Robert Adams - The New West

3rd edition published by Aperture, 200&
Format: Hardback with dustjacket, 260x230mm
Pages: 124
Condition: Very Good. Some very light yellowing to outer pages and top of cover.

The open American West is nearly gone. The New West is a photographic essay about what came to fill it ― freeways, tract homes, low-rise business buildings and signs. In five sequences of pictures taken along the front wall of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Robert Adams has documented a representative sampling of the whole suburban Southwest. These views have a double power. At first they shock; normally we try to forget the commercial squalor they depict. Slowly, however, they reveal aspects of the geography ― the shape of the land itself, for example ― that are beyond man’s harm. Adams has written that “all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty,” and his photographs show this. Originally published in 1974, The New West is now regarded as a classic, standing alongside Walker Evans’s American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans in the pantheon of landmark volumes of photography exploring American culture and society.