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).