Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Robert Adams circa 1970, from September 8 through October 29, 2005. The years between 1967 and 1973 were especially productive for the young photographer Robert Adams. During that time, he worked on a series of images that eventually became two books—The New West and denver. Both publications are now viewed as landmarks of photography in the last half-century, and both have been phenomenally influential for a younger generation of artists.
Since the late 1960s, Robert Adams has photographed the changing American landscape. Free from distortion or moral posture, Adams’s pictures are poised, earnest portraits of the land as we have come to inhabit it. Adams’s images present an undiminished geography including both the natural and man-made and testify that an absolute beauty endures despite humanity’s intrusion.
Robert Adams circa 1970 will include a selection of rare and unpublished vintage prints from the 1970s. In these images, Adams’s theme is the transformation of the wide-open spaces of the American West into the one-dimensional America of the present. Among the photographs being exhibited are Adams’s rarely seen images of interiors of stores and suburban homes. These photographs bring to forefront the plasticized and wood-veneered surfaces of the modern American home.
Robert Adams circa 1970 will run concurrently with an exhibition of his newest work, Turning Back, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is accompanied by a catalog published by Fraenkel Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery. An exquisitely printed and signed exhibition poster will be available for $25, of which all the proceeds will go to RiverVision, in Astoria, Oregon, a group of individuals united to make the U.S. less dependent on foreign, unstable, and non-renewable energy sources.
