Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

An Old Forest Road

Rate this book
The subject of Robert Adams’ (born 1937) latest book is a little-visited forest reserve near the photographer's home in Oregon. Sunlight plays a pivotal role in this sequence of pictures, as it pierces through the canopies of branches and leaves to reveal the hidden shapes and structure of the forest and the well-trodden path ahead. Shadows, too, are prominent in these pictures, adding gentle drama and contrast; they occlude the way forward, rendering it a portal to a destination unknown. These images, made between 2012 and 2013, constitute a lyrical meditation on walking and the natural world.

72 pages, Hardcover

Published September 26, 2017

Loading...
Loading...

About the author

Robert Adams

72 books42 followers
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
See this thread for more information.


Robert Adams is an American photographer best known for his images of the American West. Offering solemn meditations on the landscapes of California, Colorado, and Oregon, Adams’s black-and-white photos document the changes wrought by humans upon nature. “By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet. Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil,” he wrote. “What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos.”

Born on May 8, 1937 in Orange, NJ, his family moved around the Midwest throughout his childhood, finally settling in Wheat Ridge, CO in 1952. Adams went on to study English at the University of Redlands and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California in 1965. It wasn’t until the near completion of his dissertation for USC that Adams began to take photography seriously, learning techniques from professional photographer Myron Wood and reading Aperture magazine. In the 1970s, he released the book The New West (1974), and a year later was included in the seminal exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Adams has twice been the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and once the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Adams lives and works in Astoria, OR. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
5 (83%)
4 stars
1 (16%)
3 stars
0 (0%)
2 stars
0 (0%)
1 star
0 (0%)
No one has reviewed this book yet.