Robert Adams is preeminent among the many photographers who have concerned themselves with the urban development of the once-wild lands of the American West. He began to photograph on the Colorado high plains in 1965, and the subjects of his broad body of work have included the spreading of tract houses along the Rockies; strip malls, parking lots, freeways, cheap motels and garishly lit discount houses; abused land and brutalized animals; the defunct orange estates of outer Los Angeles; the ruined forests of coastal Oregon, and the adult and child citizens of the new West as he finds them, often enough, marooned in bleak trailer parks or graceless rooms.
