NEW YORK, NY.- “Are there affirmable days or places in our deteriorating world? Are there scenes in life, right now, for which we might conceivably be thankful? Is there a basis for joy or serenity, even if felt only occasionally? Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?” Robert Adams

The Place We Live traces Adams’ deep engagement with the geography of the American West, weaving together various aspects of over four decades of work into a cohesive, epic narrative of the American experience. Taken as a whole, this publication elucidates the photographer’s civic goals: to consider the privilege of the place we were given and the obligations of citizenship. Printed with an unprecedented fidelity to the photographer’s original prints, volumes one and two reflect Adams’ exacting, compelling sequence of nearly four hundred plates and bring together texts written by the photographer to accompany his photographic projects. Volume three offers a detailed chronology of Adams’ life, an illustrated bibliography of his monographs, selections from his personal archive, and a series of critical essays on his work by Joshua Chuang, Tod Papageorge, Jock Reynolds and John Szarkowski.

Exhibitions: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 11 March to 3 June, 2012; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 3 August to 28 October, 2012; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 22 January to 13 May, 2013; Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bottrop, Summer 2013; Media Space, London, Fall 2013; Jeu de Paume, Paris, Spring 2014; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Summer 2014.

Robert Adams, born in 1937 in New Jersey, first came to prominence in the early 1970s and has photographed the geography of the American West for over forty years. His work has been shown widely both in Europe and the United States, including in the landmark 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape”. His more than forty publications include The New West, What We Bought, Our Lives and Our Children, and Turning Back. Robert Adams is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Spectrum International Prize for Photography, the Hasselblad Award and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Steidl has published Gone? (2010) and Tree Line (2010).