Reinventing the West

by Adams, Ansel; Adams, Robert; Kemmerer, Allison

• ISBN13: 9781879886476
• ISBN10: 1879886472
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-06-01
• Publisher: Addison Gallery of Amer Art

Summary

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 twentieth-century master photographers, Reinventing the Westreveals how their photographs reflect changing attitudes toward the western landscape and the natural world.