Born May 8, 1937, in Orange, New Jersey, is an American photographer best known for his influential work on the changing landscape of the American West.

Adams grew up in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Colorado. He began photographing at the age of 25 while working as a college English teacher, using his summers to pursue photography. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Redlands in California and completed a doctorate at the University of Southern California in 1965.

His early photographic subjects included prairie churches and traces of Hispanic art in the United States. After spending a period living in Scandinavia with his Swedish wife, Adams decided to focus his work on the complex geography and cultural transformation of North America. During the 1970s and 1980s, he produced a series of seminal photobooks—The New West, Denver, What We Bought, and Summer Nights—which critically examine suburban expansion, consumer culture, and environmental change in Colorado and the broader American West.

Adams is closely associated with the New Topographics movement and is widely regarded as one of the most important photographers addressing landscape, ecology, and human intervention in the environment. He lives and works in Oregon.

Reference

Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), German edition.
Retrieved January 19, 2026.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adams_(Fotograf)