition will feature nearly 300
photographs in black-and-white, dated between 1965 and 2007, proceeding from the
Yale University Art Gallery, owner of the artist’s complete archive.
In a career spanning four decades, Adams has developed a photographic work known for
its austerity. The show will trace through images the engagement between the artist
and American life and his pursuit of redemptive light and beauty amidst mankind’s
relationship with the natural world. Robert Adams: The Place We Live weaves together
the diverse aspects of the photographer’s work into a cohesive epic of the American
experience in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Robert Adams was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937, and moved later with his family
to Denver, Colorado. After receiving a PhD in California, he returned to Colorado in 1962
as an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. Disturbed by the rapid
transformation of the Colorado Springs and Denver areas, Adams began photographing a
cherished landscape newly replete with tract homes, highways, strip malls, and gas
stations.
Since his beginnings as a photographer, photography publications have had a main
position in his practice. Books such as Perfect Times, Perfect Places; Listening to the
River and Pine Alley demonstrate that Adams has also been devoted to recording the
glory that remains in the West. Additionally, he has written insightful and eloquent essays
on the practice and goals of art, which have been collected in the volumes Beauty in
Photography (1981) and Why People Photograph (1994). Since 1997 he has lived in
Oregon, the landscape of which has been the subject of his last 20 years of work.
Adams’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York; the Denver Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the J.
Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, as well as a major midcareer retrospective organized
by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989. Among the artist’s many awards is the
Spectrum International Prize for Photography (1995), the Deutsche Börse Photography
Prize (2006), and the Hasselblad Award (2009).
Press
Museo Reina Sofia
Concha Iglesias
prensa1@museoreinasofia.es
prensa2@museoreinasofia.es
(00 34) 91 774 10 05 / 06
www.museoreinasofia.es/prensa/area-prensa.html
Opening: 15 January 2013
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
Santa Isabel, 52, Madrid
Hours: Mon-Sat 10-21, Sun 10-14.30
Admission: 6 euro, 3 concessions