For the first time, Robert Adams: Contact brings into view the artist’s contact sheets. Presented alongside the final prints, these previously unseen materials provide a glimpse into Adams’s creative process and the choices that shaped some of his most celebrated photographs. They trace his path through the landscape, and offer insights into his selections, sequences, and printing long after the exposure was made. Adams sometimes returned to contact sheets months or even years later. Sometimes the image “would be perfectly obvious,” says Adams. For others, “it took me a year to realize something was a picture.” Looking closely, Adams’s contact sheets reveal how he approached his subjects, and how he continued to think about his work after making an image.
In a 1969 contact sheet made in Colorado Springs, Adams took half a dozen images of a hillside covered in houses. In these exposures, the composition shifts slightly as clouds move across the sky, suggesting the stretch of time he spent there. The same sheet also includes three variations of the image above. Adams selected the version that leaves out a passing car and truck, yet retains the monumental drive-in movie screen that dwarfs the ridgeline in the distance.
A surprising roll of film includes one of Adams’s most celebrated images from The New West, depicting a real estate sign at dusk. Shaped like a giant arrow, the sign looms above the silhouetted Rocky Mountain foothills. This contact sheet includes multiple shots of a kids’ baseball game, and exposures recording the late-day shadow of an unseen figure. Small green stickers signal Adams’s interest in each of the three exposures.
When working in suburban places like Colorado Springs, Adams usually shot from the center of the street, often using a tripod. His contact sheets trace his movement on foot, as he approaches subjects and adjusts the composition. “Walking to me was essential,” says Adams. “The act of walking was integral with discovering the world and what you were trying to say about it. It all depended on walking.”
A 1970 contact sheet finds Adams in Simla, Colorado, about 50 miles from Colorado Springs. Along with several portraits of residents he encountered on a sunny afternoon, the sheet shows his interest in an old Ford truck with two children in the cab.
Most contact sheets include Adams’s crop marks in red ink or ballpoint pen, an artifact of his careful review process. To consider each frame, Adams moved L-shaped scraps of cardboard over the contact sheet, isolating individual negatives and adjusting the edges of the frame. By shifting the boards by small degrees, he discovered the best edges for a particular composition. Sometimes his marks trim just a sliver.
A meticulous and precise printer, Adams also made 3×5 note cards to record darkroom instructions for particular negatives. Here, he tracks the type of Seagull graded paper he used, the dates he printed the negative, and information about the enlarger settings. At the start of his career, Adams made cards for every serious image, but eventually decided his time was better spent elsewhere. “I could either keep good records or I could take pictures,” he recalls.
Colorado Springs was rapidly expanding when Adams photographed there in the late 1960s. In this barren moonscape, a man digs a basement for a new home. Adams describes the area during its first 25 years as “a lost landscape.”
A roll of film shot near Falcon, Colorado includes compositions that capture prairie, sky and clouds. One frame looks toward the Rocky Mountains and the outlines of a town, but most ignore this development and instead focus on the empty landscape.
In several shots, Adams frames the telephone lines cutting through the space. His marks indicate he printed three images from this roll, including a version that omits the telephone lines entirely.
Adams occasionally photographed the interiors of Colorado homes, but found arranging access could be a challenge. Often he documented the domestic spaces of his wife Kerstin’s colleagues, “who knew what we were doing and trusted me,” the artist recalls. Revisiting the interior pictures years later, Adams wrote, “What strikes me now is the evidence in them, however fragile, of caring.”
Adams photographed a horse pasture at night, for an image that was later published in the influential monograph Summer Night. As his contact sheet reveals, the stanchions supporting a brightly lit billboard were next to a freeway. “This was taken from up on the raised part of the freeway, looking down,” Adams recalls. Working at night was fraught, and while shooting the series Adams eventually hired a bodyguard for protection. But, he says, “the pictures look peaceful, and I think that’s the way they should look.”
Returning to his contact sheets, Adams sought something beyond what he first framed with the camera: a photograph that revealed itself over time, through the processes that contact sheets afford. “I wanted to surprise myself,” he says.
