LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs, an exhibition that showcases the artistic legacy of American photographer Robert Adams (b. 1937) and his longstanding engagement with the contemporary Western landscape. Featuring nearly three hundred photographs and a key selection of the artist’s publications, the retrospective weaves together four decades of Adams’s work into an epic narrative of American experience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Adams’s work reflects his dedication to describing the changing Western landscape—the growth of its built environment and the lives of its inhabitants—contemplating the presence of trees, the open plains, the Pacific Ocean, and the deforestation of the Pacific Northwest. At LACMA, the exhibition highlights Adams’s extraordinary portrayal of the terrain of the Los Angeles region.

“It is hard to envision the American West without the extraordinary achievements of Robert Adams. Adams conveys the often sharp luminosity and inky shadows of western geography like no other. Yet it is in his reckoning with man’s fraught presence that Adams’s spare and terribly beautiful photographs continue to challenge us,” said Edward Robinson, associate curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, who organized LACMA’s presentation.

With nearly three hundred gelatin silver prints, the exhibition features the photographer’s major projects, from early pictures of quiet buildings and monuments erected by settlers of his native Colorado, to his most recent images of oceans and migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest. Accompanying the photographs in the exhibition are texts drawn from Adams’s own published writings that total more than forty books to date.

The reach of Adams’s work has been felt equally through his publications, which are an indispensable element of the artist’s creative practice. A selection of these books will be displayed; copies will also be available in a reading area and digitally on iPads in the exhibition, enabling visitors to experience Adams’s masterly use of the photographic book as a poetic medium in its own right.

Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs is organized by the Yale University Art Gallery. The exhibition was cocurated by Joshua Chuang, Assistant Curator of Photographs, and Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director, both of the Yale University Art Gallery. The exhibition debuted at the Vancouver Art Gallery (September 25, 2010–January 16, 2011) and traveled to the Denver Art Museum (September 25–January 2, 2012). Following LACMA’s presentation, the show will travel to the Yale University Art Gallery before beginning an extensive European tour that will begin at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.