YALE ART GALLERY ACQUIRES

PHOTOGRAPHER ROBERT ADAMS’S COMPLETE BODY OF WORK

In his life’s work as a photographer Robert Adams has clung to the notion
that our country can save itself in spite of the environmental and social
destruction that he finds at every turn. With his poignant balance between
pessimism and optimism, Adams portrays the face of the land as it is in our
time. While sorrow and joy might pervade this work—and find form in littered
fields or quiet landscapes—these pictures never fail to teach us what might be
the most important choices for the future.

Richard Benson, Dean, Yale School of Art, July 2004

January 6, 2005, New Haven, CT—Jock Reynolds, the Henry

J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, has announced
the Gallery’s acquisition of The Master Sets, a total of 1,465 gelatin
silver prints by the influential American landscape photographer
Robert Adams. These fifteen vintage sets and several related prints
join the acclaimed Adams set What We Bought: The New World,
Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area, acquired by the Gallery in
2000, making Yale the chosen repository of the artist’s complete body of work to date. The
purchase also includes an agreement with the artist under which the Gallery will receive one
print, or set of prints, of all of Adams’s future work.
“The significance of this extraordinary addition to our already strong collection of post-
1950 American photography cannot be overstated,” said Reynolds. “Together with Lewis Baltz’s
Park City project and Emmet Gowin’s recent aerial photographs of the West, both of which the
Gallery recently purchased, this acquisition forms a worthy complement to the extensive
holdings of nineteenth-century western American landscape photography residing at Yale’s
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Master Sets will provide an invaluable visual
resource for students, artists, and scholars. We are particularly pleased to be working directly
with Robert Adams in shaping a shared vision for how his works will be preserved, exhibited,
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and published, and it will soon be the Gallery’s privilege to organize a major touring
retrospective of his work.”
Acquisition of The Master Sets was made possible through the generosity of Saundra
Lane, the Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.

Robert Adams
Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937, Robert Adams moved with his family from
Madison, Wisconsin, to Denver, Colorado, at the age of fifteen, and has since lived in the
western United States. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and, intent
upon an academic career, returned to Colorado in 1962 as an assistant professor of English at
Colorado College. Shocked and dismayed by the rapid transformation of the landscape in the
Denver region—an area that, less than a decade before, Jack Kerouac had described as “like the
Promised Land”—Adams began photographing what had become banal suburbia, replete with
hastily conceived tract housing, strip malls, and gas stations. “In a few years,” Adams wrote, “the
area’s ruin would be a testament to a bargain we had tried to strike. The pictures record what we
purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy. They document a separation from
ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.”
In an essay accompanying the catalogue for Adams’s series What We Bought: The New
World (2002), the photographer Tod Papageorge, the Walker Evans Professor of Photography at
the Yale School of Art, wrote, “While Adams’s pictures likely
owed a part of their effect to his thinking about nineteenth-
century photography, they also provided an emphatic
demonstration of how conclusively he had rejected the
twentieth-century photographic convention that identified the
American West with its national parks. Unlike Ansel Adams,”
Papageorge asserts, “this new Adams, by portraying a West
made up of a seemingly endless series of ill-made structures embodying the tangles of easy
compromise and unremarkable venality that saw them built . . . proposed a radically different,
and for photographers, revolutionary frontier. In his view, even the immemorial land itself was
implicated in a general disaster, exhausted, as he revealed it, by human busyness.”
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Since the late 1960s, many of Adams’s photographic surveys have been published, as
have volumes of his insightful and eloquent essays, most notably Beauty in Photography: Essays
in Defense of Traditional Values (1989) and Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and
Reviews (1996). He was a major participant in such memorable and groundbreaking exhibitions
as The New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, at the International
Museum of Photography, Rochester, New York, in 1975, which defined the movement pioneered
by Adams, and Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960, organized by John
Szarkowski at The Museum of Modern Art in 1978. Most recently, an entire room was devoted to
Adams’s work in Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph, a major
survey that opened at Tate Modern, London, in 2003, and traveled to the Ludwig Museum,
Cologne. In 2002, What We Bought: The New World was exhibited at the Yale University Art
Gallery concurrently with Lewis Baltz’s Park City and Emmet Gowin’s Changing the Earth.
Adams’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions throughout the United States as well
as Europe and Asia, and is in the permanent collections of leading museums throughout the world.
Among the artist’s many awards are two Guggenheim Fellowships (1973 and 1980), two
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1973 and 1978), the Colorado Governor’s Award
in the Arts (1979), the Peer Award from the Friends of Photography (1982), a MacArthur
Foundation Award (1994), and the Spectrum International Prize for Photography (1995).

