Robert Adams’s photographs of the Western landscape are iconic reminders of nature’s resilience in the face of human development. But as this collection of never-before-published contact sheets show, his precise arrangements of clouds, trees, and roads under clear Colorado light were not inevitable. Instead, they are the result of Adams’s relentless searching for form and his inimitable, exacting photographic technique, as evidenced by prints marked with cropping lines, exposure times, and other notes. The book pairs around 50 photographs with their original contact sheets, each showing the exposures from a single roll of medium format film, or with contact-printed 4×5 negatives and pencil-drawn printing guides.
The photographs span 20 years, from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, just before Adams traded these larger negatives for a nimbler 35mm camera. Artifacts from an age when every serious photograph was a handmade object, the contact sheets offer a graphic record of what Adams was seeking, and what he set aside. As Jeffrey Fraenkel writes in his introduction, Adams’s contact sheets “remind us [Adams] was never looking for the perfect picture. He looked until the picture became one.”
