The New West

Originally published in 1974, Robert Adams’s The New West signaled a significant shift in photographic representation of the American landscape. Eschewing photogra­phy’s role in romanticizing the Western land­scape, Adams focused instead on the construc­tion of tract and mobile homes, sub­divisions, shopping centers, and urban sprawl in the suburbs of Colorado Springs and the Denver area. Objective and direct, Adams’s photographs, rendered in his signa­ture middle-gray scale, unsentimentally depict a despoiled landscape washed in the intense Colorado sunlight. The New West stands alongside Walker Evans’s American Photographs, Robert Frank’s The Americans, and Stephen Shore’s Uncom­mon Places in the pantheon of landmark projects on American culture and society. This second reissue of the classic publica­tion has been recreated from Adams’s original prints, and will be released ahead of a major traveling exhibition that will launch in 2010. This project was made possible, in part, through the generosity of Lynne and Harold Honickman and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.