Robert Adams

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This pivotal early series was re-edited to include previously unpublished pictures from the period.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.