VANCOUVER, BC.- The Vancouver Art Gallery launched Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs, an exhibition of the life work of eminent American photographer Robert Adam. The retrospective is on display at the Gallery until January 16, 2011, the first stop in an international tour of North America and Europe.

Over the past four decades photographer Robert Adams has come to be widely regarded as one of the most original and significant chroniclers of the western American landscape. The first large-scale exhibition of Adams’ work to be presented in Canada, Robert Adams: The Place We Live traces the artist’s longstanding engagement with the degradation of the environment in the face of suburban development.

“The Vancouver Art Gallery is honored to have been selected as the first venue for the international tour of this important exhibition,” said Gallery director Kathleen Bartels. “Vancouver is known internationally as a centre for contemporary photography and we are so pleased to showcase an artist who has so profoundly influenced the work of many prominent Canadian artists.”

Robert Adams (b. 1937) blazed a trail to a new kind of landscape photography in the 1970s as a leader in the New Topographic movement. For more than 40 years, his challenging yet beautiful photographs have focused on the changing landscape of the American West, and illuminate the hand of man on the natural environment. In an interview with PBS, Adams said “I’d like to document what’s glorious in the West and remains glorious, despite what we’ve done to it… But I also want to show what is disturbing and what needs correction.” Honoured with many awards during his career, Adams’ received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1994, and the Hasselblad Award in 2009. Now in his senior years, Robert Adams has devoted his energy to assisting the Yale University Art Gallery to create this retrospective of his life’s work.

“We are delighted to be able to work with our colleagues in Vancouver to debut this exhibition,” says Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, “Not only is the city home to some of today’s most vital practitioners of photography, it is also located in the region of the world that Adams has made his subject for the past twenty years.”