Robert Adams and Colorado’s Cultural Landscapes: Picturing Tradition and Development in the New West

Figure 1.

Mobile Homes, Jefferson County, Colorado, 1973. Photograph by Robert Adams. Copyright Robert Adams; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Robert Adams is one of the most important photographers of the post–World War II West. His images of the developing metropolitan sprawl along the Front Range define suburbanization in Colorado during the late 1960s and 1970s. His concerned focus on the logged-over areas in the mountains and the bulldozed fields and ponds on the plains present the sacrifices made to the burgeoning consumer culture of tract homes, housing developments, and shopping malls surrounding Denver and Colorado Springs. Starting with the 1974 publication of The New West and the New Topographics exhibit in 1975, Adams has built an international reputation, augmented by his eloquent writings on the aesthetics of photography and the practice of picture taking.

During his first decade as a photographer, 1965–1975, Adams took pictures in the suburbs at the same time as he amassed the images for his first two books, both of which were historically based studies of rural structures, landscapes, and ways of life. White Churches of the Plains and The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado are often presented as journeyman work influenced by Myron Wood, a prolific photographer of the American West who lived in Colorado Springs and took photographs for Colorado College, where Adams taught literature and film. According to one critic, the books show “a relatively impassive style of picture-making” (Papageorge 2001, 84). They exist as a prelude to “the central decision of his career” (Rubenfien 1976, 111) that brought a more skilled Adams to the suburbs where he photographed “the locus classicus of the [New Topographics] movement” (Jeffrey 2000, 455).

This essay argues that Adams’s depictions of the material culture and traditional landscapes of two distinct, rural regions complement the creation of the new West captured in his suburban photographs. First, I will discuss Adams’s vision of rural Colorado. By examining Adams’s treatment of these traditional cultures we can account for the lack of a vernacular in suburban shots that inventory the materials of mass production. Then I will analyze the reading of the history of settlement that grounds Adams’s images in the West. White Churches of the Plains and The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado wrap photographs into community history; the suburban shots emanate from an incomplete present. The complex relationship among artifact, landscape, and tightly knit communities constructs an environment of meaning and belief that contrasts sharply with the suburban developments farther to the north, where Adams searches for remnants of these relationships amid the tract houses, freshly staked saplings, and cul-de-sacs of the suburbs. Human action in these suburban tracts erases the regional past held in the landscape, rather than drawing from it. Only the spatial organization of the frame and the use of the overpowering light of the high plains insinuate the West into these pictures. Finally, I will place Adams’s work in the context of other surveys of Western terrain, conducted by nineteenth-century photographers and by contract workers on the public lands of the contemporary West. Through this reading, I suture together aspects of Adams’s work that have been held apart by critics who have concentrated on his attention to beauty and form. Adams is a historian and critic of contemporary culture as well as an aesthetician and an artist.

Figure 2.

Catholic church, Ramah, 1918. Photograph by Robert Adams. Copyright Robert Adams; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Robert Adams in Rural Colorado

Adams focuses on two expressions of the vernacular in the two early books: one is manifested in the customs of faith communities and the other is embodied in the handcrafted artifacts of a traditional culture. White Churches of the Plains presents the religious structure as the culmination of a vernacular process. According to his introduction, the project to erect such...