Robert Adams: What We Bought: The New World, 1995, First Edition

This is a first edition, first printing of “What We Bought: The New World, Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area 1970-1974” published by Stiftung Niedersachen, Germany. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Americans poured into the cities of the West, attracted by the natural beauty and quality of life found there. As populations ballooned, buildings, roads, telephone poles, supermarkets and billboards went up and the land became littered with the signs of civilization. These photographs, all made in the Denver metropolitan area, pinpoint a moment of major alteration in our culture’s values. According to Robert Adams, “In a few years…the area’s ruin would be testament to a bargain we had tried to strike. The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy. They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.” From Aperture, “Objective and direct, Adams’s photographs unsentimentally depict a despoiled landscape washed in the intense Colorado sunlight….his work stands alongside Walker Evans’s American Photographs, Robert Frank’s The Americans, and Stephen Shore’s Uncom­mon Places in the pantheon of landmark projects on American culture and society."

Measuring approximately 9” x 8” and containing 193 black and white photographs, the book is bound in cloth boards in a photographically illustrated dust jacket. Both the book and dust jacket are in FINE condition with the dust jacket evidencing the typical dulling that accompanies this type of coated cover stock.

Stock photographs of the cover as well as photographs from the book appear in the photo section of the listing.