Since the 1970s, photographer Robert Adams has chronicled the changing landscape of the American West, from the growth of cities like Denver to the seemingly unconquerable openness of the Great Plains — the subject of Adams’ Prairie. The first edition of Prairie, published in 1978, is now a sought-after collector’s item; this expanded volume includes all of those original images, along with new photographs selected and sequenced by Adams himself, many of which are being published for the first time.

Informed by a dedication to ecological principles, Adam’s photographs offer an
unsentimental view of the American wilderness — paying tribute both to its natural beauty and to the infrastructure of life on the land: farmhouses, gravel roads and furrowed fields. 

This elegantly designed and richly printed book, with 45 tritone reproductions, is a masterpiece, and a poignant reminder of the quiet but profound ways in which our habitation of the land alters it.

Robert Adams is a photographer whose work has been the subject of major exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2005); the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. (2002); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1989); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1979). He currently lives and works in northwestern Oregon.

Prairie (New expanded edition)
by Robert Adams
62 pages, 45 tritones
Paperback, 8.9 in x 7.9 in
Distributed by Yale University Press for the Denver Art Museum
and the Fraenkel Art Gallery
2011
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