In the fall of 1968, Robert Adams, a college English teacher, found himself inexplicably drawn to photograph a nondescript area south of Colorado Springs whose most notable feature was a truck stop off the interstate. Unflinching in their description yet embodying a mysteriously radiant peace, the pictures Adams made of the otherwise graceless site confirmed for him a vital new way of relating to the world. He would parlay this revelation into The New West, the book that would establish both his photographs and his subject-the contemporary landscape of the American frontier-as matters of wider consequence. This pivotal early series has been re-edited to include previously unpublished pictures from the period.

The subject of these pictures is not tract homes or freeways but the source of all Form, light ... light of such richness that banality is impossible. Robert Adams, from The New West