Along Some Rivers

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 Along Some Rivers also includes a selection of 28 unpublished landscapes.

Robert Adams is a major figure in New Topographics movement known for his photographs of the modern American West. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Spectrum International Prize for Photography, and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, his many books include: From the Missouri West (1980), Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981), Our Lives and Our Children (1983), Summer Nights, Walking (1985), Los Angeles Spring (1986), and Perfect Times, Perfect Places (1988). Adams's work has been widely exhibited, including in a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Richard B. Woodward is an arts critic in New York. His frequent writings about photography include monograph essays on Disfarmer, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, Robert Adams, An-My Lê, Abelardo Morell, David Levinthal, Ansel Adams, and many others. He has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of the Arts and the New York University Graduate School of Journalism. His articles have been published in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Criterion, the New Yorker, and many other magazines and newspapers, and he contributes regularly to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.