Robert Adams is an internationally recognized photographer that I’ve had an interest in for several years. When first introduced to him I was not at all impressed with his photography. It was only looking at more of his portfolio that I fell in love with his offerings. This is what one website says about him:

Robert Adams has photographed the landscape of the American West for more than forty years, particularly in California, Colorado and Oregon. His vision is inspired by his joy in nature’s inherent beauty, yet tempered by his dismay at its exploitation and degradation. Adams uses photography to express his love for the landscape and to understand how urban and industrial growth have changed it, all the while insisting that beauty in the world has not been entirely eclipsed.

Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937 and raised in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado. He moved to Southern California in 1956 to attend the University of Redlands. He chose to major in English literature and went on to earn a Ph.D. in that subject at the University of Southern California in 1965.

When Adams returned to Colorado to begin what he anticipated would be a career in teaching, he was dismayed by the changes he saw in the landscape. He bought a 35-mm camera, taught himself the fundamentals of photography, and began making pictures infused with a love for the geography of his home state.

Adams’s visual education came in part through the work of photographers who had preceded him in the West a century before, especially those of Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and Carleton Watkins. Their work, together with that of Lewis Hine, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, and Ansel Adams–who often merged their social concerns with aesthetic ones–helped inspire Adams’s style: a spare formalism coupled with emotional depth.

It was this image above in particular that got me interested in Adams - it was shot in Colorado Springs where I grew up. When I saw that it immediately resonated with me. This suburban image is so typical of the Colorado Springs that I grew up in. I the discovered that Adams grew up in Wheat Ridge where I live and in fact one of his photos that is now in the Yale University Art Collection is of a house just up the street

R. Adams Photo

My Photo

Other photos taken in and around Wheat Ridge are displayed here. Some are going for $18,000+ in galleries

No place is Boring, if you have had a goods nite sleep and a pocket full of undeveloped film - Robert Adams

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Robert Adams and Wheat Ridge, CO