In the fall of 1968, Robert Adams, a college English teacher, found himself inexplicably drawn to photograph a nondescript area south of Colorado Springs whose most notable feature was a truck stop off the interstate. Unflinching in their description yet embodying a mysteriously radiant peace, the pictures Adams made of the otherwise graceless site confirmed for him a vital new way of relating to the world. He would parlay this revelation into The New West, the book that would establish both his photographs and his subject-the contemporary landscape of the American frontier-as matters of wider consequence. This pivotal early series has been re-edited to include previously unpublished pictures from the period.

The subject of these pictures is not tract homes or freeways but the source of all Form, light … light of such richness that banality is impossible. Robert Adams, from The New West