In 1976, Robert Adams shot "Fort Collins, Colorado, " a nighttime picture of a lone tree in a Colorado parking lot, the crescent moon hanging in the sky above. More than 30 years earlier, Ansel Adams had captured "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, " showing a magnificent vista of desert scrub and clustered buildings, snow-capped mountains in the distance, the full moon majestically presiding in the expansive sky overhead. These two pictures could be neither more different nor more similar; nor could the younger Adams have made his photograph without knowledge of his greatly admired predecessor's. If Ansel Adams created singular images in search of a platonic ideal of nature, Robert Adams explored repetition and conformity; both were responding, in their own personal and aesthetic way, to the landscape of the American West. The first book to juxtapose bodies of work by these two 20th-century master photographers, Reinventing the West reveals how their photographs reflect changing attitudes toward the western landscape and the natural world.
