New West

The open American West is nearly gone. The New West is a photographic essay about what came to fill it freeways, tract homes, low-rise business buildings, and signs. In five§sequences of pictures taken along the front wall of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Robert Adams has documented a representative sampling of the whole suburban Southwest.§The views have a double power. At first they shock; normally we try to forget the commercial squalor they depict. Slowly, however, they reveal aspects of the geography the shape of the land itself, for example that are beyond man s harm. Adams has written that all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty, and the photographs show this.§Originally published in 1974, The New West is now regarded as a classic, standing alongside Walker Evans s American Photographs and Robert Frank s The Americans in the pantheon of landmark volumes of photography exploring American culture and society. This new edition marks the book s fortieth anniversary and the beginning of a multi-year commitment by Steidl to publish the full extent Robert Adams s remarkable body of work.