Robert Adams: Along Some Rivers: Photographs and Conversations

Robert Adams, one of America’s foremost living photographers, has spent decades considering and documenting the landscape of the American West and the ways it has been altered, disturbed, or destroyed by the hand of man. A professor of English before turning to photography, Adams is also a skilled writer and acute thinker on aesthetic questions. Aperture’s previous bestselling collections of his essays, Beauty in Photography and Why People Photograph , assembled his thoughts on a range of subjects, including writing, teaching, photography’s place in the arts and a host of fellow photographers. Along Some Rivers collects Adams’s correspondence and conversations—some of which have never been published before—with writers and curators including William McEwan, Constance Sullivan and Thomas Weski. In so doing, it provides another point of entry, offering a portrait of the artist in debate and elucidating his thoughts on a number of his now legendary projects, including Cottonwoods and What We Bought. Adams also expounds on why, in his view, Marcel Duchamp has not been a helpful guide for art, and he discusses which filmmakers and painters have influenced him, which cameras he prefers and how he approaches printing his pictures. Along Some Rivers also includes a selection of 28 unpublished landscapes.