In 1976, Robert Adams shot "Fort Collins, Colorado," a nighttime picture of a lone tree in a Colorado parking lot, the crescent moon hanging in the sky above. More than 30 years earlier, Ansel Adams had captured "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," showing a magnificent vista of desert scrub and clustered buildings, snow-capped mountains in the distance, the full moon majestically presiding in the expansive sky overhead. These two pictures could be neither more different nor more similar; nor could the younger Adams have made his photograph without knowledge of his greatly admired predecessor's. If Ansel Adams created singular images in search of a platonic ideal of nature, Robert Adams explored repetition and conformity; both were responding, in their own personal and aesthetic way, to the landscape of the American West. The first book to juxtapose bodies of work by these two 20th-century master photographers, Reinventing the West reveals how their photographs reflect changing attitudes toward the western landscape and the natural world.
Edited by Joseph N. Newland.
Essays by Allison Kemmerer and John Stilgoe.
Introduction by Adam D. Weinberg.
Paperback, 83 pages, 39 b&w
