What We Bought: The New World. Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area, 1970-1974

First Edition thus, 2009. 208 pages. Book measures 9.25 x 8 inches. Includes 193 richly printed tritone plates. 

What We Bought, together with denver and The New West, form a loose trilogy of Robert Adams’s work exploring the rapidly developing landscape of the Denver metropolitan area from 1968 through 1974. These books demonstrate the artist at the height of his powers as a documentary photographer and a poetic sequencer of images. In this work, Adams created a comprehensive document that was resolute in its avoidance of romantic notions of the American West and dispassionately honest about man’s despoliation of the land. The photographs featured in What We Bought show tract housing with mountain ranges in the distance, trailer lots devoid of people, suburban streets through generic windows, shopping mall interiors, and parking lots: subjects distinctly unspectacular, familiar, and banal. Adams’s compositions are straightforward and democratic, and it is this precise turn from sentimentality that has made Adams one of the most influential figures in the history of American photography. 

Fine in Fine dust jacket. As new condition