Yale University Art Gallery

Founded in 1832, when patriot-artist John Trumbull donated to Yale College more than
100 paintings of the American Revolution, the Yale University Art Gallery is the oldest college art
museum in the United States. Today, the Gallery’s encyclopedic collections number more than
100,000 objects ranging in date from ancient times to the present day. These holdings comprise a
world-renowned collection of American paintings and decorative arts; outstanding collections of
Greek and Roman art, including the artifacts excavated at the ancient Roman city of Dura-
Europos; the Jarves, Griggs, and Rabinowitz Collections of early Italian paintings; European,
Asian, and African art from diverse cultures; art of the ancient Americas; the Société
Anonyme Collection of early twentieth-century European and American art; and Impressionist,
modern, and contemporary works.
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The Gallery is both a collecting and an educational institution, and all activities are aimed
at providing an invaluable resource and experience for Yale University faculty, staff, and
students, as well as for the general public. The Gallery is presently in the process of a
comprehensive restoration of its landmark main building, designed by American architect Louis
I. Kahn and opened in 1953. The Kahn restoration is scheduled to open in 2006; in the meantime,
the Gallery is presenting an active program of permanent and collection exhibitions in its
Egerton Swartwout building. The collection can also be explored by visiting the Gallery’s new
Web site: http://artgallery.yale.edu.

* * *

Image p. 1: Robert Adams, Untitled, from Summer Nights, 1982. Gelatin silver print. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased
with gifts from Saundra B. Lane and the Trellis Fund, and with The Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund, courtesy of Fraenkel
Gallery, San Francisco

Image p. 2: Robert Adams, Newly Completed Tract House, Colorado Springs, from The New West, ca. 1974. Vintage gelatin
silver print. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with gifts from Saundra B. Lane and the Trellis Fund, and with The Janet and
Simeon Braguin Fund, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

For additional information or visual materials, please contact Lisbeth Mark or Stephanie
Ruggiero at Jeanne Collins & Associates, LLC, New York City, 646-486-7050, or
info@jcollinsassociates.com.
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Robert Adams: The Master Sets

Complete Sets:
Art & Architecture of Hispanic Colorado (85 prints)
Bodhisattva (13 prints)
California (57 prints)
Denver (93 prints)
From the Missouri West (88 prints)
I Hear the Leaves and Love the Light (34 prints)
Listening to the River (176 prints)
Los Angeles Spring (40 prints)
The New West (56 prints)
Notes for Friends (60 prints)
Our Lives Our Children (74 prints)
Perfect Times Perfect Places (85 prints)
Summer Nights (85 prints)
Turning Back (151 prints)
West from the Columbia (82 prints)

Related Prints:
34 prints related to the Prairie series
48 prints related to the Cottonwood series
15 prints related to the Eden series
6 prints related to the Lookout Mt. series
30 prints related to the New West series and the Denver series
60 additional prints related to earlier work from the Prairie series
46 prints related to the Ludlow, Long Island, and Ghost Dance series

Related Large-Format Prints:

Prairie (22 prints)
Summer Nights (5 prints)
From the Missouri West (5 prints)

5 prints related to the What We Bought series

19 prints related to the West from the Columbia series
12 prints related to the Cottonwood series and the Listening to the River series