Robert Adams: 27 Roads

Book excerpt: The road has been a central motif in the work of Robert Adams (born 1937) since the beginnings of his life as a photographer in the late 1960s. 27 Roads is the first publication to focus on this important aspect of his work, and is comprised of the artist's concise, poetic selection of images spanning almost five decades. Whether fast concrete highways, quiet cuts through dark forests, paved commercial strips or dusty tracks on a clear-cut mountainside, Adams' roads function as metaphors for solitude, connection or freedom. Adams writes, "Roads can still be beautiful. Occasionally they appear like a perfect knife slicing through a perfect apple, the better to show that two halves are one." Robert Adams has been the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award. His work was the subject of a major retrospective organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, which toured internationally from 2011 to 2014.