Interstate 25, Eden, Colorado (1968)
© Robert Adams, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
On the Wall This Month: Robert Adams's New Topographics
Plus other notable shows including Timothy Greenfield-Sanders at the Brooklyn Museum, Man Ray in L.A. and more
Robert Adams: The Place We Live
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, through January 2, 2012
denverartmuseum.org
In his 45-year visual odyssey Robert Adams captured the splendor and sprawl of the American West and became a pioneer of the New Topographics movement. With more than 200 images, this traveling show (next stop: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in March) merges pristine landscapes with stark depictions of tract housing, strip malls and deforestation sites to create unsettling dissonances. “The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy,” Adams wrote. “They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.”
A portrait of the rapper Pitbull
© Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: The Latino List
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, through December 11
brooklynmuseum.org
For more than 30 years Greenfield-Sanders has created a wide-ranging body of strikingly intimate portraits. His subjects range from injured Iraq vets to famous porn stars, but in each case his intent is, as he puts it, “to humanize them, to show them as people.”
In 2008 at the Brooklyn Museum he exhibited The Black List, a series on prominent African Americans. This year he returns, this time with Latino stars including fashion icon Christy Turlington Burns, golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. You can also catch The Black List (Volumes 1, 2 and 3) at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery from October 28, 2011, through April 22, 2012.
Plaster and Roofing, Lakewood, California (1950)
© Estate of William A. Garnett
In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945–1980
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, December 20 - May 6, 2012
getty.edu/museum
Starting this winter, the Getty celebrates Los Angeles through the eyes of artists associated with the metropolis. Man Ray, Garry Winogrand and William Wegman are among the 25 photographers who offer their own takes on the City of Angels.
This article was originally published in American Photo November/December 2011
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