Robert Adams

American (Orange, New Jersey, 1937)

Longmont, Colorado

1973
photograph | gelatin silver print
Not currently on view in the museum
Longmont, Colorado

Best known for his elegiac landscapes of the West, Robert Adams also took photographs that explore suburban experience. Seeking glimmers of humanity and beauty amid unsightly developments, Adams carried his hand camera into shopping centers, covertly photographing people as they navigated endless rows of consumer products.

Shot in a grocery store in suburban Denver, where Adams lived for many years, this photograph is one of many he took of unsuspecting shoppers who lived near the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, where plutonium was processed. For the series, entitled Our Lives and Our Children, Adams used a hand camera, which he often concealed inside a shopping bag. Unlike most of his other photographs, which were taken with a large-format camera on a tripod, the pictures in this series are spontaneous (in this case even blurred).


15 1/2 in. x 14 in. (39.37 cm x 35.56 cm)
Acquired 1996
Collection SFMOMA
Accessions Committee Fund: gift of the Modern Art Council, Helen and Charles Schwab, Norah and Norman Stone, and Danielle and Brooks Walker, Jr.
© Robert Adams
96.163
Keywords

women, shopping carts, stores, businesses, baby carriers, groceries, mothers


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