Robert Adams EDEN

Photographs of the American frontier from the period of Adams' epochal The New West

In the fall of 1968, Robert Adams (born 1937), a college English teacher, found himself inexplicably drawn to photograph a nondescript area south of Colorado Springs whose most notable feature was a truck stop off the interstate. Unflinching in their descriptiveness, yet embodying a mysteriously radiant peace, the pictures Adams made of the otherwise graceless site confirmed for him a vital new way of relating to the world. He transformed this revelation into The New West, the book that established both his photographs and his subject―the contemporary landscape of the American frontier―as matters of wider consequence.

This pivotal early series was re-edited to include previously unpublished pictures from the period. First published in 1999 and long a rarity, Eden has now been made available again by Steidl.