Robert Adams: Contact, a new exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery, brings together Adams’s photographs of the Western landscape with the original contact sheets from which they were selected. On view for the first time, the contact sheets reproduce entire rolls of medium-format film and groups of 4×5 negatives, making visible every frame Adams considered. Each is paired with the photograph he ultimately chose, offering unprecedented insight into his working process and his search for precise arrangements of clouds, trees, roads, and light. The exhibition is accompanied by a new, hardcover monograph published by Fraenkel Gallery. On Saturday, November 7, from 11am–4pm, the gallery will host a book launch featuring Robert Adams: Contact and other books by the artist.
Spanning roughly 20 years, from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, the sheets provide a deeper understanding of Adams’s working methods. One reveals Adams made only a single exposure of an image that would become one of his best-known photographs. Others include sequences in which he worked his way through a landscape or suburban neighborhood, refining a composition frame by frame. Red and black markings and cropping lines trace his selections, while 3×5 cards record handwritten notes on exposure times and paper choices. Together, these materials provide a rare glimpse into the decisions behind photographs that can appear inevitable in their final form.
The exhibition also includes a new selection of Adams’s painted woodblocks, many on view for the first time. Made between 2020 and 2024, the modestly sized works draw on Adams’s memories of the Colorado prairie and are painted in luminous, springlike hues. Their simplified depictions of expansive skies echo motifs found throughout his photographs. Created as his darkroom practice came to an end, they might be understood as a kind of afterimage: a continuation of Adams’s lifelong attention to landscape seen through a different medium.
