Robert Adams American, 1937- Robert Hickman Adams has been working as both a writer and a photographer since 1967. His portraits, landscapes, and seascapes are poetic documentations of a world that, in the artist's words, is "a troubling mixture" of ugliness, beauty, chaos, and alchemic order. The contemporary American West is Adams's favorite subject, one to which he has returned time and again. He tempers the heroic grandeur of his black-and-white vistas by including material evidence of human presence, revealing a relationship between man and land that is both troubled and hopeful. Born in Orange, New Jersey, Adams moved from the East Coast to Colorado as a teenager and farther west to California where he attended the University of Redlands, receiving his B.A. in English (1959), and a Ph.D., also in English, from ucla (1965). He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1979), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1981, 1989), the Photo Gallery International, Tokyo (1991), the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Belgium (1992), and the Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (1994). His work was also included in New Topographics at the George Eastman House, Rochester (1975), and Photography Until Now at the Museum of Modern Art (1989). His publications include White Churches of the Plains: Examples from Colorado (1970), The New West: Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range (1974), Denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area (1977), From the Missouri West (1980), Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981), Our Lives and Our Children: Pictures Taken Near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant (1983), Perfect Times, Perfect Places (1988), Robert Adams: Photographs 1965-1985 (1988), To Make It Home: Photography of the American West (1989), Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews (1994), Listening to the River: Seasons in the American West (1994), and Cottonwoods (1995). Adams has received numerous honors and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1978) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1973, 1980), a Peer Award from the Friends of Photography (1982), an award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1994), and the Spectrum International Prize for Photography (1995). He lives in Longmont, Colorado. A.W.