Robert Adams 2009 Hasselblad Award Winner
November 7 - January 10 2010 

Over four decades Robert Adams' work has carefully and systematically documented the impact of human activity on the land, not simply to condemn it but to find in its often tragic overtones something of what he has called the ‘persistent beauty' in the way the earth adapts and heals itself. While they are often unpopulated, Adams' photographs echo with human presence and are continually attentive to social structures and to a sense of community. In charting cultural transformations of the landscape, for example, Adams has recorded the creation of suburban environments and the new qualities of life and patterns of consumption that unfold within them. As much as it surveys broad vistas and wide open spaces, bathed in pristine light, Adams everyday world has equally been one of supermarkets, motels, parking lots and tract housing, the physical parameters of an ordinary life that he consistently reveals to be extraordinary.

Adams' world is not one created by the camera, it is a place that we can recognise and that we all to some degree inhabit - with all its faults, its problems, its incredible complexity and its brief moments of sublime transcendence. The example of his formidable body of work continues to have a wide-ranging impact on the practice and thinking about photography internationally and is a great legacy for the future.