Robert Adams (1937) is known for his photographic work on the transformation of the western landscape of the United States and his environmental consciousness. The exhibition presents for the first time a Paris, the entire series Our Lives and Our Children, one of the artist's most striking visual essays on ecological catastrophism. One day in the 70s, the photographer spotted a column of smoke rising above the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Manufacturing Facility near Denver, Colorado. He decides to stage what a nuclear disaster could destroy.
Armed with a Hasselblad, hidden behind a shopping bag, he will examine the city, its suburbs, parking lots or shopping malls, to photograph people, shaped by the consumer society and living under the influence of this menace. He is particularly interested in the visible relationships between people under the influence of a potential danger, reported but invisible. Beneath the apparent tranquility of these women, men and children lies the fine line between the possibility that seems to unite them and the almost imperceptible danger faced by nuclear catastrophe, which, according to Robert Adams, remains inevitable.
In 1983, Aperture published the now-out-of-print first edition of this series of photographs taken between 1979 and 1982 under the title Our Lives and Our Children, Photographs Taken Near The Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. In 2003, the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York presents an exhibition and a catalogue, a second novel aspect like the many journeys through the parking mall, Down City Streets. The 2018 augmented reissue of the book Our Life and Our Children by Steidl Publishing includes part of these photographs.
Image: Robert Adams, Sans titre, No Small Journeys, 1979-1982 © Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
